Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape. During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and …
The identity of the individual referred to in waves of dramatic legal filings as Victim-1 — the woman at the very center of the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking case against the music mogul Sean Combs — was never much in question. But when she takes the witness stand at a …
Sean Combs, one of America’s most influential music moguls, was accused by federal prosecutors on Monday of leading a criminal enterprise that enabled his abuse of women and worked to cover it up. As his trial got underway in Federal District Court in Lower Manhattan, prosecutors painted him as a …
Jury selection for Sean Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial was delayed on Friday over worries that some jurors might get “cold feet” before the start of the high-profile case. Judge Arun Subramanian, who is overseeing the case, expressed concern that if jurors were selected before the weekend, they could grow …
Sean Combs’s hair and beard, once jet black, are gray now. Hair dye is not allowed at the Metropolitan Detention Center. Breakfast is at 7 a.m. The exercise room has yoga mats and a small basketball hoop. The communal space in the dorm-style housing he’s been assigned has pingpong and …
In a room full of cubicles, workers in headsets read from their computer screens, addressing callers who dialed a 1-800 number. They have a script. “Were you or your loved one sexually abused by Sean ‘Love’ Combs, known as Diddy, Puff Daddy and P. Diddy?” “If the abuse occurred at …
Roy Ayers, a vibraphonist who in the 1970s helped pioneer a new, funkier strain of jazz, becoming a touchstone for many artists who followed and one of the most sampled musicians by hip-hop artists, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 84. His death, in a hospital, was announced by …
Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish. When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes …
Few groups have had more impact on the shape and evolution of hip-hop than Wu-Tang Clan, the Staten Island supergroup that helped define the sound of 1990s New York rap and transform the industry. And yet seeing Wu-Tang Clan perform a full-length concert in the flesh — all of the …
To accompany this article, Adam Bradley created a playlist of the songs that define R&B’s new era. THE R&B SINGER-SONGWRITER Muni Long has a voice that people say could sing the dictionary and they’d still listen. In 2007, as a teen growing up in Gifford, Fla., she put that claim …