By chance rather than design, Thanksgiving of 2023 marked the end of the year-long window allowing alleged victims in New York to seek civil redress for sex crimes otherwise outside the statute of limitations.
And the approach of that deadline saw R&B singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura file suit against her former boyfriend, Sean Combs, known variously as “Puff Daddy, “ “Diddy”, “Puffy.” Ventura charged that the rap mogul had raped her and subjected her to a years-long ordeal of sexual and psychic abuse.
Combs settled the suit the day after it was filed. But two other women, Joi Dickerson-Neal and Liza Gardner, filed separate suits against him on Thanksgiving itself. They each alleged that he had raped them at the start of his career; Gardner in 1990 and Dickerson-Neal early on the following year.
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Dickerson-Neal’s suit says she had done something subsequent to the alleged January 3, 1991 attack that could have spared numerous others from being similarly assaulted by him. His career might have ended before it really began. But the immediate outcome was one that had become too common in the days before before #MeToo.
“Plaintiff filed police reports in New York and New Jersey and spoke to several prosecutors hoping to press charges,” Dickerson-Neal’s suit reports. “Members of law enforcement told Plaintiff that her allegations would need to be corroborated by witnesses and others who had experienced similar assaults.”
Combs would deny–and continues to deny–that he has ever sexually assaulted anybody. And, having become a billionaire, he could have contested or just quietly settled those cases as well. That might have been, had his behavior with Ventura and others not come to the attention of federal prosecutors in New York this year.
That behavior included “freak-offs” involving paid escorts and drugs. Prosecutors also took note of a surveillance video obtained by CNN that shows Combs kicking and dragging Ventura in a hallway at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016.
Combs was indicted in September and remanded to the horrid Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. His attorneys twice attempted to get him released pending trial with a multimillion-dollar bail package. He did not help himself by repeatedly violating the MDC’s rules regarding telephones and text messaging.
The attorneys then did what they should have done in the first place and enlisted Ira Judelson, New York’s most respected bail bondsman. He put together a $50 million package that included 24-hour security to ensure he followed whatever conditions the court felt necessary. That included in-home detention, 24/7 GPS monitoring and no access to phones or internet. The government took the position that Combs had proven too untrustworthy for pretrial release, whatever the assurances.
Combs caught what might be considered a break when the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) conducted a sweep of the MDC for weapons and contraband. A BOP investigator used it as an opportunity to search through some papers in Combs’ cell that his attorney said had been marked “legal.”
Manhattan Federal Judge Arun Subramanian was clearly not happy. And at a hearing on Friday he sounded more open than the previous two judges to the possibility of Combs making bail. He asked the two sides to submit their legal arguments by Monday and said he would issue a decision later in the week.
The judge said nothing about this coming Thursday being Thanksgiving, but that must have risen in the minds of the family members in the courtroom at Friday’s hearing. They included Combs’ twin 17-year-old daughters, Jessie and D’Lila.
The twins had been with their father back on Thanksgiving of 2022, when he engaged in a little prescient public relations by going with a current girlfriend to serve turkey dinner to homeless men at The Caring Place in Miami, Florida. His daughters were not likely aware that Thanksgiving of 2022 and the one to follow would happen to coincide with the opening and closing of the adult survivor window. They could not have have forseen that along with the indictment and the suits filed by Ventura, Gardner and Dickerson-Neal, more than two dozen women and men would file civil suits charging their father with sexual assault. That was somehow the same father who smiled so brightly when he saw them sitting in the second spectator’s bench on Friday.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Daily Beast had not yet learned whether it would be third time lucky for bail and Judelson’s package would prove sufficient for the judge to release him in time for the holiday. Combs’ chances seemed to dim somewhat near the end of the day, when the prosecution filed a letter saying it was belatedly citing US v Boustani, a 2019 case where the Second Circuit Court to Appeals ruled that wealthy individuals cannot pay for a “private jail” for pre-trial detention, as that would constitute a “two tiered” justice system. The prosecution added that it had failed to cite the case during the bail hearing due to a misunderstanding.
Should Combs remain in custody, he will get at least an approximation of a turkey dinner, though it is served at midday at the MDC. But if even just some of the accusations against are found to be true when the case is scheduled to come to trial in May, it is hard to feel sorry for him.
The twins and the rest of his family are another story. And just as your father is still your father, an empty chair on Thanksgiving is still an empty chair.
