Sean Combs is in jail awaiting trial, but that doesn’t stop him from being sued. On Tuesday, it was revealed that a woman named Thalia Graves has sued him for sexual abuse and rape, which would be the 11th complaint in just 10 months against the rapper, producer and businessman, winner of three Grammy Awards.
According to documents that the website initially had access to, TMZGraves accuses Combs and one of his bodyguards, named Joseph Sherman, of having sexually abused her and also raped her in 2001, as well as of recording what happened. The woman explains in the court documents that she met the musician when she was 25 years old through her boyfriend, who was then an employee at Bad Boy Records, the artist’s record company. In the summer of 2001, she shared a car trip with Combs and Sherman, who offered her a glass of wine; after consuming it, she began to feel “dizzy and physically weak,” according to the documents, and that she even lost consciousness. When she woke up, she found herself naked and tied up in Combs’ studio in Manhattan, while the musician crushed her head against a pool table until she vomited; however, he did not stop his violence. She explains that, in her comings and goings of consciousness, both raped her.
Thalia Graves also claims in the lawsuit that until now she had not dared to report the attack because she was afraid of retaliation from both attackers. She suffered from depression for four years, even contemplating suicide, and also had serious anxiety problems, which worsened in November 2023, when she learned that the attack was recorded and that both “continued to show the rape video for years and sold it as pornography.”
This is the eleventh lawsuit that the musician — also known as Puff Daddy or Diddy — has received since November 2023, when his ex-girlfriend, Casandra Ventura (artist known as Cassie), made public his rapes, abuse, beatings and threats in a lawsuit that, however, she withdrew just a day later after an out-of-court settlement. But that set the stage for another handful of them to arrive, most from women who recounted constant abuse by Combs and how he played with their lives and careers to keep them submissive, fearful and silent.
All of this led to his arrest in New York on Monday, September 16, as part of the verdict made in secret by a grand jury. On Tuesday, September 17, a week ago, the charges were announced. Combs was accused of sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transportation for prostitution. The 14-page indictment reads that “for decades the defendant abused, threatened, and coerced women and other people around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and hide his behavior. To do so, Combs relied on employees, sources, and the influence of his empire of different faces, which he directed and controlled, creating a criminal enterprise in which its members and partners engaged, or tried to engage, among other crimes, in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, robbery, and obstruction of justice.”
Combs faces a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison for sex trafficking, but he could spend up to life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty. Although his lawyers asked that he wait out his trial — scheduled for November 12 — on $50 million bail, the judge refused. He is in a specific anti-suicide protocol and, since Monday, has been incarcerated in the Brooklyn detention center, where he shares space with other high-profile prisoners such as former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and where he does not have to share common areas with other inmates.
So far, there have been nine other lawsuits against Combs, 10 with the one from Thalia Graves. In November 2023, two women filed a lawsuit: Joi Dickerson-Neal, who accused him of raping her and recording it in 1991, when she was 19 years old; and Liza Gardner, who claimed that in 1990 he assaulted her and a friend. Just a month later, a fourth anonymous woman filed a complaint, in one of the fundamental lawsuits of the legal process: she reported that she was sexually trafficked and flown on a plane from Detroit to the musician’s studio in New York to rape her when she was also a minor.
In February, a producer Combs regularly worked with named Rodney Jones Jr. accused him of nonconsensual touching, and in May, two more came. First, a model named Crystal McKinney said that in 2003 he forced her to perform oral sex after drugging her in his studio. Second, April Lampros described Combs’ assaults when she was a student in New York to whom he made promises about the future. In July, Adria English, who worked at a party in the Hamptons in 2004, accused him of sex trafficking, of forcing her to drink alcohol and take drugs and of offering her to friends for “sexual exchanges.”
The ninth lawsuit is, so far, the only one that has so far had a ruling and that has been known. a posteriori This was in June but it was only revealed in September. Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, 51, who is in prison in Michigan, accuses him of abusing him at a party in 1997. The judge imposed an exemplary fine of 100 million dollars on Combs, since he did not appear at the trial. Until now, before Graves’s, the last complaint had been filed by a singer named Dawn Richard, vocalist of Danity Kane (a group that he created on a television show), who accuses the rapper of sexual abuse and threats. She claims that the rapper manipulated her for years and forced her to follow his instructions, such as showing up to meetings in her underwear; if she did not, he would not let her sing or he would turn off her microphone. He also groped her and hit her on the buttocks, threw objects at her when he got angry, and sometimes did not pay her and deprived her and her companions of food and sleep.
