Last night I sat down and watched Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy on Peacock, and I have to admit that I was left a bit undewhelmed. The film states that it went into full investigation mode after Combs’ explosive September 2024 arrest, as the crew began speaking to Diddy’s closest friends “to get insight on who Sean was” and “who he is now.”
Courtesy of Vibe, they put together 5 explosive takeaways from the 90 minute doc, and I'll also include my overall opinion of the doc below...
via: Vibe
City College Stampede Payments
In connecting the perceived “heartless” behavior from Diddy over the course of his career, the film covered the oft-forgotten City College stampedes. On Dec. 28, 1991, Uptown Records, Diddy, and Heavy D put together the first 1st Annual Celebrity Basketball Game, with the event set to include appearances by both artists and other big names like LL Cool J, Mike Tyson, and more.
On the day of the event, 5,000 attendees attempted to get inside the school’s gym, which had a maximum capacity of 2,730 people. Fans and students grew impatient as they waited for the doors to open and bum-rushed the gymnasium, leading to a massive crowd rushing through the stairwell and into the gym, resulting in a stampede. The stampede turned deadly, as 29 people were crushed underneath the excited fans, with an additional nine students dying.
Peacock explored how Diddy denied any wrongdoing in the tragic incident, with people accusing him of promoting the event as if it were 10,000-person capacity, overselling tickets, and not having enough security for the event. Combs was hit with a plethora of lawsuits, with families demanding that he be held accountable for his hand in the incident.
One family in particular, the family of Sonya Williams, was exceptionally saddened as the young student was killed as a result of the stampede. Williams, who met Diddy through a then-girlfriend, was given a ticket by Combs to attend the basketball game. Combs met with Sonya’s brother, Sonny Williams Jr., to discuss doing something in his sister’s memory. Diddy allegedly offered him $50,000 to make things right, which he felt was a “slap in the face.” Williams admitted, though, that he accepted the money “reluctantly.”
Litigation in the case against Sean Combs dragged on for 6 years, with the Hip-Hop producer not hit with any criminal charges.
Connection To B.I.G.’s Murder
The Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1997, dying at the age of 24. As the decades raged on, so have the conspiracy theories surrounding Biggie’s death. One in particular found its way to Peacock’s doc, with Gene Deal, Combs’ bodyguard from 1991-2005, addressing theories that Diddy was directly involved. Deal recalls conversing with Combs in the week leading up to Biggie’s death, during which the future mogul argued with the Life After Death star about a trip to London.
“Biggie was telling people he had to be in London, but Puff was telling people he ain’t going to London that whole week,” Deal alleges, stating that Combs had scheduled for Biggie to attend a VIBE Magazine party in Los Angeles instead.
After B.I.G was shot multiple times by an unknown perpetrator, they rushed the superstar to a nearby hospital. It was there where Deal had another tense interaction with Combs, recalling how “Puff ran out the hospital door and grabbed my arm and said, ‘Gene, we’ve got to pray.'” Deal then claimed that he shot back to Puff, “‘Pray for what? That ni**a is dead, bro.’ [Combs] just was stunned. He had this look in his eye like he couldn’t believe [The Notorious B.I.G.] was dead.”
The film’s producer then asked Deal if he thought Diddy was directly involved with Biggie’s demise, to which the man asserted, “I think that he placed B.I.G. in that atmosphere. So, did he directly have something to do with it? He could have.”
Allegedly Groping Da Band’s Sara Rivers
Making Da Band 2’s Sara Rivers appeared in the film, where she accused the mogul of inappropriately touching her during her time on the MTV show.
“The incident basically, I was by myself,” she emotionally recalled. “He touched me in a place that he shouldn’t have. That was inappropriate. I felt intimidated, I felt like oh my god, what the heck just happened just now? I’m definitely nervous because, like I said, I haven’t said anything for so long, and it’s built up. It’s been 20 years of going through my mind. This has happened, that’s happened, this was stopped. Mentally draining.”
Rivers also claimed that she saw him verbally abuse some of her bandmates at various times from 2002-2004 while on the show. The woman claimed that he made several eye-brow-raising remarks that made her question his character.
“When he got angry with one of my band members, he said, ‘You make me so mad I want to eat your flesh.’ And then he said to another one of my band members, he said, ‘You’re rolling your eyes, I could go get a crackhead and pay them $20 to smack the sh*t out of you.’ Who says that? That’s crazy.”
Former Bad Boy Employee’s “Mission”
One former Bad Boy employee, who remained anonymous and modulated their voice in fear “of retaliation” from Puffy, claims that he met Diddy in 2015.
