Ever the thoughtful host, rapper and music mogul Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs stepped onto the balcony of his mansion in the Hamptons one summer in the 2000s to let guests of a more sensitive disposition know that it would soon be time to go home. The debauchery was about to get serious.
‘We fed you all, we gave you drinks, now it’s time to enjoy life,’ he told them to cheers. ‘This is a celebration of life. This is the real White Party. Kids have an hour left [then] this thing turns into something that when you get older, this is something y’all gonna want to come to . . . so let’s just start to get our groove on, put the kids away. It’s all good.’
The occasion was one of Combs’s infamous White Parties, lavish extravaganzas which he threw each year from 1998 to 2009 – mainly at his 4,500 sq ft East Hamptons mansion but also in Beverly Hills and even in St Tropez.
The rich and famous flocked to them, as they did to his equally glitzy birthday parties, with some boasting up to 1,000 guests.
Everyone from Beyonce and husband Jay-Z, Naomi Campbell, Kanye West and Mariah Carey to Sarah Jessica Parker, Martha Stewart, Salman Rushdie, Russell Brand and Leonardo DiCaprio were photographed at them, dutifully observing the strict all-white dress code.
Meanwhile, a video invitation Combs sent for his 29th birthday party featured glowing tributes from Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Stiller and even Donald Trump. Some described him as Hollywood’s Gatsby, and he was delighted by the comparison. ‘Have I read The Great Gatsby?’ he told an interviewer in 2001. ‘I am the Great Gatsby!’
These bacchanals, which would start in the daytime and last long into the following morning, became so notorious that, when asked, stars would laugh uncomfortably and refuse to discuss what they’d seen at them.
Photos that have emerged from one party show topless girls surrounding a male guest in the swimming pool as they pour champagne down his gullet and Combs pouring it over two other girls, wearing only bikini bottoms and kissing each other.
‘I think half the people there were butt-naked,’ reality TV star Khloe Kardashian trilled to friends in 2014, two years later gushing to Combs – also known as Puff Daddy – when he appeared on her show: ‘Well, I know you’re known for the parties. When you think of a party or a good time, you think of Puff.’
Not any more. Boasting of attending soirees, chez Diddy has suddenly become deeply unfashionable. Combs, 54, most certainly isn’t having a ‘good time’ as he languishes in a notoriously grim Brooklyn detention centre on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution.
If convicted, he faces life in prison. He denies the charges, and his lawyer has said Combs ‘is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal’.
The 14-page indictment, covering the period from 2008 to now, claims the multi-millionaire orchestrated ‘a criminal enterprise’ through his business empire that engaged in sex trafficking, drugs offences, forced labour, arson, bribery, kidnapping and decades of physical abuse against women, among other offences.
Meanwhile, the entertainment industry is waiting in trepidation to see whose name will be next to be dragged into the scandal.
While the indictment doesn’t specifically mention the White Parties, it focuses heavily on other, far more sordid events that Combs allegedly held, which he called ‘freak-offs’.
These were private sex parties usually held in luxury hotel suites. The orgies involved prostitutes – both straight and gay – endless supplies of alcohol and drugs and industrial quantities of baby oil and lubricants.
Investigators say they found a thousand bottles of oil during raids on Combs’s properties. Some ‘freak-offs’ are said to have gone on for days and ended up with exhausted participants having to rehydrate via an IV drip. They were so degenerate that Combs allegedly had to pay to repair not only damage to the hotels but to the individuals involved as well.
It’s alleged that his former girlfriend Cassie, real name Casandra Ventura, was trying to flee just such a freak-off in 2016 when security cameras in a Los Angeles hotel captured Combs viciously attacking her, even hurling a vase, in a corridor.
Crucially, prosecutors say Combs not only masterminded them but frequently recorded these freak-offs and used the video evidence to stop those involved from complaining. In this respect, some of his accusers have compared him to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly secretly filmed his famous friends having sex with girls he provided.
Gene Deal, a former bodyguard of Combs, claimed this week that the music mogul kept tapes of politicians taking part in his freak-off sessions. Deal said his indictment could expose high-profile celebrities and officials.
Although some believe these events were entirely separate from his big celebrity bashes, it’s been claimed that the illicit behaviour also went on at the latter surreptitiously – in secluded corners of the party or after most guests had gone home – as Combs and friends would retreat for hardcore sex and drug-taking.
Former White Party guest Tom Swoope claims the event he attended was ‘tiered off’ and that in private VIP areas of the house, male and female guests were sexually humiliated on the promise of record deals or money, while drugs – mainly cocaine and ecstasy – were sometimes snorted off the bodies of guests.
Meanwhile, an ex-drug dealer has told The New York Post that when he was once summoned to Diddy’s Hamptons home during one of his big parties, the star – wearing only a bathrobe – led him to a bedroom where he was astonished to see male rappers having sex with each other.
Such reports have fuelled claims that Combs is bisexual. Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones, a music producer who worked for Combs, is suing him for sexual assault. He alleges Combs subjected him to continual ‘groping’ – touching his genitals – and tried to ‘groom’ him into having sex with another man, reassuring Jones it was normal in the music industry. Combs rejects the allegations.
