In an emotional letter submitted to court ahead of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Friday sentencing, Cassie Ventura wrote that she fears “swift retribution” if the disgraced music mogul “walks free.”
Ventura asked U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian to consider the “seemingly insurmountable level of trauma” caused by Combs’ abuse as she urged him to deliver a significant sentence in a three-page victim impact statement submitted to a New York court on Monday and obtained by Rolling Stone.
Filed alongside a prosecutor’s request for Combs to receive at least 11 years and three months in prison, Ventura’s letter argued that Combs’ sentence should “reflect the reality of the evidence and my lived experience as a victim” and “the truths at hand that the jury failed to see” during his eight-week trial earlier this summer.
Combs was found guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution in July but was acquitted of the more serious racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges, a decision Ventura said she finds deeply unjust.
“For four days in May, while nine months pregnant with my son, I testified in front of a packed courtroom about the most traumatic and horrifying chapter in my life,” Ventura’s statement read. “I testified that from age nineteen, Sean Combs used violence, threats, substances, and control over my career to trap me in over a decade of abuse. He groomed me into performing repeated sex acts with hired male sex workers during multi-day ‘freak-offs,’ which occurred nearly weekly.”
