Later she testified, “Eventually it became a job for me.”
She said the freak-offs “took a big chunk of my life,” and recalled being up for days — drinking, taking drugs and having sex with “strangers.” The encounters, she testified, ranged from roughly 36 hours to four days in length, though they could last even longer with breaks. She said she would then need to recover from the drug use, dehydration and sleep deprivation.
“There was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again,” Ms. Ventura said. She testified that despite having recorded “hundreds” of songs during their relationship, Bad Boy released only one studio album by her, saying that her music career had been “stifled.”
Before her testimony, Mr. Combs’s children and other family members gathered outside the courtroom in a circle with their heads bowed to pray. As she testified, Mr. Combs showed little reaction, sometimes whispering to his lawyers or taking notes.
Mr. Combs had control over her career as well as her life, Ms. Ventura reported, and his security personnel were always present. “Security protected him, kept an eye on me,” she testified. Mr. Combs had keys to her Los Angeles apartment, she said, and used them whenever he wanted.
Ms. Ventura’s husband, Alex Fine, was allowed to be present in the courtroom for the beginning of her testimony, but the judge said he would have to leave during a discussion about an allegation that Mr. Combs had raped her in 2018. Mr. Combs’s lawyers argued that they might need to call Mr. Fine as a witness later.
The much-anticipated testimony was Ms. Ventura’s first major public comment since she filed a bombshell lawsuit against Mr. Combs in late 2023, in which she accused him of having instituted a system of abuse and control over her life and career for more than a decade. Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura quickly reached an eight-figure settlement in the civil case, which led to a government investigation and Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024.
