Aubrey O'Day Reacts to Sean "Diddy" Combs’ Kids Supporting Him
Aubrey O'Day has some thoughts on Sean "Diddy" Combs' kids attending his sex trafficking trial.
The 41-year-old, a former member of his past girl group Danity Kane, spoke out after his children—which include Quincy, 33, Justin, 31, Christian, 27, Chance, 18 and twins D’Lila and Jessie, also 18—supported him in the courtroom during the first days of testimony, during which witnesses such as his ex Cassie Ventura shared details about his alleged sexual abuse.
"The fact that the kids are being are marching up to that court," O'Day said on the May 16 episode of former GMA3 cohosts Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes' podcast Amy & T.J. during a trip to New York, where the trial is taking place. "I don't know any father that would want their children to sit through [that kind of] testimony."
The reality star said she thought Combs—who has denied any wrongdoing in the case—was "being selfish" by having the kids in court. "In my opinion," she continued, "it feels like 'Daddy needs you in court because Daddy needs all the optics to look in his favor.'"
Not all of Combs' kids stayed for all the proceedings. Chance and the twins left the courtroom twice May 12, while male escort Daniel Phillip shared graphic details about an alleged paid sexual encounter between himself and Ventura, which he said Combs watched while masturbating, multiple outlets reported.
During the trial, prosecutors also played a 2016 surveillance video that depicts Combs assaulting Ventura in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel. According to People, Combs’ daughters and mother, Janice Combs, remained in the courtroom but looked straight ahead, while Combs’ sons watched the footage.
As witnesses continue testifying next week, O'Day will not be one of them. She shut down rumors about testifying against Combs herself during her visit to the city, but did note in her podcast interview that she had "a meeting with Homeland Security."
Combs, who has been held in jail since his arrest in September, has pleaded not guilty to five felony counts of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. He faces a minimum 15 years in prison and life behind bars if convicted of all counts.
And he has had his kids' public support since before his trial began.
"Many have judged both him and us based on accusations, conspiracy theories, and false narratives that have spiraled into absurdity on social media," read a statement shared on Quincy's Instagram in October. "We stand united, supporting you every step of the way. We hold onto the truth, knowing it will prevail, and nothing will break the strength of our family. WE MISS YOU & LOVE YOU DAD."
Read on for more about Combs' trial.
Danity Kane alum Dawn Richard testified May 16 that she witnessed Sean "Diddy" Combs hit then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura with a skillet full of eggs in 2009.
“He came downstairs angry and was saying, where the f--k was his eggs and he was telling Cassie she never gets anything right and where the f--k was his food,” Richard said in court, per the Washington Post. “And he came over to the skillet with the eggs in it and tried to hit her over the head and she fell to the ground.”
Ventura "went into the fetal position," Richard continued, "literally trying to hide her head."
There were no drugs mixed into the baby oil that Combs liked to use during “freak offs,” Ventura testified May 15.
A lawsuit filed against Combs in October 2024 alleged he laced the oil with GHB, or Rohypnol, which is often referred to as a date rape drug.
Under defense cross-examination May 15, Ventura testified that Combs would get jealous and have an “explosive” reaction when she took drugs with other friends and not with him.
She said that Combs once overdosed on painkillers, and when asked by defense attorney Anna Estevao if her ex’s mood swings were connected to pills, Ventura said that “was a part.”
Asked earlier in the day if she thought Combs was a drug addict, she said, “I would say he was an addict.”
And her answer was “yes” when asked if Combs became angry or volatile when he was going through withdrawal.
“I’m not a doctor,” Ventura said, but “coming off of certain pills he would be pretty irritated.”
While Ventura was in the witness box May 15, Judge Arun Subramanian called a recess while Combs' defense began showing explicit emails and text messages during cross-examination.
When defense counsel Estevao presented Ventura with sexually explicit messages between the former couple from 2009 to argue that their relationship was consensual, the prosecution called an objection, which the judge sustained.
Following the objection, Ventura was seen whispering to the judge, with the official abruptly calling for a 10-minute break.
A heated debate between prosecution and defense erupted before the jury entered the courtroom when lead defense attorney Marc Agniflio argued that more texts should be shown in the court. The judge said some messages violated federal evidence rules.
However, a number of them were admitted into evidence, in which Combs and Ventura spoke in graphic detail about their sex lives.
Ventura testified May 15 that while “it’s impossible to know” how many “freak offs,” she took part in with Combs, she said it was “hundreds.”
She alleged that her ex had filmed the sexual performances to use as blackmail against her. She said she told her that he was “going to release them" and put her "career in jeopardy."
