Jay-Z files a lawsuit against the woman who accused him of rape and her lawyer Tony Buzbee, who said: "This case is baloney and has no legal merit".Plus the new civil cases against Diddy and his mum Janice Combs. Diddy’s team has told us the case against his mum ‘is another frivolous attempt to relitigate claims that have been repeatedly thrown out of court over the past 30 years’ and a civil suit from Sara Rivers is ‘another example of false claims filed against Mr Combs’.Rolling Stone's Investigative Reporter Cheyenne Roundtree and Criminal Defence Attorney Shaun Kent answer your questions and discuss the latest news with Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty.The Diddy on Trial podcast is here to investigate the rumours, confront the theories, and give you the answers that you need.We also want YOU to be part of the conversation. Have you any burning questions about the cases or the upcoming trial? Heard a theory that doesn’t sit right with you? Get in touch now via WhatsApp: 0330 123 555 1.Presenter: Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty Series Producer: Laura Jones Sound Design: Richard Hannaford and Nicky Edwards Production Coordinator: Hattie Valentine Editor: Clare FordhamCommissioning Editor: Rhian Roberts Assistant Commissioner: Will Drysdale Commissioning Producer: Adam Eland Commissioning Assistant Producer: Rechmial MillerSean ‘Diddy’ Combs - who has also gone by the names Puffy, Puff Daddy, P Diddy, Love, and Brother Love - emerged into the hip-hop scene in the 1990s. He founded Bad Boy Records, which launched the careers of the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J Blige.His current legal issues began when he was sued by his ex-girlfriend Casandra Ventura, also known as Cassie, in late 2023. She accused him of violently abusing and raping her. That lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount a day after it was filed, with Mr Combs maintaining his innocence.His controversial history with Ms Ventura resurfaced in 2024, when CCTV footage emerged showing Mr Combs kicking his former girlfriend as she lay on a hotel hallway floor in 2016.Multiple people have filed lawsuits accusing Mr Combs of sexual assault, with accusations dating back to 1991. He denies all claims.He is accused of the federal charges of kidnapping, drugging and coercing women into sexual activities, sometimes by using firearms or threatening them with violence.In a raid on his Los Angeles mansion, police found supplies that they said were intended for use in parties known as “freak offs”, including drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil. Mr Combs denies all the charges.
Chapter 1: What is the latest lawsuit filed against Jay-Z?
BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Diddy on Trial from BBC Sounds with me, Anushka Matanda-Doughty. Make sure you subscribe and turn on your push notifications so you never miss a thing. We're here every week to bring you the latest news about Sean Diddy Combs in the build-up to his federal trial in May.
He's also facing civil lawsuits and it's been a busy week for those. We also have a whole bunch of listener questions to work through. Joining me today is our resident criminal defence attorney, Sean Kent. Hi, Sean. Hey, guys. How are you all doing? And Rolling Stone senior investigative reporter, Cheyenne Roundtree. Hi, Cheyenne. Morning.
So this week, Cheyenne, you've been pretty busy covering the Oscars and Sean fighting many fires, no doubt. But it's been a relatively busy week for Diddy News in terms of new lawsuits being filed, one against his mum. Cheyenne, could you just talk us through what happened there?
Yeah, so the former co-founder of Bad Boy Records, Kirk Burrows, he filed a lawsuit early last week against Janice Combs, Diddy's mom. He claims back in the early 90s, Diddy walked into his office with a baseball bat, and the implication was that he was forced to sign over his 25% stake in Bad Boy Entertainment.
But Janice was a beneficiary, so he filed a suit against her and some other companies associated with Diddy. that time. Kirk says that when this all happened, that Janice was fully aware of it, that she knew that he was being unjustly kind of forced out. But they played dumb throughout the years and decades that they knew known each other.
And it was only recently in the past few years that he discovered that Janice was allegedly fully aware of what happened.
Is this the first lawsuit we've had filed against Janice?
I believe it is the first lawsuit that she's accused of being more wrapped up into Diddy's businesses than previously thought.
And Sean, you've spoken before about how suing Diddy at the moment in a civil lawsuit isn't going to do you much good because we've got to get through the federal proceedings first. But Janice Combs, could she sit for a deposition?
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Chapter 2: Who is Janice Combs and why is she being sued?
