A former girlfriend of the music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs shared more disturbing accounts of her on-and-off relationship with Mr. Combs, who is on trial for sex trafficking and other charges, on Wednesday. Cassandra Ventura also shared the amount of money, which had been undisclosed, that she received when she settled her civil lawsuit against the rapper in 2023. She will likely face a fierce cross-examination from the defense on Thursday.  

“Who paid you $20 million?” an assistant United States attorney, Emily Johnson, asked Ms. Ventura at a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon. 

“Sean and his companies,” Ms. Ventura answered.

Ms. Ventura has been on the witness stand since Tuesday and is considered a key witness in the case against Mr. Combs, whom federal prosecutors have charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs faces a maximum of life in prison if the jury convicts him. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.   

In November 2023, Ms. Ventura, who was in a rocky relationship with Mr. Combs for 11 years, between 2007 and 2018, filed an explosive civil lawsuit alleging years of physical and sexual abuse, and also that he raped her. The lawsuit between Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura was settled in less than a day. But the accusations she made laid the groundwork for the criminal charges he now faces in federal court. The exact amount of the settlement in the bombshell lawsuit, which triggered dozens of other lawsuits from both women and men against Mr. Combs, had not been disclosed until Wednesday.     

In their opening argument, the defense team claimed that Mr. Combs paid Ms. Ventura $30 million, as the Sun has been reporting, but on Wednesday Ms. Ventura said she received $20 million. 

The amount may seem astronomical, but Mr. Combs was until recently a self-made billionaire, and Ms. Ventura alleges years of physical and sexual abuse.    

During her testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Ventura — who is eight and half months pregnant with her third child with her husband, the bull rider and actor Alex Fine, whom she met in 2018 while Mr. Fine was a personal trainer for her and Mr. Combs — provided more elaborate details about the sex-parties, or “Freak Offs” as Mr. Combs called them, she was allegedly “coerced” to participate in and also about the physical abuse she claims she constantly suffered, like Ms. Combs stomping on her head, and beating her so badly that she often had to hide out in hotel rooms for days to recover.   

Ms. Ventura also mentioned that she briefly dated the Grammy-winning rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, around 2011, while she was still in a relationship with Mr. Combs, and that once the music producer found out about her affair, he “mentioned that Scott’s car would be blown up.” Mr. Mescudi’s car was in fact set on fire in January 2012, but Mr. Combs denies any involvement in the incident.     

Ms. Ventura met with Mr. Combs, she said, shortly before Christmas in 2011 to discuss her affair, and Mr. Combs threatened her that he would publish video tapes he had recorded of her having sex with male escorts during the “Freak Offs.” 

“I went into his room and he was irate. … He told me about the videos he had and how he was going to hurt Scott and I,” Ms. Ventura testified. “When I was leaving … Sean kicked my back on my way out. … The day is fuzzy, but I had bruises in other places on my body. I just remember that one significantly because he literally kicked me with the bottom of his foot in my back.”  

Ms. Ventura testified that she left Mr. Combs’s house and went to a hotel, where she had been staying and where she had kept a “burner phone,” a second phone she had used to communicate with Mr. Mescudi. When she arrived, the room had been trashed. 

“It was just torn up. … Somebody peed all over the floor in the bathroom. My clothes were everywhere. All the furniture was turned upside down. Somebody pooped in the toilet and didn’t flush it. It was just gross.”  

She then traveled to Connecticut, where she was born and raised, to spend Christmas with her family. Mr. Mescudi came to visit her and she testified that she ended the relationship with him, because both she and Mr. Mescudi would have been in “too much danger” if they would have continued seeing each other. “Sean said to me,” Ms. Ventura testified, referring to Mr. Combs, “before I left L.A. that he was going to hurt the both of us. And I, at least, took that in my mind, like, if I stay in this situation, we both will be hurt. If I don’t, then no one will be.” 

Ms. Ventura also spoke about a meeting in Los Angeles with Messrs. Mescudi and Combs. “The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the relationship that we were no longer in,” she said, referring to the affair she had ended with Mr. Mescudi. “Scott said, ‘What about my vehicle?’ And Sean said, ‘What vehicle?’” 

Ms. Ventura did not provide more details regarding the “vehicle” on Wednesday, but according to Rolling Stone, which cited police records and the Los Angeles Fire Department, Mr. Mescudi’s Porsche was set on fire by an “incendiary device” on January 9, 2012, at a Los Angeles address connected to him through public records. No one was charged, and Mr. Combs denied any involvement in a statement through his attorneys. But the indictment has listed “arson” as one of the acts of the racketeering conspiracy charges, and it could be that prosecutors are referring to Mr. Mescudi’s car. Other witnesses will likely testify on the matter later in the trial.  

