Veteran author and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom referred to as her mom after leaving probably the most stage-managed interview she’d ever carried out – with none aside from Sean Combs, previously referred to as Puff Daddy, previously referred to as Diddy, then making an attempt to be referred to as Love.
“I bear in mind saying to my mother that he seemed like a toddler,” Cottom tells The Impartial of the rapper she was profiling for Self-importance Truthful’s September 2021 situation.
Combs was in the course of the ‘Love’ rebranding – prompting an preliminary eye roll from Cottom, she writes within the piece – and invited her into his sprawling Malibu property for a sitdown, throughout which he repeatedly referred to himself within the third particular person as he boasted about his personal handsomeness, she says.
“He stored speaking about, ‘I’m a beautiful younger man,’” Cottom says of Combs, who was then 51 and a number of other years older than the author herself. “The way in which he would describe himself, to begin with, was ‘younger’ which I believed was weird. It was telling that he has created a personality model of himself that’s highly effective and attractive and bodily engaging when actually, what he’s, is wealthy.
“Absent the cash and the star energy, I’m unsure we might take a look at him and assume these issues, however that’s the form of story a really scared, self-conscious little boy would write about himself, proper?” she says. “The women love me. I’m so highly effective. I’m so dope. I’m a playboy. That seemed like a toddler.”
The interview setup negotiations had been fraught and “aggressive,” Cottom says, with Combs’ supervisor demanding to know in regards to the author and the story framing whereas offering nearly nobody else from the mogul’s life to be interviewed for the profile. Combs was equally imprecise about why he was selecting that individual second to advertise his “Love” rebranding, which he’d first posited jokingly in 2017 earlier than submitting a petition two years later to vary his center identify.
In Might 2021, he pushed the identify become overdrive with an Instagram submit displaying off a photograph of his driver’s license – “Sean Love Combs” written below his image – and the caption: “Look what I simply acquired within the mail in the present day. IT’S OFFICIAL!!! WELCOME TO THE LOVE ERA.”
That Instagram submit, together with nearly all others from Diddy’s profile on the platform, has vanished within the wake of an avalanche of accusations towards him in lower than a 12 months. He’d already settled a 2017 sexual harassment go well with by a former worker, famous in Cottom’s piece together with a reminder that then rapper’s rep referred to as that settled matter “a frivolous lawsuit by a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for trigger.”
Three new lawsuits have been then filed in November 2023, nonetheless, below a New York regulation providing grownup survivors a one-year window to file fits whatever the statute of limitations. These lawsuits alleged Combs had drugged and raped three separate victims, which some allegations relationship again many years; he continued to categorically deny all claims.
Cottom was welcomed into Combs’ sprawling mansion in the summertime of 2021, greater than two years earlier than these fits have been filed. However the laws had handed within the New York Senate in June 2021, paving the way in which for the governor to signal it into regulation the next 12 months; it took impact in November 2022, and the three Combs fits have been filed proper earlier than the deadline expired.
As Cottom was organising the 2021 profile interview with Combs’ folks, she notes that they “have been so aggressive; I by no means acquired it within the second.
“The one factor that is smart to me, looking back …I’m questioning if simply realizing perhaps the sheer quantity of potential [in] claimants, that he was simply making an attempt to get out forward of the prolonged time to file a civil case,” she says.
Regardless of the causes, the negotiations finally succeeded, and she or he discovered herself strolling together with her grad scholar assistant into Diddy’s oceanfront house for a really over-the-top encounter. Combs’ workers stated he was taking vital last-minute enterprise calls, so she noticed the environment as he stored her ready.
“The primary flooring was arrange very intentionally,” she tells The Impartial, describing a Ciroc bottle show in his bar and a wall {of professional} household images. “However there was a ton of exercise I might hear, folks, on the second flooring … it seemed like there needed to have been about perhaps a dozen folks upstairs.”
When Diddy did deign to descend from upstairs, she says, he orchestrated “one of the vital deliberate acts of seduction I’ve ever been concerned with.”
She describes his demeanor as “the way in which a person flirts together with your good friend’s mom … making an attempt to allure her, however not in a critical, sexual method.”
“My sense was he by no means actually engaged with a lady like me, somebody who didn’t really want something from him,” she says. “And he was slightly off his recreation … so he stored making an attempt totally different approaches.”
He confirmed off the view, his journal, footage with Biggie, something he might do to impress her, she says. His workers was “very, very deferential.”
