Sean Combs in 2010. Photograph by John Seb Barber, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A Great Villain Is a Great American

Prisons are American tourist attractions, and criminals who become fugitives or inmates our outlaw heroes—Al Capone, Alcatraz, Charles Manson, Sing Sing, Angola, Luigi Mangione, O. J. Simpson, Diddy, né Sean Combs. A collective underdog fetish means that the image of a civilian outwitting, outrunning, or confronting “the man” is enough to negate his trespasses. Maybe achieving the apotheosis of success in the United States requires becoming a convict, being threatened with or facing real incarceration and exile, doing time, paying dues, and making a grand comeback. At that finale you can sell that story to restore your fortunes, dignity, and maverick glory. Combs is the latest public figure to go from celebrated to disgraced to tentatively redeemed in some eyes by a show trial and the masculine compulsion to cheer when men get away with terrorizing women. The rapper Jay Electronica stood outside of the courtroom with his two Great Danes on the day the verdict was delivered, and announced, “I’m just here supporting my brother.” He looked half-ashamed, half-deviant about it, like he was both courting and afraid of backlash. Others call Diddy’s comeuppance a legal lynching, insinuating he’s a survivor of a because-he’s-black character assassination, since other powerful, abusive men have yet to be held accountable. It’s a truly American malfunction, this belief that the once oppressed should have the freedom to become as evil and ruthlessly decadent as their oppressors. This is what is sold to the public as prestige, and imitations of it exist at every stratum. With this in mind, Diddy’s story could be construed as a bootstraps tale—from Harlem to Howard to Hollywood endings. His recent downward spiral might be just another buoy, one that will help him ascend anew.

Hip-hop music understands this about the American subconscious, taps into these delusions of impunity for material, and dresses its best emcees in rap sheets, threats, beef, high and low-level street violence—sometimes actual death and martyrdom. Even the so-called success stories who sell the genre out to the mainstream cannot be too clean—they better be rumored to run a trap house, attract a harem of groupies, and defy the legal system if they expect to maintain credibility. As the wealth of those at the top has increased, their criminality has grown reckless and entitled, blasé even, but no less compulsory. Now it’s tied more to contracts, NDAs, and designer drugs than to desperation to break through; they run media companies, liquor brands, parts of the NFL.

In June 2022 Diddy was granted BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award and thanked, among others, Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend between 2011 and 2018, for holding him down in the dark times. That same year, he dressed as the Joker for Halloween. He was so creepy and persuasive in his white face and sleaze that many didn’t know it was him in the costume; it felt like a mimed confession of his true attributes. In 2023, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, presented Diddy with the coveted key to the city. The key was returned the following summer, after news began circulating that Combs had abused Ventura. In September of 2024, Combs was taken into custody by the Southern District of New York and held without bail on RICO charges of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was considered a flight risk and a threat to potential witnesses. His loyalists formed a hush harbor. This month, he was acquitted of the most serious charges and cheered on by many who seem to feel vicariously acquitted themselves ready to get back to a White Party or freak-off; when he’s released from prison, it seems likely he’ll be offered a hero’s reentry, a new lease on cultural domination and indiscriminate sexcapades, a new deal, as if he’s some kind of New Age abolitionist. Villainy was good for business. 

The Business

Ruined and impeccable women are the muses of the entertainment industry, the subjects of enduring torch songs, the abject heroines in courtroom dramas. They are the stars of Diddy’s quasi-downfall, forced to testify in the pursuit of conviction for crimes that are considered more sophisticated and substantial than the cycle of unchecked domestic violence he inflicted on them. When you hear rumors about how a rapper’s mistress or baby mother died suspiciously, seemingly at the hands of a phantom hit man, but the autopsy lists pneumonia or aneurysm, when you wonder if the arm candy’s new red-carpet bangs are covering bruises, you keep quiet and wait for injustice to prevail. Without realizing it, you are part of the choir that keeps a culture of muses and their handlers in business, in vogue, in demand, thriving, posturing excellence as an excuse for grotesque decadence. Making it in or adjacent to Hollywood, we’re expected to believe, is predicated on passing this coward’s etiquette off as cool. Be careful what you wish for is an insufficient warning. It’s more appropriate to ask, What’s wrong with you that you ever wished for that?

