Sadly, the recently discovered video showing Diddy hitting his ex-girlfriend Cassie in 2016 and his subsequent apology demonstrates the violent nature of the disgraced rap mogul. But throughout Diddy’s lengthy and illustrious career, there have been numerous other violent incidents and accusations of such.
Although Puff’s fall from grace is primarily attributed to the numerous lawsuits that have been filed in the last six months, which allege that he was sexually and physically abused, it’s possible that indications of Puff’s overtly aggressive behavior date back to the late 1980s. Here are a few of the reported and verified violent incidents.
Diddy’s Alleged and Confirmed Violent Incidents
1987–1988: Claims of Abusing College Girlfriend: An interview with a former classmate of Sean “Diddy” Combs at Howard University in 1987–1988 is featured in a recent Rolling Stone investigative report. The woman who wishes to remain anonymous recalls a day when she and numerous other students supposedly saw Puff repeatedly belt his then-girlfriend. Another source corroborated the classmate’s account, the report said, but Diddy’s ex-girlfriend turned down an interview.
1994: Allegation of Having Tupac Shakur Shot: In November of 1994, record executive Jimmy “Henchman” Rosemond invited Tupac Shakur to a recording session. Following this invitation, Shakur was famously robbed and shot five times inside New York City’s Quad Studios. In the moments following the shooting, Tupac told Vibe that he was convinced Diddy, Henchman, and Pac’s old friend, The Notorious B.I.G., were either directly involved in orchestrating the attack or knew it was going to happen and chose not to alert Tupac.
Diddy played a major role in the deadly East Coast vs. West Coast beef that was ignited by the shooting and the accusations that followed. According to reports that surfaced in 2012 from The Hollywood Reporter and Village Voice, Jimmy Henchman’s purported admission during proffer sessions with the government in 2011 provided fresh evidence linking him to Tupac’s attack. Combs and Biggie Smalls, however, were never charged.
Diddy played a major role in the deadly East Coast vs. West Coast beef that was ignited by the shooting and the accusations that followed. According to reports that surfaced in 2012 from The Hollywood Reporter and Village Voice, Jimmy Henchman’s purported admission during proffer sessions with the government in 2011 provided fresh evidence linking him to Tupac’s attack.
Combs and Biggie Smalls, however, were never charged.
1995: Reports of Beating a Rapper with a Cell Phone: In a 2009 blog post, late hip-hop journalist and media personality Combat Jack related a story in which he said he saw Diddy savagely beating Brooklyn rapper Positive K. Jack claimed that during a violent altercation at Club Esso in New York, in 1995, Diddy allegedly beat Positive K with a brick-like cell phone before Puff’s bodyguards threw the bleeding rapper outside onto the sidewalk. The purported disagreement stemmed from Diddy’s unpaid production fee.
Attack on Steve Stoute (1998): A year after his close friend and new Bad Boy Records signee The Notorious B.I.G. passed away tragically, Sean “Diddy” Combs and two friends broke into record executive Steve Stoute’s New York City office and threatened to use violence.
Following Diddy’s outrage at seeing himself portrayed as Jesus Christ being crucified in the music video for Nas’ song “Hate Me Now,” Stoute was attacked with a phone, an office chair, and a champagne bottle. Combs had earlier asked for the scene depicting the crucifixion to be taken out of the film. Diddy was detained, found guilty, and ordered to attend an anger management class.
1999: Shooting at Club New York: In December 1999, Diddy got into a fight at Manhattan’s Club New York with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, during which he knocked a man’s drink out of his hand. The situation then got out of hand when Shyne, a former Bad Boy rapper, pulled out a pistol and fired two shots inside the club, injuring three people.
Diddy was caught by police after he ran from the scene and was charged with unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon. He was ultimately found not guilty of the charges, but Shyne—who now says he was Diddy’s go-to guy—was given a 10-year prison term for assault and possession of a firearm. As recently as this year, Natania Reuben—a woman who was shot in the face during the altercation—maintains that Combs fired the shot, despite Diddy’s acquittal.
2000: Alleged Attack on Shakir Stewart: Diddy is said to have broken a chair over the head of late record executive Shakir Stewart on the eve of Epic Records Chairman and CEO L.A. Reid’s wedding in Italy in 2000. In a 2023 interview with The Art of Dialogue, Mark Curry, a former artist for Bad Boy Records, stated that Combs physically assaulted Stewart for developing a romantic relationship with Kim Porter, the mother of Diddy’s three children.
Shakir was threatened by Diddy during the chair incident, according to Stewart’s mother, who recently told Rolling Stone that Diddy “left him bleeding on a hotel floor in Italy.”
2003: Accused of Using a Baseball Bat to Threaten Former Business Partner: Kirk Burrowes, the co-founder and former president of Bad Boy Records, sued Diddy in 2003, claiming that Puff had threatened him with a baseball bat in order to get him to give up his ownership of the label. According to reports, the incident happened in the late 1990s, right before Burrowes was let go from Bad Boy. Burrowes filed a second lawsuit against Diddy in 2006 for the same reason, but it was unsuccessful after the first one was dropped for being over the statute of limitations.