Predictably, some are asking whether those who attended his other parties can shed any light on his alleged offences.
The rappers, singers and producers who for years constituted much of his inner circle include not only Jay-Z but R&B star Usher. The latter owes his career largely to Combs after a record company boss sent him – then aged 14 – to live with Diddy for a year in 1994. In a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Usher – who has been accused of deleting tweets that mention Combs since his arrest – said his mentor showed him a totally different set of s*** – sex, specifically.
He went on: ‘There was always girls around. You’d open a door and see somebody doing it or several people in a room having an orgy.’
Usher has yet to comment on the Combs charges.
Canadian pop star Justin Bieber has also known Combs for years – since he broke out from YouTube fame as a 15-year-old, signing a deal with Usher’s record company.
Footage has resurfaced online of a teenage Bieber along with his mentor Combs – 24 years older – as Combs says to camera: ‘He’s having 48 hours with Diddy, where we hanging out and what we’re doing we can’t really disclose. But it’s definitely a 15-year-old’s dream.’
Asked what he wants to do, Bieber tells his friend, ‘Let’s go get some girls’, to which Combs replies: ‘Man after my heart. That’s what I’m talking about.’
When Khloe Kardashian recounted the Combs party in which ‘half the people there were butt-naked’, she mentioned that Bieber – who would have been 19 or 20 – was a guest.
Another video that, with hindsight, has raised many eyebrows on social media is far more recent, showing Bieber, now an adult, hugging Combs. The latter, however, appears to some as if he’s frisking the other star to discover if he’s wearing a wire to record their conversation.
However, the pair remained sufficiently close that Bieber contributed to Combs’s latest album, released last year, with Bieber describing the other star at the time as his ‘brother’. Bieber, whose career has been marred by mental health problems, has yet to comment publicly on Combs’s arrest and insiders say that he won’t.
They insist that he was completely ‘thrown’ by the news of the alleged offences and pointed out that the singer ‘had a long break from Diddy [during the period] when he believes most of this took place’.
The source added: ‘Bieber is disturbed by the Diddy news and is unwilling to process it or discuss it, so he has shut off.’ The singer is instead concentrating on his first child, Jack, born last month to his model wife, Hailey.
Another Bieber video that has been attracting attention since Combs was charged last week shows a tearful 2020 interview in which he discussed trying to shield fellow pop star Billie Eilish from the excesses of the music industry. ‘I just want to protect her. I don’t want her to go through anything I went through. I don’t wish that upon anybody,’ Bieber says, wiping his eyes. ‘It was bad . . . it was dark.’
Another big star who was young when he was drawn into Combs’s social orbit is actor Leonardo DiCaprio. In 2018, Vogue interviewed Combs and asked him for his No 1 guest at his White Parties. DiCaprio, he said without hesitation. A photo from a 1998 party shows a laughing 23-year-old DiCaprio, dressed in shorts and clutching a cigarette, sitting behind Combs, who is holding a champagne bottle.
They were pictured together in public six years later at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. (Combs has been a prominent Democrat supporter and a long-time friend of Barack Obama, who once joked the rapper had considered changing his name to Pimp Daddy).
Though DiCaprio was seen dancing beside Combs at the latter’s 50th birthday in 2019, a source close to the playboy actor insisted he has ‘not been in contact’ with the rapper for years. ‘Leonardo DiCaprio has absolutely nothing to do with any of this,’ said the insider. ‘He attended a few of his parties back in the early 2000s – but literally everyone did.
‘They were not freak-offs. They were big house parties. Leo was at the start of his career at the time and has moved way past his partying . . . he has nothing to do with any of that world.’
Others keen to distance themselves from their old party host include model Naomi Campbell and singer Janet Jackson. Campbell, 54, was rumoured to have dated Combs briefly in the early 2000s (a spokesman insists they were just friends) and attended his White Parties.
She was also – along with DiCaprio – at his star-studded 50th birthday and last November threw Combs a 54th birthday party at a London nightclub where guests included Jackson and Idris Elba.
However, after singer Cassie Ventura later publicly accused Combs of abusing her for more than a decade, both Campbell and Jackson reportedly wiped photos they’d shared of the birthday bash from Instagram.
Another old flame of Combs, Jennifer Lopez, has yet to comment publicly on the charges against him.
The actress and singer, who was with him between 1999 and 2001, has credited him with mentoring her music career but later said he’d cheated on her. ‘I was in a relationship with Puff where I was totally crying, crazy and going nuts; it really took my whole life in a tailspin.’
Actor Ashton Kutcher is another star facing questions over what he knew during his friendship with Diddy, particularly after an old interview from 2019 resurfaced in which he appeared to be evasive. Asked if he had any wild stories about Combs’s shindigs, he said, ‘I’ve got a lot I can’t tell’, before admitting all the stories fell into that category.
How many others have a lot they can’t tell? It’s possible that none of his famous guests knew about the wildest depravities at Combs’s parties, but the stench of scandal that now surrounds the rapper is unnerving many in Hollywood circles.