When surveillance footage of Cassie Ventura being dragged through a hotel hallway and kicked and beaten by Combs began circulating in the late spring of 2024, then made the evening news, a lot of people had to either remain silent or feign surprise. There were his close celebrity friends, never to be heard from in association with him again; his staff, quieted by fear that they were next; his current rotation of women, busy dealing with their own incidents. And then there were the defenders—his fans, made up of incel-esque members of the manosphere who believe that he was entitled to his bouts of anarchic rage; the women who center powerful men no matter how extreme their abuses of that power become; and the rap industry fundamentalists who believe that being an infinitely ruthless OG is more important than the women, children, and artists you destroy along the way.

The culture at large is emerging from a stupor that Combs helped induce. If Diddy’s empire was crumbling, who would bully all the king’s men into a nonstop-party lifestyle well into their fifties, and who would ensure there were always women to entertain them? What would mainstream hip-hop culture become in the absence of a long-reigning tyrant? The stakes were the integrity of iconography in the context of black music. A new semiotics would be necessary if evil and glory had become contingent on each other within a music that was meant for testimony. A space for marginalized groups to vent creatively, constructively, had become bent on silencing them. If Sean Combs had spent that past several decades antagonizing women and colleagues unobstructed, had lured everyone from Biggie to Mase to Cassie to Usher to Justin Bieber to Kim Porter, the mother of four of his children, into his lurid lifestyle and then held them captive there using money, status, and surveillance footage from the cameras rigged in all his homes and at all his parties, was he black entertainment’s closest approximation of Jeffrey Epstein, able to control creative trends using a makeshift sexual blackmail? Perhaps this was even part of his job description as head of a record label.

And whose apprentice or protégé had he been? His father, Melvin Combs, was an informant killed in a drug deal gone wrong when Diddy was just two years old. His mentor and rumored lover was Clive Davis, who used his own label, Arista, to help fund Bad Boy Records after Diddy dropped out of Howard University. Half-open secrets make it easier to control artists in a genre built in part by submissive, neurotic men imitating masculinity as seen in the Mafia, secret societies, and global cabals. Hip-hop’s aspirational energy can thus be channeled into hubris that leads to self-sabotage. And were the mainstream emcees who enacted that sabotage just a bunch of closeted or otherwise compromised men inventing a culture of violence and misogyny to deflect from their shame? Do men who love women kick them through hotel hallways, or is that the behavior of men who resent the fact that they have to pretend to love what they merely envy, that they do not get to be feminine and beautiful in that way themselves? This is the lifestyle we’ve been selling to one another back and forth, one that can squirm out of accountability for itself at every turn, just like the men installed to run it. “If I ruled the world, I’d free all my sons,” a 1996 Nas hook sung by Lauryn Hill promises, ominously. His peers who pretend to rule the world free no one.

Sean Combs attends the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit gala celebrating the opening of the Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between exhibition on Monday, May 1, 2017, in New York. Photograph by Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press.

The Women

Chatting with a veteran casting agent, I learned that circa 2005, Cassie attended her auditions and callbacks with her father. The deliverer of this detail recalls thinking it swell, an advantage—here was a young, beautiful aspiring singer/actress who would not fall prey to lecherous men and their rotten promises; she had a father figure, nature’s bodyguard, looking out for her. A couple of weeks later, in another glimmer of Hollywood serendipity, I met someone at lunch who knew Combs. She had been close to the Jane Does who were by then testifying in the federal case against Diddy, but had herself emerged unscathed and unaware of the side of him now being revealed. A woman at the table asked her bluntly, “Did you grow up with your father?” No, she replied, undermining the implication that Diddy reserved his violence for fatherless men and women who would treat the blows as signs of devotion and make him their spirit daddy. The conjecture didn’t hold up to reality—the girl with the hyperinvolved father turned out to be his primary victim for years, while another without that so-called privilege had been spared. Some will say that certain women’s personalities provoke these men; I maintain that what provokes them is their own insecurity and the resilience of the women they think they’ve trapped.

