A week after Sean “Diddy” Combs entered a not guilty plea on sex trafficking charges and more, another lawsuit alleging severe sexual assault has been filed against the incarcerated performer/producer.
“In or around the summer of 2001, Plaintiff’s life was violently knocked off course when Defendants Sean Combs and Joseph Sherman viciously raped her at the Bad Boy Records studio in New York City,” says the complaint against Combs, his bodyguard and Bad Boy corporate entities filed in federal court in New York for Thalia Graves on Tuesday.
“Plaintiff was twenty-five at the time and dating one of Combs’ employees, a relationship that Combs exploited to lure Plaintiff into meeting him and Sherman alone,” the graphic suit adds. “Once they successfully sequestered Plaintiff, Combs and Sherman gave Plaintiff a drink, likely laced with a drug that eventually caused her briefly to lose consciousness. She awoke to find herself bound and restrained.”
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“Following the assault and multiple times over the years, both Combs and Sherman contacted Plaintiff and warned her to be silent, threatening repercussions including Plaintiff potentially losing custody of her son if she ever disclosed the assault,” the three-claim civil action claims in terms and allegations found in a number of past lawsuits in recent months against Combs and his entourage. “Because of their enormous power in the industry, including through their ownership of and positions at the Combs Corporations, Plaintiff knew that they could follow through on their threats.”
Over 20 years after the alleged attack, the wound of the rape was ripped open anew for Graves in late 2023. That timeline squares up with just days away from when Combs’ former longtime girlfriend Cassie Ventura filed her own short-lived sexual assault suit against the Grammy winner.
“Any progress Plaintiff had made in healing from the attack over the years was dramatically reversed on or around November 27, 2023, when she learned for the first time that Combs and Sherman had video-recorded the horrific rape twenty-two years before and had shown the video to multiple men, seeking to publicly degrade and humiliate both Plaintiff and her boyfriend,” today’s 26-page filing states.
“Plaintiff could not believe that Defendants would record themselves committing such a gruesome crime and then proceed proudly and widely to disseminate the recording of it,” the document says. “She was distraught and sunk into a deep depression. She again considered ending her life.”
Federal prosectors unveiled a deep history of Combs filming his self-declared “freak offs” in the charges last week. Drenched in drugs, sex workers and more, the footage apparently was used to blackmail, silence, and intimidate participants.
Read the latest sexual assault lawsuit against Sean “Diddy” Combs here.
A few hours after Graves’ jury-seeking complaint was filed in the Empire State, the plaintiff appeared at a press conference in Los Angeles with attorney Gloria Allred.
Attorney Gloria Allred holds a press conference with Thalia Graves, an alleged victim of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, in Los Angeles on Sept. 24, 2024.
“Some of the hardest parts of this pain are the shame and the guilt I have experienced that plays a negative part in my daily ability to function properly,” Graves said Tuesday in Allred’s LA offices. “Being blamed, questioned and threatened has often made me feel worthless, isolated and sometimes responsible for what happened to me.”
While Graves gave a statement, she would not answer any questions about the lawsuit or what happened with Combs.
Allred did take questions, but was very cagey about whether Graves’ legal team had been in contact with federal prosecutors in Combs’ criminal case, or if Combs or other alleged victims of his supposed predatory misconduct had been in contact.
Allred would not say if she would be filing any other suits against Combs,but did admit that she has at least one other client with accusations against the one-time music mogul.
Graves is the 11th person so far to publicly claim that Combs sexually assaulted them.
In her suit, Graves is seeking a variety of unspecified damages. She is also seeking to have Combs and Sherman ordered by the courts “to account for and destroy all copies of any and all images and videos” of the prolonged assault of her 23 years ago.
Arrested on September 16 at an upscale Manhattan hotel as the on-going federal probe reached a clear inflection point, Combs is charged in by US Attorney Damian Williams with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. The allegations in the unsealed indictment could see the 54-year-old Grammy winning rapper in prison for the rest of his life, if he’s found guilty. He plead not guilty.
Awaiting trial after two failed attempts by the defense to spring him on a $50 million bond and more. Combs is behind bars at Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center, the only federal prison facility in the five boroughs.
