Just when we thought the allegations against Diddy couldn’t be any more heinous than the claims brought forward in the past by women like Cassie in her 2023 lawsuit, something new comes up. To Lainey’s point made yesterday in What Else?, I, too, have no interest, nor the stomach, to run through the minute details of Diddy’s “freak offs”, the baby oil discovery, and all of his other nastiness. But when it comes to this most recent arrest and indictment, there are some points that are necessary in the discussion of the sheer magnitude of his enterprise of carefully orchestrated alleged sex abuse and sex trafficking. Especially when you consider how it all pertains to the war that has been waged on the most important people in this whole story, which are his victims – the ones we know of and the ones we don’t. 

 

But there are also the whistleblowers. The ones who, in the face of so many powerful men and women who chose to remain silent about the horrors they either witnessed or saw the aftermath of, were brave enough to stand up and say something. Even if it meant they would pay for it, and even if it meant they would lose it all. 

The most recent flurry of activity that ultimately resulted in Diddy’s arrest and indictment this week came in the wake of a lawsuit filed on September 10 by former Danity Kane member Dawn Richard. In her lawsuit, she claimed not only that Diddy sexually and verbally abused her for nearly a decade, but that during her time in his company, she witnessed him abuse several women, including Cassie. Dawn also alleged that Diddy-Dirty Money bandmate Kalenna Harper bore witness to the abuse. Dawn claims she’s owed millions in unpaid salary, royalties and tour wages.

It was revealed that following Dawn’s lawsuit, Diddy reached out to Kalenna a whopping 54 times the day before she made a statement on social media. In her statement, she “acknowledged” Dawn’s claims, but put visible and deliberate distance between their experiences. The intention behind these phone calls is obvious – he was trying to do damage control. But you can’t help but wonder about his tactics. Did he intimidate her? Bribe her? Beg her? Blackmail her? Whatever his weapon of choice may have been, you have to wonder if it led to the statement she made the following day.

 

The reason I bring this up is because it’s a very clear example of how Diddy triangulates his victims. It puts on clear display the power he still has, even as his house of cards comes crashing down. The mere fact that he is being accused of owing Dawn over $3 million despite his (albeit dwindling) empire is just beyond comprehension, but also an indication of the financial abuse he inflicted over women whose dreams he exploited. 

 

When you think of a show like Making the Band, this was such fertile ground for finding his victims. He was surrounded by women and men, vying for his attention, support, and mentorship, and to be handpicked by him. He wielded all the power in his relationships with the people on these shows who were aspiring to be celebrities, aspiring to be like him. And that’s just one of many power dynamics at play in all of this. But it’s a power dynamic that didn’t function as it usually did for Diddy in his relationship with cast member Aubrey O’Day. 

One thing I have constantly found myself at odds with is how to feel about all the people who stayed silent. Trauma and abuse, even the mere witnessing of it, can do a number on anyone, and I’m in no position to judge how it may impact one’s ability to speak up or not, particularly when your abuser is one of the most powerful men in the music industry. There are victims who remained silent out of fear of reprisal, and victims who are likely still coming to terms with the idea that they were, in fact, victims. So in a lot of ways, the more I understand his power, the more I understand the silence. 

Aubrey has her own way of explaining this, which she did on a red carpet earlier this year in June, saying people’s silence didn’t come as a shock to her. 

"I really still see how much of the hold, what being a part of what he created for the people in moments and times that we all experienced him, I still see how deeply it lives in so many of us."

 

To her point, I’m mindful that so much of that silence stemmed from people who were not his victims, but rather his co-conspirators. The ones that benefited from experiences they were afforded because of Diddy. Their silence was driven by their own fear of what would be exposed about them. And this is actually where a great deal of Diddy’s power came – in having dirt on others, in his strategic acquisition of uncashed “you owe me” cheques which he is now coming to collect as he finds himself spiraling deeper and deeper into the hell he manufactured. 

So between the victims and the co-conspirators, these are two very different forms of self-preservation we’re dealing with here. And the thought of the more sinister kind of self-preservation instills in me a lot of fear to imagine the full extent of what really went down, some of which was allegedly captured on footage seized from Diddy’s property.

The other thing that makes me unsettled in how to feel about the silence is the noise made by whistleblowers like Aubrey, who, despite being very aware that they could lose everything, spoke up. Allegations against Diddy date back to the 90s. And there have been several people who sounded the alarm about him since then. Usher spoke about his experiences living with Diddy as a teen in this interview with Howard Stern back in 2016.

 

Gina Huynh, who dated Diddy also shared her experience with him, saying he was physically abusive and forced her to terminate two pregnancies. People like Wendy Williams, who suggested Diddy orchestrated her being fired from Hot 97 after she made disparaging remarks about him on-air and continued to discuss his series of legal battles on The Wendy Williams Show. And people like Aubrey, who has been one of the loudest and most consistent voices over the last 20 years, alleging many of the things that have been corroborated in the accounts told by others and in lawsuits.

In a 2022 episode of Call Her Daddy, Aubrey claimed that she was axed from Danity Kane over her refusal to comply with Diddy’s “non-music” demands. Since then, she’s been advocating for victims, following Diddy’s moves closely and lending her voice to media coverage in the wake of new developments.

Earlier this year, in June, Aubrey said she didn’t feel vindicated ‘at all’ by the claims surfacing about Diddy. 

"There's no vindication when you're a victim of someone. ... Anyone being exposed, or any truths being told, don't change the reality of what you experienced. It's a forever thing that you have to wake up every day and choose to evolve past. It doesn't go away.”

 

But she seems to have changed her tune a bit. Following his arrest, she shared this tweet:

In recent days, the salaciousness of it all has been circulating on social media, by celebrities and non-celebrities alike. Rapper 50 Cent, who has been trolling Diddy for years over the allegations against him, posted this photo of him with Drew Barrymore, essentially having a laugh about not being in Diddy’s situation. It got over 11 million likes, 25,000 reshares and nearly 5,000 comments.

All of the attention on a post like that makes me wonder why, rather than laughing about something so serious as sexual abuse at the hands of an incredibly powerful celebrity, we’re not offering more support and visibility to the victims and whistleblowers who were essentially blacklisted for not complying with Diddy’s demands. According to Aubrey, that means changing the function of the music industry, work she says she’s already got a head start on:

"I'm just so motivated and dedicated to create change in this industry. I work so hard all day long on some projects that are coming out in the future and I'm just truly in an advocating stage of my life where I really do want to see the system -- the music industry in particular -- make a lot of advances before I go."

Rather than concern ourselves with how to extract a laugh from the unimaginable trauma so many men and women endured at the hands of this monster, the focus should be on how we can help with the collective healing of the people who had the course of their lives fundamentally changed merely by interacting with this man and being drawn in by his sickening, strategic exertion of power, deception and abuse.