I was in Miami visiting a friend who had just become a father for the first time, on the weekend that Diddy’s Miami house was raided. That city felt more like a muse for a true crime conspiracy than usual for those days. I speculated darkly, as more information came out about what was in that house, that Diddy might be a descendant of Eldridge Cleaver, who had announced his plan to rape white women as revenge for slavery, as if this were some kind of rigorous ideology. It seemed there was a method to Diddy’s use of women as accessories, that he had been deliberate about it. Yoko Ono screams, “Woman is the nigger of the world,” and some are outraged by her use of the hard-r version of the slur, and some join her and make it a chorus of punk-erotic distress. Diddy did not discriminate; he seemed to direct his intentional violence at women of any race, creed, or gender. During her somewhat frazzled testimony, Diddy’s former assistant Capricorn Clark recounted an afternoon when he had Cassie come into the kitchen and then barked mechanical orders at her as if she was a canine—stand up, sit, go, come back, et cetera—and she followed each one without saying a word. He told Clark that she didn’t have a man because she couldn’t be house-trained like Cassie. Then he dismissed Cassie from the room.

What each woman who was subpoenaed and forced to take the witness stand at Combs’s trial admitted to at one point or another, even beyond having been beaten or raped or held hostage or passed around by him among male escorts, was that she was in love with him, or loved him deeply, or was deeply in love, or wanted his love, or was jealous of other lovers, or could be a better lover, or called him Love, or traded love for danger, or chose unconditional loyalty to him in hopes love would follow. What makes women marks, in part, is other women, the formation of a humiliation-ritual assembly line made up of those willing to be the on-demand replacement if the abuse gets too harsh or frequent for the one before her, waiting and maybe even longing for that moment, flaunting the threat of being the untainted understudy, quiet in the face of the principal’s plight or reluctant to speak up, fearing for her own life or because she’s financially and emotionally dependent on their beloved abuser, groomed into believing that codependency is unconditional love. If the father in the home is a wannabe mafioso or minstrel kingpin, does that count as the patriarch most mean when they preach about how growing up in traditional households can deter a woman from dangerous men? Or is it that many heads of household manage to keep families together the way abductors keep all their hostages in one place?

“After the jury left, the judge did Diddy a favor and kicked everyone out except for his family so that he could share a private moment with them. In his hands were two self-help books, the first being The Happiness Advantage, the second The Power of Positive Thinking,” a reporter tells us from inside the courtroom the day the verdict is delivered, the Wednesday before Fourth of July weekend.

In this courtroom sketch, Sean “Diddy” Combs reacts after he was convicted of prostitution-related offenses but acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges that could have put him behind bars for life, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Manhattan federal court in New York. Elizabeth Williams via Associated Press.

How Do You Feel about Your Wide-Eyed Boy?