2011: Keefe D Says Diddy Hired Him to Kill Tupac Shakur: Due to the fact that Diddy and Shakur were on different sides of the East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry, many in the hip-hop community believed Diddy was somehow involved from the time Shakur was shot in September 1996 and passed away a week later. But Diddy was first formally linked to the murder in 2011 following a confession from Duane “Keefe D” Davis, a member of the Los Angeles gang. Keffe D claimed in a recording of the confession that LA Weekly was able to obtain that Diddy had offered him $1 million to kill Suge Knight, the founder of Death Row Records, and Tupac.
Even though Sean Combs has never been detained or accused of being involved in Tupac’s murder, Keefe D has continued to accuse Puff in a number of interviews over the years.
After being taken into custody in September 2023, Keefe D was accused of obtaining the gun that his late nephew Orlando Anderson had allegedly used to kill Shakur. Davis, who is scheduled to go on trial in November of this year, is also said to have been present during the murder.
2011: Fight With Kenny Burns About Vodka Brands: Diddy got into a fight with well-known radio and television personality Kenny Burns at Compound nightclub during the post-BET Hip Hop Awards afterparty in Atlanta. Diddy can be heard criticizing Burns for not drinking Puff’s Ciroc brand in the incident’s video, even though Burns was at the time endorsing Grey Goose vodka. Diddy taunts and threatens to smack Burns while he’s on stage before hurling something in his direction. At the party, T.I., who was celebrating his recent release from prison, got on stage and told Diddy to “let them n***as drink what the f**k they want” in an attempt to defuse the situation.
2012: Claims of Detonating Kid Cudi’s Vehicle: In November 2023, Cassie filed a lawsuit alleging physical and sexual abuse from Diddy. In that lawsuit, the singer claimed Diddy was the cause of the 2012 car explosion. Following a violent altercation with Puff, Cassie clarified in the lawsuit that she had stayed at Kid Cudi’s house. Diddy then allegedly threatened to blow up the rap artist’s car. According to a Kid Cudi representative who spoke with The New York Times, Cudi’s car exploded in his driveway not long after.
2013: Alleged Fight With J. Cole: According to hip-hop lore, Diddy and J. Cole got into a physical altercation in 2013 at an MTV Video Music Awards afterparty. On his 2021 track “Let Go My Hand,” which actually features Diddy on the outro, Cole acknowledged the “scrap with Puff Daddy,” despite the fact that fistfights are noticeably out of character for him and both parties denied the rumors immediately afterward.
Diddy and J. Cole jokedly posed in an Instagram photo together, each with their fists raised in a fighting stance, one month after the song’s release. Even though the image appears to have been taken in jest, it may serve as more proof that the 2013 fight actually took place.
2014: Punching Drake Allegations: According to reports, in December of 2014, Diddy punched Drake outside of Miami’s LIV nightclub during a party hosted by DJ Khaled. The altercation allegedly started as a result of a heated argument over the rights to Drake’s 2013 song “0 to 100.” In an interview with The Breakfast Club shortly after, Combs refuted the incident, saying, “I didn’t do nothing to Drake,” in spite of credible reports from Page Six and the Miami New Times that included eyewitness accounts. Drake is my friend.”
2015: Allegation of Dangling a Woman Over a Balcony: Songwriter Tiffany Red wrote an open letter to Diddy in December 2023, which Rolling Stone published. In it, she supports a number of the allegations made in Cassie’s abuse lawsuit, which is her close friend’s lawsuit. In one particularly graphic accusation, Red says that in 2015, Diddy picked up another friend of Cassie’s and dangled her over a balcony on the 17th floor of a hotel. Red claims that after one of the mogul’s “freak off” parties, Diddy and the singer returned to the hotel, which is when the incident allegedly occurred during Cassie’s birthday celebration that year.
2015: Attack on UCLA Football Coach: In June 2015, the Harlem rapper-producer Diddy assaulted Assistant Coach Sal Alosi with a kettlebell while Justin Combs, his son, was playing football for the University of California, Los Angeles.
Puff confronted Alosi in his office, where the altercation broke out, after he saw the coach yelling at Justin on the practice field. Later that day, Diddy was taken into custody and charged with assault. In September of that same year, he was exonerated of all criminal charges, though.
2019: Accused of Beating Model Gina Huynh: Fashion model Gina Huynh accused Diddy of beating her after they had an intermittent romantic relationship that lasted for five years, starting in 2014. In a 2019 interview with Tasha K, Huynh related one particularly violent episode in which she claimed Combs punched her in the back of the head, grabbed her by the hair, and threw her to the ground while “stomping” on her stomach. Following the interview with Tasha K, which received little attention, Gina Huynh has said nothing more about her relationship with Diddy. Most recently, she declined a comment to Rolling Stone on the matter.
Diddy’s violent moments surface amid a plethora of lawsuits and accusations
Diddy has been the target of seven lawsuits over the last six months, alleging a long list of violent crimes, including sexual assault.
Cassie’s November 2023 lawsuit was settled out of court in less than a day, but it opened the door for multiple lawsuits with similar allegations from producers Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones and an unidentified woman who claimed to have been raped as a teenager. April Lampros, a woman who says she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Diddy several times while attending New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in the mid-1990s, is suing Sean Combs in his most recent lawsuit.
Without a doubt, Diddy’s decades of experience and business savvy contributed to the globalization of hip-hop culture. But the shocking hotel video that shows he attacked Cassie and his present legal problems throw new light on the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment’s troubled past with violence.