“I feel I requested him at one level about how he runs a good ship, and he was like, ‘No … they know the form of vibe I have to work with, and everyone’s job is to keep up that vibe.’”
Cottom herself felt like “I had walked into the Truman Present,” she tells The Impartial.
“I do bear in mind considering, every part that isn’t being stated right here is as vital as what he’s saying – so who’s right here, the place they’re standing, who’s silent, the individuals who stored getting into and exiting the room and by some means knew precisely what they have been purported to do … all of that, to me, was as a lot part of the story, and it was extraordinarily distinctive.
“And I wish to assume I’ve talked to some unusual characters in my time, however this was within the prime tier of strangeness.”
Workers, she says, “didn’t need to inform me their names – so it was that stage of simply excessive form of paranoia.”
The author “tried very onerous to be deliberate in my phrase alternative for describing the setting, for instance, as a result of I did need to attempt to seize … how clear it was to me, within the second, that it was very a lot a efficiency.”
Combs tried to set her up in an outside “attractive” scenario overlooking his gorgeous view, calling for workers particularly to carry her a “pashmina” – “so deliberate; he says it as a result of he needs that written down,” she tells The Impartial – whereas gushing about how he loves caring for ladies and having fun with their firm.
She writes within the piece how she was stunned that Combs introduced up MeToo earlier than Black Lives Matter. Trying again, she says, that now appears strategic – in addition to hole.
Combs is quoted within the VF profile lauding the motion and the way, “after they stated within the #MeToo, when it was over, it was over … The #MeToo motion, the reality, is that it impressed me. It confirmed me that you could get most change.”
Cottom pushed him past that, she says, asking about why the motion affected him and what he thought as a lady dad – however she didn’t get very far.
“He couldn’t even carry out it nicely … It was one other a kind of moments the place it was clear that it was out of context, the quotes,” she says. “He wished it to make the piece, however he didn’t have something to make it important. And he did get very uncomfortable once I requested follow-up questions.”
Now that Combs is struggling his personal #MeToo second – not solely sexual assault lawsuits however a litany of felony expenses and damning video footage of him beating one sufferer – Cottom has a much more sinister interpretation of his “Love” rebranding.
“I feel that’s notably egregious,” she says. “After every part got here out, selecting ‘Love’ felt like a psychopath transfer. It wasn’t sufficient to attempt to rebrand himself and do all of the fame administration, however that appeared like a really form of specific thumb within the eye to his victims. That, to me, pushed it into being, … sick.”
She was horrified by the 2016 footage obtained and revealed by CNN in Might depicting Combs brutally beating then-girlfriend Cassie in a lodge – its public launch finally eliciting an apology from the rapper.
Earlier than that, nonetheless, Cassie’s lawsuit – filed below her authorized identify, Casandra Ventura – prompted Cottom to go “ again by my notes, it by these eyes.
“What was most shocking to me is that my notes match the particular person she described,” Cottom says, noting “every part from the intense quantity of management to how onerous he tried to seduce me” within the interview.
She was additionally reminded of how Diddy’s workforce supplied up no sources or associates who might spherical out the profile “on the file … about his new period or no matter.”
“I do not forget that being very unusual,” she stated, including: “I feel it’s as a result of he had grow to be remoted.”
“I want I had correctly pulled at that piece, like, why aren’t folks prepared to speak about him? Why doesn’t he have any associates? Why aren’t his enterprise associates prepared to speak to us?
“After which I additionally simply felt … slightly soiled,” she says. “I at all times knew it was a part of this relaunching of himself, and I hated to assume that I had been complicit in his PR marketing campaign.”
She does, nonetheless, really feel that the rebranding “eras” are certainly over for Diddy.
“I feel what issues now’s he has in all probability been efficiently prosecuted within the courtroom of public opinion and, not like a Harvey Weinstein, he doesn’t get to come back again. I don’t assume there’s a redemption story for Diddy.
“He wasn’t highly effective sufficient,” says Cottom, who can also be a sociologist. “He was fashionable, however that’s not the identical factor as highly effective. So I’m fairly positive that is the top … I feel any person who appeared the way in which he appeared, when he hit Cassie in that video after which shrugs it off, the way in which he did — the second the place he snaps again into character – [was] so chilling to me.
“I feel that particular person is able to having completed nearly something.”
When requested this week whether or not Combs had any remark in regards to the Self-importance Truthful profile, his quotes inside it or the timing of the duvet story and ‘Love’ identify change, his PR workforce supplied the next response: “We do not know what you’re asking about.”