But then on top of that, she claims that she was sexually harassed throughout the filming by Diddy, who would make comments about her body, saying that she needed to tighten up. The reason why she was there was for her to look good. And then she alleges there was an assault. And she says that was a kind of battery attack.
where she was cornered by Diddy when she was alone in the studio and he started talking to her very suggestively and kind of cornered her and then began kind of stroking her breast. She says that she was clearly uncomfortable and Diddy kind of then backed off and then she fled. She claims that afterward she was kind of blackballed by Diddy. He disbanded the group in the third season
And she claims she never was really able to find her footing again. And one alleged incident is that she said she had an offer on the table from Capitol Records and Diddy called up an executive and that deal went away.
Chapter 3: What allegations are being made against Diddy by Sara Rivers?
So we've heard sort of similar allegations before that he's wielded his power to make the working environment difficult for other people so that they sort of do what he tells them to do. Sean, once again, we have corroboration of conduct there, right?
You've got corroboration, you've got corroboration of conduct. A lot of these lawsuits, I think, well, there's no doubt we're going to stop seeing these lawsuits. The filings are officially stopped. The Gender Motivated Violence Act had a timeline on it, which hit, I think, Sean, correct me if I'm wrong, February 28th. And so that's why you saw these last filings come through.
So they're officially done. But yeah, you have her words, you have corroboration. I don't want to call it a valid lawsuit, but you have an appropriate filed lawsuit from the victim's point of view. The problem is, if you watch... I don't want to say the wrong way, but the social media push. And I think I talked about this the first time we ever got on here.
When you have or you have one bad lawsuit or you have one situation, if you look like the Jay-Z, Busby situation, it affects everybody else's lawsuits. So now everybody is now looking at these new finds of lawsuits with a little bit of is this a good one or is not a good one? New York passed a statute, a Gender Motivated Violence Act.
So basically the purpose of this statute is, and keep it as simple as possible, that if you can allege that something happened on you based upon your gender, it's kind of not hilarious when you think about it because... Men and women are bringing actions against each other under the statute. So the gender doesn't really need to be there.
But if you make an allegation that somebody attacked you, harassed you, did something on you based upon your gender, the purpose of this statute was to open. And so we're talking about it now, the statute of limitations and say, we're giving you guys a window. We're giving you a small and I think it was a two-year window that you can bring claims from whenever. Bring them back.
Because what would end up happening is real victims, if you're really victimized, sometimes you're just like, I can't bring this lawsuit right now. I don't want to talk about it. In a Diddy situation, I'm scared for retaliation. He can come get me. So we had this window that it doesn't matter how long ago it was, you can bring the claim within a specific window. And it was two years.
That window ended on Friday.
So this is what Diddy's legal team have sent us about that. They've said this is yet another example of false claims being filed against Mr. Combs. No matter how many lawsuits are filed, it won't change the fact that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone, man or woman, adult or minor. We live in a world where anyone can file for any reason.
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Chapter 4: How do recent lawsuits affect Diddy's legal standing?
So I guess, first of all, will it impact Busby's other cases that he's brought forward?
I think it already has. It's already affecting because it is making it seem like some of these cases doesn't have merit, that he's not looking into his cases, whether it's true or not. It's affecting that. And no, there's no evidence whatsoever this was a settlement. Zero. Less than zero.
There's been a bit of a development there between Jay-Z and Busby's case. Didn't the judge come out and say something that indicated it might actually go to trial?
Yeah, it's crazy. And it's actually the judge's analysis is really good. They filed him for two things. They filed him for extortion and they filed for defamation. The judge said this ain't extortion. Lawyers have a right to send a demand letter as much as they possibly want. Move on with that.
As far, though, as and last week we talked about lawyers have qualified immunity or immunity to bring lawsuits. The judge says you have to prove actual malice that Busby acted with actual malice in the filing of this lawsuit. And he says, look. Just failure to investigate a case might be bad lawyering, but it's not actual malice to the point that I can bring a case.
Yeah, and that's not all we've heard from Jay-Z this week because he's actually now also suing the anonymous woman who accused him of raping her at VMA's afterparty in 2000 and then, as we know, dropped the lawsuit. So he's claiming his new defamation action claims his representatives have recently made direct contact with the Jane Doe
And in the lawsuit, they claim she allegedly admitted that she made up her claim about Jay-Z and felt pressured by her legal team to repeat it during that interview she did with NBC. It goes on to say that the Jane Doe said it was her lawyer, Tony Busby, who pushed her to go forward with the false narrative of the assault by Mr. Carter in order to leverage a maximum payday.