John Doe told the film’s producers that he saw Combs “be very violent” and had threatened him on various occasions if he ever thought to depart from Bad Boy Records. John Doe claimed that at one point, Combs showed him a video of two men having sex and told him that this was “what people do in the industry to get to the top.” The producer then asked the John Doe what Combs had him do, to which he responded, saying, “That’s a sticky question…This is a very touchy thing to talk about, and I don’t really want to comment on that.
Additionally, Doe claims that his job was full of various activities, but Combs often had him go on “missions,” which included gathering most likely underage women for alleged “freak-offs.”
Kim Porter Was Murdered
Singer Al B Sure! was also featured in the documentary, where he spoke about his and Diddy‘s late ex, Kim Porter. While discussing Porter’s 2018 passing, the 56-year-old referred to it as “her murder” and then asked, “Am I supposed to say ‘allegedly?'”
The singer, nee Albert Joseph Brown III, detailed how he had seen Porter before her death and said that she was healthy. However, hearing reports that she died of pneumonia led him to the conclusion that something far more sinister had happened to her, saying, “Nah, something is not right with this.”
Brown recalled one of his last conversations with Porter, discussing Sean’s dark transformation. Brown claims that Porter made him promise her never to speak about her life with Combs “because she was in complete fear of my life.”
“After Sean starts to see Kimberly, Kimberly and I remain friends. She starts to confide in me. What she did say is, ‘Something is not right. His soul has gone completely dark like he’s just not there.'”
“Before her death, she was keeping a diary and things of that nature,” the singer expressed. “Someone got the passcode to her phone and her computer, and they found out she was writing what was going on behind closed doors.”
The documentary points out that Porter’s children released a statement regarding her death, stating that “there was no foul play” and called the allegations that she was murdered “false and hurtful.”
Additional information from the doc’s producers asserts that the Los Angeles Police Department has no reason to “[suspect] foul play and that there was no criminal involvement in Kim Porter’s death. The coroner’s office determined that her official cause of death was lobar pneumonia.”
Al B Sure! even suggests that the other people directly involved with Uptown Record’s success, Heavy D and Andre Harrell, both died, and that it can’t be a coincidence. It should also be noted that the doc states that law enforcement did not consider Heavy D and Andre Harrell’s deaths to be suspicious in any way.
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I'm not going to hold you, but I felt besides what Al B Sure! shared in his package, I don't feel like I learned anything new from the documentary. I have been following all the alleged tea Jaguar has been spilling. We all are aware of Cassie's lawsuit, and the footage where Diddy is seen kicking and dragging her across the hotel hallway. I was also aware of the tea Diddy's former bodyguard Gene Deal was spilling, because he has done multiple interviews on YouTube over the years before he sat down with Peacock.
Growing up in New York City I remember the 1991 celebrity basketball game that triggered a stampede at New York’s City College, when more than 5,000 spectators showed up to a 2,700-capacity gym, reintroducing survivors who lost family members in the crush. The only thing I wasn't aware of regarding that tragic event was that Diddy settled with the family victims for $40k.
I also wasn't aware that Sonny Williams reluctantly accepted a $50,000 settlement for his sister’s death even as Combs, then a burgeoning hip-hop impresario, was worth more than $40m (“a slap in the face”, Williams called the offer) – the tragic anecdote doesn’t do enough to stand up the central theory: that Diddy was a good boy turned bad.
I also wasn't aware that Diddy inappropriately touched Sara from The Band. She didn't go into further detail as to what he did, but it was good to hear from someone who was part of Making The Band. I just wish if someone comes out with allegations of assault that they would have pressed on it a bit more.
The Making of a Bad Boy to me felt like a rush job to capitalize off of all the Diddy drama dominating the mainstream news cycle. Here's hoping the upcoming 50 Cent Netflix doc and the four-part Max series (The Fall) that’s slated to release later this month will fare much better.
I do feel like what may have kickstarted his sexual fetishes and lack of understanding boundaries stems from what he was exposed to as a child.
In the doc, his childhood friend Tim “Dawg” Patterson reveals that growing up he and Diddy were exposed to a lot of sex around the house, as Diddy's mom Janice would throw parties at the house on the weekends.
“That’s what we were privy to; this is what we were fed,” he said. “Was it desensitizing us? I’m sure it was. Were we aware of it? No, that was just Saturday night… I’ve always been asked the question why. I don’t know the answer to why, but I truly believe it all goes back to childhood.”
“On the weekend, [Combs] partied in the house, and we did that a lot,” he said. “He was around all types of alcohol; he was around reefer smoke. Drug addicts around, lesbians around, homosexuals, he was around pimps, pushers. That was just who was in our house. People that attended the parties were from Harlem, from the streets. It wouldn’t be a thing to mistakenly walk into one of the bedrooms and you got a couple in there, butt naked.”
It also explains why he allegedly felt the need to use drugs in order to not only sexually assault others, but use his freak-off parties to traffic women and men.
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