• A lawyer for Sean "Diddy" Combs is spending Thursday cross-examining the star witness.
• The witness, Cassie Ventura, is being asked about explosive sexts she sent to Combs.
• Ventura had to read aloud one from 2009, telling Combs: "I'm always ready to freak off LOLOL."

Defense lawyers for Sean "Diddy" Combs went on the attack Thursday against the star witness, R&B singer Cassie Ventura — showing jurors explosive texts in which both she and the rapper referred to "freak offs" with graphic enthusiasm.

"I can't wait to watch you," Combs texted her in 2009, two years into their 11-year on-and-off relationship.

He was referring to the drug-fueled, dayslong sex performances at the center of his criminal sex-trafficking trial.

"I want you to get real hott," Combs responded to Ventura's text, misspelling the word.

"Me too," Ventura texted back. "I just want it to be uncontrollable."

The texts were displayed on screens in the Manhattan federal courtroom where Combs is fighting racketeering and sex-trafficking charges that could land him in jail for life.

Ventura, who is eight months pregnant, was repeatedly asked by a defense lawyer to recite the texts out loud from the witness stand. She did so quietly, her voice sounding almost robotic.

"I'm always ready to freak off LOLOL," the singer read aloud to Combs' jury Thursday morning, reciting from a text she had used her Blackberry to send Combs on August 5, 2009.

"You tell me the day. You choose," Combs quickly responded, according to the text. "Name the day."

Ventura's husband, Alex Fine, sat in the courtroom audience while she was on the witness stand. As she began reading through the texts, he stared at his lap. Then he shifted his gaze and looked at her across the courtroom, and to a large TV screen displaying the messages to the public audience.

Thursday is Ventura's third day on the witness stand. Anna M. Esteveo, the defense lawyer handling the cross-examination, has told the judge that she expects to wrap up sometime Friday.

The defense has promised the four-women, eight-man jury that they will prove at trial that Ventura and Combs' other accusers participated in freak offs voluntarily.

On other occasions, Ventura told Combs she would prepare a room for a planned freak off.

"I'm going to Duane Reade to grab candles and then going home to pack us a bag," she said in one August 2009 text message that Combs' attorneys introduced into evidence.

Other texts show Ventura confronting Combs when she felt he was not paying enough attention to her.

"When we used to freak off, we were so in love," she said in one December 2009 message.

"I'm nervous that I'm just becoming the girlfriend that you get your fantasy off with, and that's it," she said later in the message. "I don't get the other part… Anymore at least."

In a later message, Ventura expressed frustration that Combs wouldn't prioritize her when he was traveling, which she testified happened often.

"I know you can take 3 minutes out of your day to talk to me and you don't even try," Ventura said on the witness stand, reading aloud from a text she sent Combs in 2010. "You're in too much of a rush to get me off of the phone."

Ventura had testified on direct examination that while she loved Combs, she hated freak offs, and only pretended to enjoy them because the encounters were often the only time she had with him.

"I was just in love and wanted to make him happy," Ventura testified earlier in the week.

She told jurors that she felt "worthless" joining in on the freak offs.

"I felt pretty horrible about myself. I felt disgusting. I was humiliated. I didn't have the words at the time to tell him how I felt," Ventura testified. "And I couldn't talk to anyone about it."

• Sean "Diddy" Combs came face-to-face in court Monday with his key accuser, Cassie Ventura.
• The R&B singer dated Combs between 2007 and 2018.
• Prosecutors allege Combs sex-trafficked Ventura and another woman.

The R&B singer Cassie Ventura, a longtime girlfriend of Sean "Diddy" Combs, broke down on the witness stand Tuesday as she testified she felt "worthless" joining in on the drug-fueled sex marathons that he called "freak offs."

"I felt pretty horrible about myself. I felt disgusting. I was humiliated. I didn't have the words at the time to tell him how I felt. And I couldn't talk to anyone about it," Ventura, who is eight months pregnant, told a jury in Manhattan, breaking into tears as she sat opposite Combs during his criminal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.

Ventura testified that she did not want to have sex with the male escorts that she says Combs recruited for the sessions, but she said she wanted to be intimate with Combs. She craved one-on-one time with Combs, and freak offs, she said, were "the only time I could get."