Toward the end of the eight-week run of the U.S. v. Sean Combs, I had reason to be in New York and decided to attend a day of the proceedings. I made no formal plan, had no credentials ready, and all the friends who had seemed eager to accompany me when I’d proposed the idea backed out in terror or apathy the morning of, wishing me luck. It turned out it was a pilgrimage I needed to make alone. I was ushered in after passing through the line of news anchors, told to turn in my phone and laptop, which I’d assumed I would use for notes, and sent inside. Jane Doe, who had been with Diddy all the way up until his arrest and whose rent he still pays every month, was on her second week of testimony. The defense shared and narrated text messages between Jane and Combs, some that made him seem almost levelheaded as he weaponized therapy jargon and told her he didn’t want them to be “toxic,” good energy only. They bickered about his “fantasy called voyeurism,” which is how he’d introduced freak-offs, now called “hotel parties,” to her, and then they made up by throwing them. She sent him glowing reviews of how close she felt to him after hotel nights, and then expressed everything from hesitation to utter refusal the next time he proposed one, only to acquiesce again to keep the peace. He’d chased and beaten her one night in particular, broken down doors in the home he paid for, but this was mild compared to what he’d subjected Cassie to. Jane seemed both entitled, aloof, and still in some semblance of romantic love or infatuation with Combs. She cried softly while reading their make-up texts aloud.

He sat in the courtroom in a yellow sweater that made me think of the I Ching line “yellow is the color of the mean,” and also of the allegory of the canary in the coal mine: Diddy might be the first one alert to his own slow suffocation in a group where everyone could be next. During a short break, he made a heart with his hands, aimed at the gallery, and carried one of his self-help tomes like a talisman. He deployed every psychic defense except stoicism and overt remorse. After several mind-numbing hours of Jane, likely the least endearing witness in the trial, her overt mixture of subtle fawning and resentment making it seem as though she were still working out the breakup on the stand, attempting and failing to incite pathos at every turn, one riveting moment arrived. She described Combs getting high during a hotel night and writing a love letter to Cassie. There’s that bastardized word again. Love, that “dangerous necessity,” sold out to compensate for longing or ego woundings, or as cover for despair, nostalgia, trauma bonds, or pernicious lust. Nonetheless, this was the most human interlude of this particular day of the trial, an account of an aging abuser reflecting on or deferring to a past victim in the presence of a new one and trying to revise that dysfunctional communal history, his image, and his self-regard. The benefit of being mean and evil in the Delta blues style is that whenever you’re in a good or generous mood, it’s so appreciated, so refreshing, that it’s conflated with a heroic act, even if that act betrays you to your face. Jane’s eyes went flat as a bell with no tongue and the court adjourned. She wasn’t finished testifying, but the details had become excessive, people were growing hostile toward her and you could feel that; everyone needed a break.

I was one of the first in line to retrieve my electronics with the floppy cardboard ticket I’d been given on my way in and escape into the Chinatown sun. Diddy’s son King Combs, twenty-seven, was ahead of me and had already retrieved his devices. As he passed the line, which was still short at this point and made up of only those of us who refuse to loiter in lobbies at a time like this, he gave a long, hard, unabashed stare, assessing me specifically. I realized I was conspicuous, wearing all white. Another person in line noticed the encounter and giggled. King Combs was strutting like a cool kid in between classes in high school who might be handing out invitations to a party he’d be throwing that weekend. I was the new kid—maybe he wanted to know if I had a father at home, or saw my equanimity as approval of his dad. Or maybe all men assume every poet of industry is one line away from giving it all up to be a glorified groupie. This assumption has always helped me when I’ve played into it to get more of the story. This time, the Art Ensemble of Chicago album People in Sorrow flashed in my mind, accompanied by a pang of equal parts empathy and revulsion. The show would go on, King Combs would spend his cultural inheritance ensuring it, just as I would spend mine documenting, writing, lyricizing the intervals where logic and integrity fail us all. He would host the parties until his dad made it home. Young Diddy, looks just like his daddy.            

