The term came to raising public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a legal action accusing Sean Combs, her boyfriend and her record brand, years of sexual and physical violence: “Freak-Off”.
According to Cassie’s costume, which was born Casandra Ventura, this is what Mr. Combs called the very choreographed sexual meetings which he ordered to “engage in a fantasy of his” voyeurism “. “Abundant drugs”, including ecstasy and ketamine. Hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs looking and recording events on a phone while he was masturbating.
Freak-offs have become a central element in the case of government, which accuses Mr. Combs of sex trafficking, racket conspiracy and transport to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs pleaded not guilty and his lawyers firmly denied that one of his sexual meetings with women was not consensual.
In a highly anticipated judicial testimony this week, Ms. Ventura – who is visibly pregnant with her third child – described the monsters in atrocious terms. Tuesday, during the hours of testimony, she cried and sometimes dabbed her eyes with fabric.
The first Freak-Off occurred at the age of 22, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper in Las Vegas to come to a house that Mr. Combras rented to Los Angeles, she said. Ms. Ventura said that she was wearing a masque masquerade mask and provocative clothes of a “sex store”, and that she and the man took ecstasy and drank alcohol before having sex and Mr. Combs looked.
The monsters “made me feel worthless,” said Ms. Ventura, “as if I had nothing else to offer” to Mr. Combross.
Freak-offs quickly became almost weekly, said Ventura. They took place in houses and hotels across the United States and in international places like Ibiza, a Spanish island; Mr. Combs asked his employees to make travel arrangements so that men come to him and to Mrs. Ventura – a key point in the case of the government for sexual traffic. They have also become more elaborate, with studio-style candles and lighting, and Ms. Ventura said that she would sometimes take a whole day to prepare for them-Mr. Combross also controlled this, she said, until the color of her nails.
She testified that she had participated in the events in part because she wanted to make Mr. Combs happy. “When you are in love with someone, you don’t want to disappoint them.”
But she also said that she feared her violence if she refused and told episodes of her beating her. When Mr. Combs got angry, she said, “Her eyes go black. The version of him I was in love was no longer there.”
The events drained it, she said, and it sometimes took days to recover. “The monsters became a job where there was no space to do something other than recovering and trying to feel normal again.”
The videos that Mr. Combs made, she said, has become “blackmail materials” that pressed her to accept to participate, for fear that videos could be published on the Internet, she said.
Fucked by drugs, monsters could last 36 hours to four days, said Ms. Ventura. They also became more “humiliating”, she said: Mr. Combs directed her and men, on sexual positions, and he would order them to continually apply baby oil to keep themselves “sparkling”. The blood was left on bedding because Ms. Ventura had to occur during her period, she said. There was also urine, as Mr. Combs sometimes told men to urinate in his mouth while she was lying on the ground – she could only end it by holding her hands in the air and hoping that Mr. Combross would tell man to stop.
In her testimony, Ms. Ventura said that a monster was underway in March 2016 at the Intercontinental Century City Hotel in Los Angeles, where a corridor security camera captured her by trying to take the elevator before Mr. Combs assaulted and led her.
The Freak-Offs, she said, continued until she finally left Mr. Combs in 2018. But the government maintains that another victim, who will testify under the pseudonym of Jane, had efforts with Mr. Combs from 2021 to his arrest last year.
