As Diddy is accused of sex crimes, our podcast delves into the stories

More than 100 allegations of sexual abuse, including multiple accusations of rape and even child abuse, at his infamous drug-fuelled parties – and that’s just the start of the reckoning for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.

Or so believes Marjorie Hernandez, the Daily Mail’s West Coast News Editor, who has been investigating the reams of charges against the rapper and music mogul for more than 18 months.

Hernandez has just launched the Mail’s most ambitious podcast yet and arguably its most shocking. The Trial Of Diddy analyses the claims of dozens of people, women and men, who say his depraved appetites have been an open secret in the music industry for decades.

‘The whole of the entertainment world is shaking in its boots,’ says Hernandez. ‘All the A-listers clamoured to get into his parties. Everybody wanted to go to a Diddy party, because you weren’t anybody if you didn’t get an invitation. So you can imagine who might have been inside those rooms after midnight when those wild parties really went down.’

One of the most troubling allegations, which emerged at a Press conference in Houston, Texas, last Tuesday, is that Combs sexually abused a nine-year-old boy. In an upcoming episode of the podcast, Hernandez interviews an anonymous witness who claims that, on the morning after a particularly debauched party, girls who appeared to be under 16 emerged from Diddy’s hotel room.

The lawyer in Houston, Tony Buzbee, who represents 120 accusers and plans to file lawsuits in multiple states, declared the cases will name ‘many powerful people’ with ‘many dirty secrets’.

Combs has operated under multiple stage names, including Puff Daddy and P Diddy, with a series of huge hits in the 1990s. But his real fame and power comes from his media businesses, including a TV ­station and the Bad Boy Records label.

He had a long relationship with Kim Porter, with whom he had three children as well as adopting the late actress’s eldest son. He famously dated megastar Jennifer Lopez, who was with him in a Manhattan club in 1999 when he and a friend, a rapper called Shyne, were arrested on weapons charges after shots were fired. Shyne was sentenced to ten years, Combs was acquitted.

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Rumours have swirled around him for decades but, says Hernandez, no one in showbiz dared speak out. ‘Everyone had a story about Diddy,’ she says, ‘but nobody was brave enough to come forward with it. He was feared because his status even transcended his wealth.

‘He was the champion of hip-hop culture, not just in the US but globally. And when you have someone who has risen to that stratosphere, people don’t want to hear about the dark side.

‘He didn’t hide the fact that he was a womaniser but he painted his partying as something aspirational – promoting the mentality that his fans could achieve what he did, if they were prepared to work as hard as he had. For a long time, it seemed like everything Diddy touched turned to gold.’ The gold is flaking off now, as Combs prepares to defend multiple federal charges in New York, including allegations of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has denied all of the allegations, with his lawyer Erica Wolff saying: ‘Mr Combs emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors.’

His aura of untouchability dissolved last May after a video emerged of Combs attacking his then-girlfriend, singer Cassie Ventura, in an LA hotel corridor.

Wearing only a towel and socks, he appeared to drag her by the hair, kick and punch her, and throw her to the floor. Ventura had filed a lawsuit against him, alleging among other things that he paid $50,000 to obtain that video from the hotel as well as forcing her to engage in sex acts with male prostitutes while he filmed. They settled the suit and Combs apologised for the physical assault but ‘vehemently denies’ all the other allegations.

Hotels were frequently the venues for his notorious parties. There were two kinds – the lavish, Gatsby-esque White Parties at his mansion in the Hamptons for up to 1,000 guests – and the more secretive ‘freak-offs’ that supposedly involved orgies, rape and drug abuse. ‘We talk in the podcast to the attorney Lisa Bloom,’ says Hernandez, ‘who is representing one of the victims who claims Diddy raped her. She discusses how the Cassie Ventura video emboldened a wave of alleged victims to come forward. So far, Diddy faces 120 civil lawsuits but it’s likely the eventual number will be over 200.

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‘The Los Angeles district attorney [chief prosecutor] George Gascon has put out an appeal asking anyone who believes they were a victim of Combs to contact his office. That’s very unusual – DAs don’t normally go fishing for more cases when they are investigating a high-profile individual.

‘That implies a huge shift in the way more allegations could be brought against him.’

The worse it gets for Combs, the more that people across the entertainment industry will fear for their own reputations and even their freedom. Hernandez compares the fallout to the seismic aftershocks following billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s downfall. Epstein was believed to use hidden cameras to record his ultra-rich friends having sex with young women, some of whom were treated as sex slaves.

That footage was used as leverage by Epstein to manipulate the powerful. According to claims in at least one of the lawsuits, Combs did the same but even more blatantly.

Rodney Jones, a former employee who says he was groped and ­repeatedly badgered for sex by Combs, has no doubt: ‘He says Diddy actually had tech guys walking around with video cameras or on their cell phones, just getting footage of everything,’ says Hernandez.

‘In another lawsuit, one of the alleged rape victims says she was filmed by his security guard and that the film of her being raped was shown to other people in the industry. We know that when FBI investigators raided Combs’s properties last March in LA and New York, they were definitely looking for footage.’

Many of the lawsuits allege Combs would drug his victims by lacing their drinks and sometimes tying them up while they were comatose or semi-conscious.

Last month, a woman named Thalia Graves filed a suit in New York claiming she was given a glass of wine by the rapper and his bodyguard Joseph Sherman at a recording studio in 2001 when she was 25 years old.

The wine made her ‘lightheaded, dizzy and weak’, and when she lost consciousness her hands were tied behind her back before both men raped her. Graves, who met Combs through her boyfriend who worked at the star’s record label, claims she was repeatedly warned against reporting the rape and threatened with losing custody of her child. Sherman told the Mail these claims were ‘totally wrong and I’m having my attorneys file a defamation suit against this lady’.

Such assaults were so widely rumoured that Eminem, on a song called Fuel released last July, made a barely veiled reference to Combs with the lyrics: ‘I’m like an R-A-P-E-R (Yeah)... wait, he didn’t just spell the word “rapper” and leave out a P, did he?’ – which of course can be heard as ‘P. Diddy’.

Other long-running rumours suggest Combs is bisexual. ‘That’s been talked about in the entertainment industry for a long time,’ says Hernandez. ‘I’ve lived in LA all my life and it was a known thing that no one dared to talk about publicly – that he was allegedly sleeping with men as well. Hip-hop has a long history of homophobia but it was something whispered about.’

Contributors to the podcast paint Combs as a bully and misogynist. Music licensing specialist Pam Lewis-Rudden goes on record, saying: ‘When he blew up, if somebody hadn’t done something or they didn’t do it right according to him, all hell would break loose, just screaming at the top of his lungs. “Bitch” was the term used for almost everybody, or at least all the women – in front of the whole office and any of the artists.’

He would pressure artists into accepting exploitative financial deals. Rapper Mark Curry claims he was signed by Combs in 1997 with the promise that the label would release his album if he wrote songs for the star.

One of them was the smash hit Come With Me, which appeared on the 1998 movie soundtrack for Godzilla. ‘He was very adamant about making sure that I signed the contract,’ says Curry.

‘So I signed, giving away 50 per cent of the publishing rights for $25,000. Two years down the line, that song could be worth $8million or $10million.’

If any of the stories are even half true, Combs has exercised a chilling grip on the music business for a quarter of a century. The question is, will he maintain that grip if he falls – and who will be dragged down with him?