"He would mention them when he was upset about something. It was just a pretty common thing," Ventura said. "I feared for my career. I feared for my family. Just embarrassing, all of it. It's horrible and disgusting. No one should do that to anyone."
Ventura testified May 14 that she accepted a $20 million settlement from ex-boyfriend Combs after filing a lawsuit against him in November 2023 alleging he sexually assaulted and physically abused her over the course of their relationship.
Ventura testified that, after having dinner out at a Malibu restaurant with Combs in 2018, during which he was "really nice," he took her back to her apartment and sexually assaulted her. She said that she was already in a relationship at the time with Alex Fine, whom she married in 2019.
“I went inside, he came in and raped me on the living room floor,” she told the court. “I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast. His eyes were black, he wasn’t himself, it was like somebody taking something from you.”
Combs’ attorneys have maintained that he did not engage in nonconsensual sex and that those who have accused him of sex crimes consented to whatever sexual activity they participated in.
Ventura testified that she had consensual sex with Combs on one other occasion after the assault. Asked why she chose to have sex with Combs again, she said, “You don’t just turn feelings off that way. I still had a good vision of who he was as a person.”
Ventura broke up with Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, toward the end of 2011 because, she testified, Combs threatened “Scott’s car would be blown up.”
“Too much danger, too much uncertainty of what could happen if we continued to see each other,” Ventura told the court. “Sean said he was going to hurt the both of us.”
“Freak offs” left Ventura with urinary tract infections, mouth sores and stomach issues, she testified May 14.
“When we were having frequent ‘freak offs’—they were back to back—and sometimes I would do a ‘freak off’ with the infection,” Ventura told the court during her second day of testimony. “I tried to flush it out with water. I got to the point where [the antibiotic] CIPRO didn’t work anymore. It was a mess.”
She continued, “It was really painful for a long time. I can’t believe I actually dealt with that.”
Among the text messages between Ventura and Combs shown in court, she relayed in one that she had sores on her tongue. He wrote, “I’m sorry.”
Ventura, taking the stand for the second day as a witness, recounted the 2016 hotel attack that was caught on surveillance footage and shared by CNN in May 2024.
She testified that Combs threw a vase at her after attempting to leave the Intercontinental Hotel before physically assaulting her.
“I just remember it coming towards me,” Ventura said of the vase while on the stand May 14. “It hit the wall. I didn’t get hit. He was yelling at me. He threw it at me, I don't remember exactly his words. I'm sure he was calling me something other than my name.”
However, she said that Combs told her “that I wasn’t going to leave him, that I couldn’t.”
Shortly after the hotel attack, Ventura said she had to attend the premiere of her film The Perfect Match with bruises on her face and body alongside Combs. Along with having to apply heavy makeup to cover up her black eye and fat lip, she added, “I had several bruises on my legs, so I changed my outfit.”
The singer testified May 13 that Combs attacked her in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in March 2016 because he was mad she walked out of a “freak off.” (Hotel surveillance footage of the incident was published by CNN in 2024. The defense unsuccessfully tried to have the video excluded from evidence.)
“I chose to leave,” Ventura told the court. “I got out and Sean followed me into the hallway, and grabbed me, shoved me to the ground, kicked me and dragged me back to the room and took my stuff.”
She hadn’t wanted to participate, but she had a movie premiere a couple of days later and wanted to placate Combs, she said. “If I pleased him with a freak off,” Ventura said, “then my premiere would run smoothly.”
He gave her a black eye, she continued, and “at this point all I could think about was getting out of there safely. I had my premiere and I didn’t want to mess it up.” Once he pushed her to the ground in the hallway, Ventura said, she stayed down because “she didn’t want him to do any more damage than he had already done.”
Ventura testified that she drank alcohol and took ecstasy when she first had sex with an escort in front of Combs. And to make it through “freak offs,” she said, she would take "marijuana, ketamine, mushrooms, whatever was the drug of choice at that point.”
“I couldn’t imagine myself doing any of that without having some sort of buffer,” she said.
Sometimes she would “actually vomit” during a "freak off," Ventura continued, and Combs “would encourage me to get up and continue on with it.”
She wanted Combs to know that the "freak offs" made her feel “horrible” and “worthless,” Ventura said, but he was “pretty dismissive” of her concerns.
After a “freak off,” there would be baby oil all over the hotel room, Ventura testified, and if Combs had instructed someone to urinate on her, there might be urine on the sheets. And, if she was menstruating at the time, Ventura said, there could be blood on the sheets and furniture as well.
Being urinated on made her feel “humiliated,” Ventura said. “It was disgusting, it was too much. I choked, I didn’t want to be doing that, I was in a position I couldn’t easily get out of.”
“It was a turn-on for him, so it happened,” Ventura said. Asked by prosecutor Emily A. Johnson why she didn’t refuse Combs' directions in these cases, she replied, “I thought that it was obvious that I didn’t want to do it.”
Ventura testified May 13 that Combs directed her and other “freak off” participants to cover themselves in baby oil.
“Sean wanted it heated and he wanted it to be glistening,” she said in court, “so we applied every five minutes.”
During one such “freak off” at the Montage Beverly Hills, Ventura said, Combs asked her to get into an inflatable “pool filled with baby oil,” while she was wearing clothes.
She didn’t want to, but if it was something Combs “wanted to happen, that’s what was going to happen,” she continued. “We used 10 bottles of baby oil, regular size.”
Ventura told prosecutors May 13 that during the first year of her decade-long relationship with Combs, he “proposed” the introduction of voyeurism into their sexual relationship. It first began with her “hiring an escort and setting up” so that she could “perform” for Combs, who would watch her with another person.
Eventually, she said, orchestrating sex performances Combs called "freak offs," which could last anywhere from 36 hours to four days, “became a job” for her.
“I had the contacts to set it up in the hotel room and all of that,” she recalled, “at the beginning Sean set it up.”
Ventura said that her “stomach churned” when he first proposed the experience.
“I didn’t have a concept of how that would be a turn on, but I accepted the responsibility,” she said. “I was confused, nervous, but also loved him very much and wanted to make him happy. It wasn't something that I wanted to be doing, especially as regularly as it became, but again, i was in love and wanted to make him happy.”
She admitted, “At some point, I felt I didn't have much of a choice.”
Ventura, who dated Combs on and off from 2007 to 2018, said that he was “frequently” violent towards her during their relationship.
"Yes, they were violent arguments, usually resulted in physical abuse and dragging, different things," she testified to jurors. "He would mash my head, knock me over, drag me, kick me."
She said that her injuries were often visible, adding, “I would get knots on my forehead, black eyes, red eyes, bruises all over my body.”
With Ventura ready to take the stand after male escort Daniel Phillip May 13, Combs’ defense requested that she be seated in the witness box before the jury enters, since she is eight months pregnant.
“Because I think there is a prejudicial quality,” defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told the judge. "Pregnancy is beautiful and wonderful. It is also a source of potential sympathy."
Ventura was ultimately brought in after the jury was seated, indicating that his defense team lost the motion.
When Ventura didn’t join Combs right when he called for her on one occasion, Phillip testified May 12 that Combs threw a liquor bottle in her direction, then grabbed her by her hair and dragged her into the bedroom. “She was screaming,” Phillip said, and, from the next room, ”what I heard sounded like him slapping her.” Phillip said he heard Combs say, “’I tell you to come here, you come here now, not later.’”
Phillip said he was “terrified” and did not intervene.
He further testified that he overheard what sounded like Combs assaulting Ventura on a separate occasion at the Essex House hotel in New York. “I heard her yelling, 'I’m sorry, I’m sorry,' someone was being slapped around and slammed around the room," Phillip said. "And I looked around the corner and I saw Mr. Combs walk out of the hotel altogether without clothes, he might have had a towel on.”
Ventura came out of the room and jumped into Phillip’s lap, he testified. “She basically tried to convince me that 'it's OK' and 'I’ll be OK,’” Phillip continued. “And I said, 'It is not OK and you need to get help.'”
“I tried to explain to her that she was in real danger if she stayed with him,” Phillip said.
Asked by prosecutor Maureen Comey why he didn’t call the police, Phillip testified that he thought of Combs as “someone with unlimited power, and chances are, even if I did go to the police, that I might still end up losing my life.”
Daniel Phillip, who said he was running a male stripper revue during the time in question, testified that he was paid “a few thousand dollars” to have sex with Ventura while Combs watched at Manhattan’s Gramercy Hotel in 2012. Phillip said that Combs wore a robe, a baseball cap and a bandanna covering his face, but he recognized him by his voice.
Ventura paid him and said she “would tip me when I leave," Phillip told the court. "We ended up having sex, rubbed baby oil on each other for a couple minutes. [Combs] was sitting in a corner masturbating.”
Afterward, the witness continued, Ventura gave him “a couple of thousand more.”
Phillip said that he was contacted multiple times over the next year to have similar encounters with Ventura and Combs at other hotels and at their respective homes in New York. He said that Combs recorded him and Ventura having sex once or twice, and that sometimes Combs would intervene and have sex with Ventura while Phillip was there.
In her 2023 lawsuit accusing her ex of sexual assault and physical abuse, Ventura alleged Combs forced her to have sex with male prostitutes.
Ventura “was scared," Florez said on the stand. "She was in the corner, hood on, covered up. I couldn't see her face, she was pretty much in the corner. On the floor was a destroyed flower vase."