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Chapter 5: What implications does the Gender Motivated Violence Act have?
Now, we asked Tony Busby for a statement and he said, this case is baloney and has no legal merit. This is just another attempt to intimidate and bully this poor woman that we will deal with in due course. And Shane, there's been a little bit more Busby news. He's filed a few other cases. Could you just quickly fill us in on what he's been up to?
Yeah. So in the past week, you know, with the Gender Motivated Violence Act statute closing, the look back window closing, he's filed a couple more lawsuits from Jane and John Doe, accusers who, again, from the 1990s up until the 2000s, alleged that Diddy assaulted them in some manner during that time period.
We've got another question for you, Cheyenne. So I think this is in reference to the investigation that you did. Cheyenne said that Wild King Night parties were not quite the same as Freecoffs. Can you explain how they were different? Is it just a rebrand? Is Wild King Night a rebrand of the Freecoffs, which is consistent with Diddy's pattern of rebranding himself?
Yeah, I think, you know, Cassie alleged what while our freak offs were something. And then you have Philip Pines, who says that he understood it to be something different. Cassie says that her freak offs always involved a male sex worker. And in Phil Pines case, he said that he understood that to happen between Diddy and a female guest. And Cassie alleges those were nonconsensual.
She described those as sex trafficking cases. Phil says from his knowledge that they appear to be consensual and maybe sometimes there might have been other people brought in. But when he was kind of there, it just seemed to be Diddy and a female guest. So those are kind of the differences between, you know, a freak off and a Wild King night.
Yeah, so they are. You can sort of separate them out in terms of what people have said. But we haven't seen the federal government refer to a wild king night in the same way they've used the term freak-offs in their filings. Yeah, it's just been freak-offs. I mean, we might get another superseding indictment. I don't know at this point. I'm so baffled by what is going on.
on because I was expecting, you know, the date to be pushed back. But everything I'm seeing is like, no, we're still going for May. We're still going for May. One of the things in the lead up to the trial is, of course, picking the jury. Sean, you've had so many comments, particularly about when we spoke about a large portion of the evidence being essentially sex tapes.
People don't usually think about the jury. But if you were asked to be part of the jury on this and you said, I just don't want to sit down watching sex tapes all day, I'm not comfortable with that. Is that reason enough to be excused?
Yes and no. So what ends up happening is we send letters. I'm going to call them letters. We'll send letters out to prospective jurors. They'll send a bunch of letters out to prospective jurors. The difference between our federal system and our state system, usually in the state system, anybody with a driver's license can get on a jury.
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Chapter 6: How do jury selection processes work in high-profile cases?
Yeah.
The clerk of court says, juror number 375, Cheyenne Roundtree, comes up. And we're sitting there with our little list. I was like, do you remember where she liked this comment so forth? Yeah, I don't care for that that much. Strike her. Your Honor, at this point in time, we move to excuse this juror and she's out.
So they will comb through your social media presence and they will individually look at each juror's posts, et cetera, likes, reshares. Wow.
Some just rely on the questionnaire that you send off. But remember, people... And here's the other thing. It's not like when you get... The jury summons is that, oh, by the way, we're summoning you for the Diddy trial. You don't know. It's getting a summons to show up for court.
And you don't know, even though everybody in the world is going to know, wait a minute, this is random that I'm in the sunny district of New York in May. I wonder what case that could be for. And you show up. They go through your questionnaire. Good lawyers go through all of your background that they can find. And now with the advent of social media, everything you've ever done is online.
We can find you. But isn't that going to take forever? We've only got two months. The jury selection in this case could take two to three weeks easily. Don't forget the O.J. Simpson trial. These trials were year long and the jury selection took a month. We try cases all the time in America. A$AP Rocky. I mean, he got a fair and impartial. I mean, you get juries. He got a fair and impartial jury.
Don't forget, this is a video with him with a gun shooting and he was found not guilty. So we do get fair and impartial juries. It's just hard. Our system has been working for a long time for very public, very famous people. And so it happens. So the system is designed for this situation. So I feel comfortable. He's going to get a good jury, a fair jury.
It's just going to take a while and it's going to be hard.
Stephanie from Spain has sent us a voice note. She's just watched the Courtney Burgess and Ariel Mitchell speaking on News Nation from a few months ago. There is an interview of witnesses.
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