The prosecution had started the day by questioning the 38-year-old Ms. Ventura about the infamous 2016 hotel attack that was caught on security footage and first aired to the public by CNN last year. The jury on Monday had seen the footage, which showed Mr. Combs repeatedly kicking Ms. Ventura as she tried to flee to an elevator at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. Just days after the attack, she attended a movie premiere for her starring role in “The Perfect Match.” She told the jury she had to cover her bruises with makeup and wear sunglasses to walk the red carpet.

Another time, in 2013, Mr. Combs allegedly threw her into a bed frame while she was packing her suitcase to go to a music festival in Canada. She said she suffered a “pretty significant gash” above her left eye. Mr. Combs’s security guards brought her, she said, to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills to get the wound stitched up. She testified that she texted Mr. Combs a photo of her injured face and wrote, “So you can remember.” The defendant replied: “You don’t know when to stop. You pushed it too far. And continued to push. Sad.”

In another text message exchange that the jury was shown, Mr. Combs asked Ms. Ventura to conduct a “proper” sex-party, without using the drug Ketamine, so they could “remember.”

“You know we have to have a proper FO (freak-off) WITHOUT NO K (ketamine) . . . A successful FO is when we remember,” Mr. Combs texted Ms. Ventura on January 26, 2016.

“That is all we do and I’m just getting back on track,” Ms. Ventura replied, meaning she was in the process of recovering. She later explained that she must have participated in “hundreds” of “freak-offs” during her 11-year relationship. 

The jury also saw a picture of Ms. Ventura’s apartment in Los Angeles, where she had placed a long kitchen knife in the door crack next to the handle. 

“I was getting a lot of unannounced visits from Sean where he was angry, and trying to kill two birds with one stone, to lock it and have a weapon.” Ms. Ventura replied. 

When asked by an assistant United States attorney, Emily Johnson, who was questioning her, when their relationship ended, the answer Ms. Ventura gave led the jury to the rape allegation she had brought up in her civil lawsuit, but is not charged in the criminal indictment. 

In its opening statement, the defense claimed that Ms. Ventura left Mr. Combs in 2018, after he made a statement at the funeral of his late partner, Kim Porter, the mother of three of his seven children. Porter died at the age of 47 from complications of pneumonia and a defense attorney, Teny Geragos, said on Monday that Mr. Combs described her as his “soulmate” at her funeral, and that this statement caused Ms. Ventura to end their relationship because she realized, “She was never going to be his wife, or the love of his life,” the defense attorney said. 

But Ms. Ventura remembered a different scenario on Tuesday, saying, “I had spent several years, like, learning about a girl that he was dating for, basically, the whole, like, last half of our relationship. And I, as an excuse for myself, I don’t even know. I said, if I catch you with her again, then I’m done. And that’s what happened. They were seen out, and I was in Connecticut, so I was out.” 

Then, in August 2018, she met with Mr. Combs at a restaurant and “we are having a kind of closure conversation. … He was just being really nice … playful, laughing … kind of romantic vibes, sort of. But we just were normal,” Ms. Ventura said. After the dinner, she testified, Mr. Combs drove her to her apartment. 

“I went inside, went in the living room. He came in, pretty usual, nothing weird, um, and then — and then he raped me in my living room,” she testified. “I just remember crying and saying no. But it was very fast.” 

Ms. Ventura told the jury that she believed Mr. Combs may have not even noticed that she was crying. His demeanor had changed, she said, as his eyes appeared “black” and he “wasn’t himself.” She said, “The laughing and, like, all the things that were happening before that were not there.” 

When the prosecutor asked how Mr. Combs reacted when she was crying, Ms. Ventura said, “He continued. I don’t even know if he noticed, honestly.” 

But after the alleged rape, Ms. Ventura admitted that she saw him again and had sexual intercourse with him again, this time “by choice.” 

“Can you explain to the jury why you agreed to see Sean again after the rape?” Ms. Johnson asked. 

“We’ve been together for over 10 years. Like, you don’t just turn feelings off that way. We were very connected at that point, still. I still had good vision of who he was as a person. Like, I didn’t hate him,” Ms. Ventura replied. 

The defense will begin its cross-examination on Thursday and is likely to press Ms. Ventura on the same question: Why did she keep going back to him if he was so terrifying and reckless?