Another lawsuit has been filed accusing Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs of sexual assault. The latest litigation follows the recent arrest of Combs on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, though the allegations in the new lawsuit are separate to those set out in the criminal indictment.
Combs has been denied bail since his arrest, something his latest accuser, Thalia Graves, noted during a press conference announcing the new lawsuit. Graves, who claims she was raped by Combs and another man in summer 2001, told reporters, “I’m glad he’s locked up, but that’s a temporary feeling of relief”.
Graves’ lawsuit sets out in graphic detail the alleged 2001 assault. She says that her boyfriend was working for Combs’ Bad Boy Records at the time. Combs asked for a meeting to discuss supposed issues with her boyfriend’s performance at work. Keen to support her partner, she agreed to meet with the musician.
Combs and his bodyguard, co-defendant Joseph Sherman, then picked her up from her mother’s home in New York and drove her to the Bad Boy Records studio. She alleges that, on the journey, she was drugged and became unconscious. When she awoke, she was restrained at the studio and subsequently violently sexually assaulted by Combs and Sherman.
Graves “never recovered from defendants’ violent rape”, the lawsuit continues. “She had suicidal thoughts” and “has received extensive psychological treatment because of defendants’ attack”.
She didn’t report the rape at the time, the lawsuit explains, because she was aware of “Combs’ power and notoriety. She was involved in a contentious divorce and custody battle at the time and feared that reporting the rape would cause her to lose custody of her young child”.
“For decades”, the lawsuit adds, Graves “remained silent and did not report the crime out of fear that defendants would use their power to ruin her life, as they had repeatedly, explicitly threatened to do”.
Much more recently, last November, Graves learned that Combs video-recorded the rape and has shown the video to multiple men, “seeking to publicly degrade and humiliate” both her and her boyfriend.
The lawsuit concludes, “this action seeks redress for defendants’ brutalising, misogynistic and violent attacks on plaintiff, starting in 2001 with their rape and continuing in the subsequent years as they compounded her humiliation by showing the video of the sexual assault to others”.
To date, Combs has denied all the allegations made against him in both the criminal prosecution and the numerous lawsuits that have been filed over the last year.