Diddy Has Always Been Like This

The audacity of his viciousness is wild

I would not have asked if I’d had any idea of who Diddy really was. Years ago, when I didn’t know about the Diddy parties and the sexual deviance, back when we were cool enough that I could call and ask him for a favor, I called and asked him for a favor. Please hire someone in my family as an intern. A 20something male I loved immensely. He did. For two months I got calls about how exciting it was to intern with Diddy and how they were flying around and doing big tings. And then, after three months of interning, the gig abruptly ended. I asked why. I was not told. I asked again. Silence. Three years later I finally got an answer: Diddy had told him either spend the night with me or the internship is over. He refused. That’s when I learned who Diddy really was.

But I realized that you could see the signs of the man Diddy has become years before his once-platinum name had turned to mud. Money and status can change many things but they don’t change who you are at your core. I say that to say, back when he was called Puff, back when he was first becoming famous, this is the group of facts that we talked about.

(1) He used to sneak onto the Amtrak to ride from Howard University in DC to Uptown Records in Manhtatan to do his internship. That told us he was irrepressible, resourceful, and willing to steal to get what he wanted.

(2) After he became a celebrated A&R man at Uptown Records, he is, uh, widely rumored to have spat on co-workers. That told us he was emotionally turbulent, he could fly into a rage, and he had the sense that he was more important than other people.

(3) He got his nickname Puff as a child from having a nasty temper—ie, he would huff and puff.

(4) He was the promoter behind a celebrity basketball game at CCNY where too many tickets were sold—5,000 in a building that housed less than half of that—and too little security was hired. When a stampede broke out, nine people lost their lives, many of them teenagers. What may led to that was a lack of concern for people of the sort we see in the suits and in the video of him brutalizing and humiliating Cassie. He treated her like she was an animal. Or a person he owned. The audacity to be so unrepentantly vicious is wild.

(5) After he became an alpha dog at Uptown, the man behind several superstars, he got fired when CEO Andre Harrell, his mentor, a man who loved him, told him “There can only be one lion in the jungle.” Apparently, Puff’s ego was too much for Harrell even though his work was generating the company more money than anyone else by far. His ego was so much that his boss and mentor told him to get out. And his ego has only grown since then.

Diddy is a man who has lived like a king for decades. His ego, his sense of entitlement, his propensity for violence, his wild sexual appetite, his ability to treat people like they’re beneath him—it’s all been there since his early days. In lawsuits from Cassie and many, many others he has come across as a violent, manipulative, controlling monster. He was a young man with blood on his hands and a problematically large ego. He’s now an older man drowning in horrifying lawsuits, looking at a long time in prison and a cosmically humbling blow.