When Ventura left the hotel she had a “purple eye,” Florez said. Once she was gone, Florez said, he and the desk manager went upstairs to remind Combs of “hotel rules.” Combs thought the manager was recording him on his phone and grabbed it, Florez continued, and when Combs tried to grab his phone, Florez said he pinned Combs against a wall. "We said we are not recording you,” Florez testified, “and de-escalated the situation.”
Prosecutors showed the surveillance footage of the attack—in which Combs appears to be hitting, kicking and dragging Ventura—that was slowed down from what was published by CNN in May 2024. (The defense had previously alleged that the clip was sped up, making the altercation look more violent than it was.) The jury was also shown video that Florez recorded on his cell phone when he responded to a call of a woman in distress on the sixth floor.
Florez testified that he did not call police at the time because Ventura wouldn’t answer questions about what happened and told him she just wanted to leave.
Los Angeles Police Officer Israel Florez was a security guard at the InterContinental Hotel when Combs attacked Ventura on March 5, 2016. (In her opening statement, Geragos called surveillance footage of the attack, which was first published by CNN in May 2024, “overwhelming evidence of domestic violence,” but over infidelity discovered on a cell phone and “not over sex trafficking.”)
Florez testified May 12 that he saw evidence of an altercation on the morning in question, and Combs offered him “a stack of money” to look the other way.
Under cross-examination, Florez said he “100 percent” interpreted the gesture to be Combs trying to bribe him.
In her opening statement, defense attorney Teny Geragos said prosecutors were trying to turn consensual sex into sex trafficking, but “it will not work.”
“Sean Combs is a complicated man,” she said, “but this is not a complicated case.”
“This case is about Sean Combs’ private, personal sex life,” Geragos continued, “which has nothing to do with his lawful businesses.”
Her client was violent, took drugs and had anger issues, she told the court, and there will be times during this trial when “you think he is a jerk, he is mean. But he is not charged with being mean. He is not charged with being a jerk.”
Geragos said, “The evidence is going to show you a very flawed individual, but it will not show you a racketeer, a sex trafficker or somebody transporting for prostitution.”
Prosecutor Emily Johnson accused Combs of using a sprawling network of employees to carry out illegal acts, like dayslong “freak offs,” which were detailed in the federal indictment, according to NBC News reporters in the courtroom.
“He sometimes called himself the king and expected to be treated like one to cater to all his desires,” she told the jury. “He used his companies to manipulate women, forcing them with male escorts to have sex while he watched. He and his inner circle made sure he got everything he wanted."
Johnson began her argument before the jury by describing Combs as a “larger than life" person who ran a criminal enterprise.
Highlighting an example of his alleged criminality, Johnson told the jury that the Bad Boys Record founder was “on the hunt" for Ventura one night after he learned that she had begun a romantic relationship with someone else. Johnson accused Combs of beating “her brutally, kicking her in the back and flinging her around like a rag doll” after he found her.
“He threatened her and said if she defies her again he will release video of her having sex with male escorts," she continued. "Souvenirs of the most humiliating nights of her life."
The prosecutor alleged that Combs’ inner circle covered up “crime after crime.”
Presiding Judge Arun Subramanian told jurors that he believes the trial will possibly conclude by July 4. He said that he hopes the trial will be done by then, although it “could go longer, but I don't expect that it will."
As the rap mogul arrived for the first day of his sex trafficking trial May 12, his mom Janice Combs was present along with six of his eldest kids.
His and late ex Kim Porter’s kids Quincy Brown, Christian “King” Combs, Jessie Combs and D’Lila Combs, his and ex Misa Hylton's son Justin Combs, as well as his and ex Sarah Chapman's daughter Chance Combs had the chance to greet their dad with a hug before he sat down with his attorneys.
The prosecution and Combs’ defense team agreed to a jury of eight men and four women, as well as four men and two women as alternates for the trial.
Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo argued that the prosecution was intentionally removing potential Black jurors, telling the judge that it “leads to a pattern and they need to give reason for strikes.”
However, prosecutor Maurene Ryan Comey denied the accusations, responding, “We have conducted ourselves without any bias. The jury is diverse with a number of nonwhite (panelists).”
The 12 jurors live in New York City or Westchester include a 69-year-old male actor and massage; a 31-year-old male investment analyst; a 51-year-old male scientist; a 30-year-old female deli clerk; a 42-year-old female nursing home aide; a 41-year-old male communications clerk at a correctional facility; a 68-year-old male retired banker; a 68-year-old retired telecommunications company; a 43-year-old female physician assistant; a 39-year-old male social worker; a 67-year-old male logistics analystand a 74-year-old female treatment coordinator.
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