Video vixens posing by a pool. Celebrities and socialites crammed together on couches. Endless bottles of high-end champagne.
These are just some of the indelible images that emerged from Sean “Diddy” Combs’s annual White Parties from the late ’90s to the late 2000s. Splashed across magazines and gossip columns, they cemented him as hip-hop’s foremost party boy. Out of all his roles as a public figure — producer, rapper, fashion designer, actor, media mogul — hip-hop’s Dionysus might be proving to be Combs’s most crucial and damaging one.
Nearly a year after his ex-partner Cassie Ventura accused him of physical and sexual abuse, Combs has been hit with a barrage of disturbing allegations and lawsuits. He currently sits in jail without bond on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. What were once portraits of Black wealth and excellence at his illustrious parties have now become sites for scrutiny and criminal inspection.
Online sleuths have spent the past year examining photos from Combs’s Labor Day bashes and other lavish events with the same intensity applied to Jeffrey Epstein’s plane logs. It’s nearly impossible to scroll through X or TikTok without seeing posts of Combs cuddled up with various celebrities with some unspoken implication that they were involved with his alleged misdeeds. Regrettably, this online game of “who knew what?” has fully veered into QAnon-esque territory, overshadowing legitimate concerns of complicity amo.