"I wanted him to know that doing this made me feel horrible. It made me feel worthless," Ventura said, adding that he was "pretty dismissive" when she told Combs how terrible she felt, including in emails and texts.

She called him "Pop Pop" in these exchanges — at his request, she said, after he asked her to call him "what I call my grandfather."

Jurors were shown photographs of six men Ventura said were paid by Combs to have sex with her "almost weekly," and sometimes two at a time.

Their names included "Dave," "Jules," and "Daniel," she said, as the images were shown one by one.

"I knew him as 'The Punisher," she said of the photo of one male escort hired "a couple of times."

Ventura said she took drugs, including Molly and Ecstasy, to numb herself to what was happening.

She described in graphic terms the encounters that she said would leave the hotel furniture and linens stained with blood, urine, candle wax, and baby oil.

The air would often be thick with the smell of body odor and the smoke from a half-dozen Glade candles, she said.

"I hated it," she told the jury, calling the hired men "strangers."

Early in her testimony, Ventura told the jury that she loved Combs and felt a sense of duty to join in the freak offs, which are at the core of the indictment against Combs.

"I was just in love and wanted to make him happy," Ventura said.

Ventura, who dated Combs from 2007 to 2018, described herself as a "people pleaser" and told the eight men and four women on the jury that Combs was often violent with her.

She testified that arguments with Combs would regularly result in physical abuse.

"He would bash me in my head, knock me over, drag me, kick me, stomp me in the head," Ventura said, adding that Combs beat her "too frequently."

"I would get knocked in my forehead, busted lips, swollen lips, black eyes," Ventura said, "bruises all over my body."

When he became violent, "His eyes would go black," she told the jury of Combs.

Ventura is the prosecution's key witness in the case.

Prosecutors allege that for two decades, Combs led a criminal enterprise that involved the sex trafficking of Ventura and an anonymous Jane Doe.

Ventura's climb to the witness stand — she is eight months pregnant and wore a stretchy brown dress and mustard-colored overcoat — came amid the first time she and Combs were in the same room since 2018. That's when she attended the funeral of Kim Porter, Combs' long-term girlfriend and the mother to four of his children.

Ventura told the jury that it was soon after she started dating Combs that she learned he had sudden, violent mood swings.

"Make a wrong face and the next thing I knew I was getting hit in the face," she told the jurors.

He would lash out "if I wasn't smiling at him, if I didn't look the certain way that he liked," or if she was being "bratty," she said.

"Watch your mouth," she said he'd tell her if he thought she spoke out of turn.

Ventura's appearance followed a whirlwind first day of the trial.

On Monday, the jury heard opening statements and testimony from the first two witnesses, including an exotic dancer who testified he was repeatedly paid to have sex with Ventura as Combs watched.

The prosecutor Emily Johnson told the jury Combs used "lies, drugs, threats, and violence to force and coerce" Ventura and another woman into "freak offs."

Plenty of bathroom breaks

Prosecutors say Ventura, 38, will be on the stand testifying against Combs, 55, for most of this week.

She's due to give birth next month to her third child with her husband, Alex Fine, a source said. She's set to be given breaks every 90 minutes during her testimony.

Fine may be called to the stand as a defense witness, Combs' attorney Teny Geragos told the judge, who is allowing him to watch part of her testimony.

If Fine is asked to take the stand, he'll be asked to impeach the testimony of his wife, Geragos said outside the jury's presence moments before Ventura began testifying.

Fine may be asked about "several very threatening messages" in which he spoke of "beating the F-word out of" Combs, the lawyer said.

The criminal indictment against Combs accuses him of making Ventura engage "in commercial sex acts as a result of force, fraud, and coercion" throughout their decadelong relationship.

Prosecutors have alleged that the commercial sex acts involved the so-called freak offs.

Ventura's account of abuse could be bolstered by security video appearing to show Combs beating Ventura in the hallway of the now closed InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles. Prosecutors say the video shows Ventura struggling to leave the hotel after a freak off held there in 2016. Jurors were shown this video on Monday.

When shown a still from that video on Tuesday in court, Ventura told jurors: "We were having an encounter that we called a freak off."