I practically ran outside and in the direction of Canal Street to find the 6 train that would take me to Fred’s apartment, where I could debrief the day in peace. I passed a coconut stand and bought one, which was cracked open for me by the vendor and furnished with a striped plastic straw, memorable because it felt absurd to go from the monasticism of the courthouse to being a pedestrian in the middle of commerce and chaos, bootleg designer bags and tropical fruit and the exhilarating stench of end-times gluttony. I contemplated the day’s indifference to this contrast, its effortless accommodation of excess, while accelerating to the pace of someone being chased. I had, for the duration of that walk of shame and shine-on, the double-mind of a lucky fugitive. Maybe none of it matters. Maybe we need our jesters more than we need justice. Maybe women are masochists, all of us. No—too much tenderness toward nihilism in that concession, too much of the old way of being a woman. Show trials are effective at shielding the powerful because they ensure disorientation or over-orientation to pathologies, until it’s tempting to throw up our hands and let disorder sneak out and conquer the next batch of sympathizers. A sense of futility overrides purpose when petty details like text messages are emphasized, displacing a larger, more malevolent agenda. And what is that? That rabid domination mistaken for love is turning black music into a safe house for psychopathy, and the songs themselves advertise that broken home as if it were a resort full of video vixens, and fanatic tourists flock toward it, and it’s a maximum security prison.

“I’m coming home, baby,” Diddy celebrated in the courtroom after the jury returned his lenient verdict. He was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and exonerated of all other charges. He’s still in prison, being held without bail until his sentencing, on October 3. There are rumors that Trump is “seriously considering” issuing him a pardon and was waiting to see if his second appeal for bail was denied or not. It was just denied. Witnesses and their lawyers wrote to the judge frantically the day the verdict arrived, expressing fear that he would retaliate if released before his sentencing, that his history of violence should not be overlooked in deciding whether to offer him bail, that he could be a flight risk. The conviction is so light compared to what it might have been that between time served and the fact that he’s already rumored to be the kind of inmate whose bed the others fight to make each morning, he really could be on his way home before long. The prosecutor, Maurene Comey, who also worked on the Epstein case, was terminated from her position on July 16, for “failing” in the two cases. Some people accused her of throwing the cases on purpose to protect the elites that Diddy and Epstein hosted like fancy butlers for their respective cultures; it’s hard to say what happened. Her practice will need a new home.

Home is a feeling, an equilibrium, and a way of being seen on your own terms. Sean Combs now plays a leading role in the center of an American crime drama where heroism and criminality are one and the same. He joins the ranks of Frank Lucas and his own father and surpasses them and other Harlem hometown legends, and he never even had to take the stand or appear on television as an inmate, no perp walk. This is the first phase of Combs’s redemption arc. I’m convinced he’ll spend it on the same antics we now understand in exhaustive detail, but with a messianic, faux-Zen twist; reminders that he still knows where the tapes are vaulted; and more unintelligible declarations of what he calls love. While being held, he’s joined some therapy groups for domestic abusers and is clearly trying to signal rapid rehabilitation. And who am I to mistrust the sudden gentleness of monsters? I’d looked into his son’s eyes and seen a soul, a tortured trickster child who both does and does not know better than to act like his father’s trial is a private club, a main attraction, the inverse of the parties that he’d been attending all his life, but with similar cultural impact. Everybody wanted to get in. He’s not wrong.

Home is also where if loving you is wrong, we don’t need to be right, where it’s righteous to defend the sins of the father. I’ve been home a long time and never quite there. Had a musician father in the home and never quite there. His absence bothered me, but never enough to send me careening into the arms of one of his understudies for longer than it took me to assess them as wannabe gangsters without the loot to show for it. What bothers me most is that what society hopes will protect women from malignant men is other, more reasonable men; it’s that habit of facile idealism that sustains our addiction to the lore of crime families. Home, and in this case, decency, cannot be impersonated. The Nas song, a true hip-hop standard, and in the tradition of half-radical black transfer-of-power anthems, does not speak of freeing any daughters. Some consolation. Perhaps we’re no longer this culture’s children. On the way from the courthouse, I couldn’t wait to get to the train, to the home with a father in it who was not my own.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, a dancer, an archivist, a filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry, including Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She is staff writer for Los Angeles Times’ Image and 4Columns. She is currently writing a biography of Abbey Lincoln for Yale University Press, a memoir on music, and a new collection of poems.