A new alleged victim was called to testify in the sex-trafficking trial of the music producer and rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs on Thursday. The witness testified under the pseudonym Mia to keep her identity anonymous. Only the jury was allowed to see her passport.  

“I believed that Puff was above the police,” Mia told the jury, referring to the defendant, Mr. Combs, whose nicknames include Puff, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Diddy, and, more recently, Love. 

Mr. Combs is charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation of prostitution, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.        

“Police was not an even option,” Mia elaborated later, explaining why she never called the authorities when she witnessed or experienced the physical and sexual assaults she, previous witnesses, and federal prosecutors have all alleged Mr. Combs committed over the course of 20 years.

Mia, who worked for Mr. Combs as his personal assistant and at one point as the director of development and acquisitions for one of his companies, Revolt Films, kept her head down as she testified on Thursday.

“Sometimes he treated me like his best friend. … Like a work partner,” she said, and other times he treated her like she was a “piece of crap.” One day, he would compliment the work she was doing, and give her “life advice,” and then the next day he would “humiliate me. … Curse at me in long extended rants,” and tell her how “stupid” she was. He would go from calling her “incompetent” to telling her she could do whatever she wanted at his companies.  

“I wanted to create and to develop film and TV projects, especially comedy,” she said. But when his mood changed, “he would threaten to take them [the projects] away or he would take them away.”  

“Puff’s mood,” she explained, determined everything, and his mood changed “all the time.” 

The jury saw a list of the job responsibilities that Mia claimed was sent to her by another employee when she first started working for Mr. Combs.

She read the list out loud. It included: “Protect him [Mr. Combs] at all times. His privacy, etc. Stay attached to Blackberry 24/7. Staying within PD’s [Mr. Combs’s] eyesight unless he advises otherwise always while on duty. Listening, asking, Maintaining PD’s [Mr. Combss’s] daily routine in both professional and private circles from the minute he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night and even in the interim. Anticipating his needs, whims, and moods.” 

His moods would often turn violent, she said. When something didn’t go as Mr. Combs wanted, he could quickly become aggressive. 

One time, Mia remembered, she was in his kitchen in his house in Los Angeles with other staff members at 3 a.m. Mr. Combs asked her to get something, but she was menstruating and hadn’t changed her tampon since she began working at 8 a.m., so instead of walking into the direction he expected to go, she turned to walk to her room to get a tampon first. 

“I started to go to my room,” she testified, “there was blood dripping down my leg.” She tried to explain her dilemma to Mr.Combs but he didn’t care to listen and threw a bowl of spaghetti at her head that missed her by a few inches. He then told her “to get the f— out” of his house. She ran away, she said, hid among bushes across the street, and eventually went to a hotel. The next day, the head of human resources of his company — or rather of his business enterprise, since he ran several companies, such as his record label and his clothing line — called her to tell her that she was “going to be suspended without pay because that’s what Mr. Combs wanted.” 

Another time, he threw a computer at her head because the Wi-Fi wasn’t working in his trailer on the set of a music video in Los Angeles. 

“He’s thrown things at me, he’s thrown me against the wall, he’s thrown me into a pool, he’s thrown an ice bucket on my head,” she testified.

There were also, she alleged, sexual assaults. When she first mentioned them to the jury, Mr. Combs vigorously shook his head at the defense table. When she later described them in detail, often pausing, holding back tears, or even crying, Mr. Combs leaned back in his chair and watched her stoically.

She said the first sexual assault happened only a few months after she had been hired, in 2009. Mr. Combs was celebrating his 40th birthday at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and suddenly he asked to speak to her alone. She said he told her that “he noticed what a good job” she was doing. Then he gave her two shots of vodka to toast to his birthday.

“I remember my eyes couldn’t focus on his face because he was so close,” she said, adding that he kissed her and put his hands up her dress.  

“I was shocked … I froze … I didn’t process what was happening. He was my boss. He was a very powerful person. He is younger than my father but I looked at him like an adult,” she testified, saying she was only in her 20s at the time.

She didn’t think much of the incident, and hoped he would not remember it and it just wouldn’t occur again. But it did. She remembered another time between 2009 and 2010, when she was staying at his house in Los Angeles, in a room on the top floor. 

“I wasn’t allowed to lock the door,” she told the jury, adding that no one was allowed to lock the doors inside Mr. Combs’s houses. She was woken up in the middle of the night, she said, by “the weight of another person on top of me.” She paused, and, crying, she said, “He put himself inside of me.” 

Again, she described how she “just froze,” saying that she was “terrified” and “confused” and “ashamed” and “scared.” 

“It was very quick. … It felt like forever. … I know he didn’t leave the job unfinished. … Until he was done or satisfied or got what he wanted,” she said. 

On yet another occasion Mr. Combs allegedly appeared out of nowhere while Mia was on the floor of his closet, packing a bag. She said he forced her to perform oral sex.  

Wiping away tears, she described these sexual abuses as “the most traumatizing, the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“What would you do after the sexual assault?” an assistant United States attorney, Madison Smyser, asked her.  

“Keep it moving,” Mia said. “Act like it never happened. … Keep working. … There wasn’t time to stop and think and reflect.”  

“Why didn’t you tell him no?” Ms. Smyser inquired. 

“Because I couldn’t tell him no — I couldn’t tell him no about a sandwich,” Mia gasped. “I couldn’t tell him no about anything. There was no way I could tell him no, because then he would know that I thought [what] he was doing was wrong, and then I would be a target.”  

Mia said Mr. Combs would often make threats that he would ruin her career, make sure she would never work in the music industry again, if she dared to speak out. She said was scared to “lose everything” that she had “worked so hard for” and to be exiled from a world that “was the only thing that I had anymore.” She said she felt “trapped” and often felt like it was her fault. She admitted, “I made of lot of excuses for him in my head.”   

Furthermore, she had signed a non-disclosure agreement with his company, she said, and was afraid of the legal repercussions she would have to face.  

According to her testimony, Mia did not tell a single person about the sexual assault until very recently. Prosecutors subpoenaed her to testify and she met with them a few times, but only after she had obtained her own attorney did she mention the sexual assaults. “I was going to die with this,” she said, meaning she was going to take the alleged offenses to her grave. 

She was also scared that Mr. Combs would physically attack her, hurt her, even kill her, she said, and that he would, as he had threatened, tell his longtime on-and-off-again girlfriend, Cassandra Ventura. 

Mia, who referred to Ms. Ventura as “Cass,” said the two women were “like sisters,” and are still close today.

Ms. Ventura testified earlier in the trial that she was subjected to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse over the course of their 11-year relationship that ended in 2018, and that Mr. Combs coerced her into having sex with male prostitutes during drug-fueled sex sessions he called “Freak Offs.” Ms. Ventura detailed incidents when Mr. Combs beat her, kicked her, stomped on her head, and one time threw a burning hot skillet at her, luckily missing her.       

On Thursday, Mia said Ms. Combs and Ms. Ventura’s relationship was “unequal” and that he was “abusive towards her.” She said Mr. Combs completely controlled Ms. Ventura’s life down to the smallest detail, such as her nails. “I’ve had to send photos of, like, her nails at a nail salon, hair styles, things like that,” she said. 

Mia claimed that Mr. Combs would take away Ms. Ventura’s car or jewelry to punish her. She also testified that she had to clean up hotel rooms after Mr. Combs’s alleged “freak-off” parties. She said she would go to the rooms before the hotel’s housekeepers to make sure there was nothing incriminating left behind. She said the rooms were a “nightmare,” covered in baby oil, candle wax, and sometimes blood.

Like previous witnesses, such as the stylist Deonate Nash, or another assistant, Capricorn Clark, Mia testified that she saw Mr. Combs constantly being violent with Ms. Ventura, sometimes for minor reasons like not being able “to get her on the phone.” 

“We would be in trouble, the punishment was typically unpredictable and pretty terrifying … I have seen him crack her head open. … Chase her. … Kick her,” she said, later adding that she saw “bruises, fat lips, busted eyebrows, and black eyes.” Mia said that Ms. Ventura never fought back, and instead curled up into a fetal position, lifting her arms to protect herself and endure the beatings.