During the first year of the relationship, "Sean proposed to me this sexual encounter that he called voyeurism, where he would watch me have a sexual encounter with a third man, specifically another man," Ventura testified.

Ventura said she initially agreed to a freak off because she "felt a sense of responsibility, with Sean sharing something like that with me."

"Also, I loved him so much," Ventura said.

Combs apologized after the video surfaced in 2023, and his lawyers have conceded he was violent during the relationship. But they have alleged that Ventura was also violent. They say all sexual encounters were consensual.

"There was hitting on both sides," Combs' attorney Marc Agnifilo said in court on Friday. Ventura's lawyer has declined to comment on this allegation.

Since his arrest in September, Combs has maintained that he's never sexually abused anyone.

If convicted on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, Combs could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

This story was updated with additional testimony throughout the day Tuesday.

• Trump's Friday morning sentencing was over in a breezy 30 minutes.
• As expected, he received zero punishment and a scolding by prosecutors and the judge.
• Trump addressed the court virtually for under 10 minutes, criticizing the "witch hunt" against him.

After months of delay, Donald Trump's criminal case is finally closed.

For a quickly paced half hour, the president-elect listened and watched via video from Mar-a-Lago as a Manhattan prosecutor decried his "dangerous rhetoric" and his defense lawyer promised to appeal the case.

Trump — slumped over a table and visible in the courtroom on overhead screens — then delivered a seven-minute statement of protest against the "witch hunt" against him. The judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, handed down a sentence of no punishment as expected.

Merchan, reading from a statement, briefly chastised Trump, saying no ordinary citizen would have received the legal breaks he enjoyed.

"At this time, I impose that sentence to cover all 34 counts," Merchan then said, referring to Trump's felony conviction and his sentence of no jail, no probation, no fines, and no community service.

"Sir," the judge then said in conclusion, "I wish you Godspeed as you assume your second term in office."

At the start of the Friday sentencing hearing, Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass condemned the former and future president, saying he "engaged in a coordinated campaign to undermine" the legitimacy of the trial that Trump faced seven months Emil Bove and "caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system."

"Far from expressing any kind of remorse for his criminal conduct, the defendant has purposefully bred disdain for our judicial institutions and the rule of law, and he's done this to serve his own ends," Steinglass told the court.

The assistant district attorney, speaking as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sat behind him, said the court had found Trump in contempt for 10 different violations of extrajudicial speech.

Friday's sentencing brings a delayed capstone to the criminal case just 10 days before Trump is scheduled to be sworn in again as the president of the United States.

Trump appeared by video from his Florida estate, sitting alongside his defense lawyer Todd Blanche with a pair of gold-fringed American flags draped behind them. Emil Bove, another of his attorneys, was the only person sitting at the defense table in Merchan's lower Manhattan courtroom.

"It's been a political witch hunt," Trump said when given the opportunity to speak. "It was done to damage my reputation so that I'd lose the election, and obviously that didn't work."

In May, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 felony counts prosecutors brought against him, finding he falsified business records in order to disguise hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who testified she had a brief affair with him ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Before Trump was sentenced, the case was thrown into turmoil after the US Supreme Court ruled in July that the president is entitled to sweeping criminal immunity protections.

Although Trump was no longer president, and much of the conduct in his case took place before his first term, the Supreme Court ruled the immunity protections were so vast that it even precluded evidence from being admitted in a criminal proceeding.

Trump's attorneys asked Merchan to delay the sentencing indefinitely and throw out the case. The judge ultimately set Friday's date, writing that only a sentencing hearing before Trump's second term would respect the jury verdict — as well as allow Trump to appeal his case like any other ordinary defendant.

Just 14 hours beforehand, a narrow US Supreme Court majority swatted down Trump's last legal efforts to halt the sentencing.

The Supreme Court's immunity decision gave Trump protections that "ordinary citizens" do not receive, but they did not "reduce the seriousness of the crime or justify its commission in any way," Merchan said Friday.

"The protections are, however, a legal mandate, which pursuant to the rule of law, this court must respect and follow," Merchan said. "However, despite the extraordinary breadth of those protections, one power they do not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict."