Her testimony at times contained graphic descriptions of sex acts she said she did not consent to. Lying on the floor, “in a position I could not easily get out of,” she said an escort urinated on her at Mr. Combs’s direction, until, choking, she put up her hands. “Eventually Sean saw me, and told him to stop,” she said.
She said she stayed to keep Mr. Combs happy.
Ms. Ventura, whose relationship with Mr. Combs’s was intermittent over a period of more than a decade, described falling in love with Mr. Combs and participating in the freak-offs because she wanted to make him happy.
“When you’re in love with someone you don’t want to disappoint them,” she testified.
But as the years passed, she said that, even as he she still sought to please him, she recognized that he had become increasingly abusive, beating her and orchestrating ever more degrading sessions that made her feel like her career was no longer music but performing for Mr. Combs’s sexual satisfaction.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have depicted the sexual encounters as consensual and denied there was anything coercive about them. But Ms. Ventura, seeking to explain why she did not end the relationship, described being fearful, not just of Mr. Combs’s anger, but of his power over her career and the fact that he possessed videos of the freak-offs that could be used to blackmail her.
The judge denied a request to downplay Ms. Ventura’s visible pregnancy.
Ms. Ventura was always expected to be the prosecution’s star witness. Her November 2023 lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and repeated abuse over their decade-long relationship helped begin the federal investigation that led to his indictment. Questions about her career — why she released only one album on Mr. Combs’s Bad Boy label, and then largely vanished from the music industry — and Mr. Combs’s influence on it have long followed her.
But Ms. Ventura was an even more dramatic figure on the stand than anticipated, testifying while in the third trimester of her latest pregnancy — so far along that the defense asked the judge to consider having her seated in the witness box before the jury entered so the visibility of her pregnancy would not prejudice the jury against Mr. Combs.