One time, she remembered, the two friends got in trouble with Mr. Combs because they had secretly gone to a party the musician Prince was throwing in a private house in Hollywood, some time between 2011 and 2012.  

“Puff had rented a hotel suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Mia said, because the next day he was invited to attend an awards show. “He told me to stay the night with Cass. … He told me to stay with her and not come to the house, because he was gonna be with his kids.” 

Then a friend of hers informed her that “Prince was having a party” and “Cass and I debated like little kids, kinda, if we should sneak out of the house,” Mia remembered. They decided to go. They were dancing and having fun, when Mia saw Mr. Combs’s “bucket hat come through the entrance.” She said she locked eyes with him and, “Me and Cass just booked it. … We ran through the house, which was quite confusing.” 

The two women managed to find their way out and attempted to hide in the bushes, but “Puff caught Cass. … He caught up to her and threw her to the ground. … He started to attack her but Prince’s security guards intervened.” 

The next day, she got the call from the head of human resources, who told her “that Puff was suspending me without pay. … And that I was in big trouble. … That I was being insubordinate.” 

Mia got emotional when she was asked about the incident when Mr. Combs allegedly slammed Ms. Ventura’s head into a bed frame. The stylist, Mr. Nash, had also told the jury about the incident during his testimony on Wednesday, as did Ms. Ventura herself, but the details Mia gave were so gruesome that the entire courtroom, it appeared, held its breath.

Mr. Combs had come into Ms. Ventura’s apartment and had begun beating her. Mia said he was raging like a “tornado” and that she tried in vain to stop him from throwing her against the bed platform, which had “the sharpest, strongest corner” she had “ever seen.” 

“He’s actually gonna kill her,” Mia remembered thinking. “He slammed her head into the bed. It started gushing blood, and she ended up with a pretty big scar on her forehead.” 

Once he saw the blood, she testified, he told Mia to call another assistant, Kala Faulkner, and to tell her to contact “doctor so and so and tell him that she [Ms. Ventura] needs to see him immediately because she was drunk and hit her head.”  

This same assistant, Ms. Faulkner, later dared, Mia said, to address the violence issue with the head of human resources. As a result she was fired immediately.  

Mia’s testimony verified the prosecution’s allegation that Mr. Combs ran a “criminal enterprise” with staff who supported his criminal acts and employees who stayed silent while they watched him get violent, and who protected him from people who dared to speak up. 

To call the police, Mia testified, was not an option. One time, she remembered, she was driving through Los Angeles on her way to meet Mr. Combs. She was late, she said, and Mr. Combs was upset that she was taking so long. She got pulled over by an officer from the Los Angeles Police Department. 

“I didn’t have my license renewed,” she testified. When she told the officer that she was speeding because she was late to meet her boss, Mr. Combs, the officer asked for proof. Mia then called Mr. Combs and handed the officer the phone. The LAPD officer began laughing on the phone, Mia said, and “she let me go.” 

Another time, she was in the car with Mr. Combs, she said, and they were speeding and were pulled over by the police. But again, once the officers realized that Mr. Combs was in the car, they let them go without a ticket.  

The defense will most likely refute the sexual assault allegations and attempt to convince the jury their sex was consensual. Mia did say that she also enjoyed working for Mr. Combs. “I made a lot of new friends … I was smiling a lot … I was happy.” But allegations of coercion, blackmail, and constant threats will be difficult to discredit. Mia also told the jury about a time when Mr. Combs pushed her to take the drug Ketamine. It was during a festival called “Burning Man.” Mr. Combs handed out platters of MDMA, Ketamine, and cocaine, she said. 

“He pulled down the black shades and turned on the disco light,” Mia remembered. She was nervous about taking the drug, because she had seen the effect it had on other people. But Mr. Combs made her feel like she was “gonna mess up the vibe” if she didn’t participate, she said. 

“I didn’t think I had a choice,” she testified, admitting that she snorted the Ketamine and then secretly tried to blow it out afterward.

The defense has argued that everyone around Mr. Combs always had a choice and that every party, every sexual encounter, and every incident of drug use was consensual. But who will the jury believe?

Mia’s testimony will resume on Friday.