Jane Doe, the anonymous alleged victim currently testifying in Sean "Diddy" Combs' racketeering and sex trafficking trial, followed up Tuesday's tense exchange with the mogul's attorney Teny Geragos with more fireworks.
On Wednesday, Jane returned to the witness stand to face further cross-examination from Geragos. The lawyer spent the day walking Jane through almost two years' worth of her text messages with Diddy, from January 2022 up until just before Cassie Ventura's lawsuit against him in November 2023.
While the content of the messages was undisputed, there was often disagreement — sometimes bitterly — about what they meant.
One example of this was in a text thread from July of 2022. In it, Jane asks Diddy, "What are you thinking about?" during a discussion about a planned get-together. Diddy responds, "Call Italian or Paul is free." [Paul and a man both referred to as "the Italian" were two escorts they frequently used for nights involving a woman having sex with escorts while Diddy watched, which were referred to as "freak offs" earlier in the trial, but which Jane calls "hotel nights"].
Jane testified about that exchange, "These are my options," saying that she took Diddy's text to mean she had to choose one man or the other, and there were no additional choices available about other ways to spend the evening. Geragos disagreed, saying that Diddy was only presenting these as possibilities for the night.
The attorney at some points even sounded sarcastic. Geragos discussed with Jane the fact that Diddy had paid for a $15,000 birthday dinner for her and around 13 friends in February 2023. The attorney asked if Jane had a "great time," and acted shocked when she answered that it was "okay."
"You didn't have a great birthday dinner that he paid for?" Geragos asked.
"No," Jane replied. "I just wanted to have a happy moment in a sad time."
Similarly, Geragos went into a long discussion of "fine dining" when Jane painted Diddy's decision to take her to Nobu for dinner while they were together in Miami simply as a decision of convenience, so they wouldn't have to leave their hotel and could proceed to their hotel night in secret. [The two were staying at the Nobu Hotel in Miami Beach.]
"I really wanted to get out of the hotel," Jane said when explaining why she had asked Diddy to take her someplace else, suggesting Carbone Miami as one possibility. "I'm asking if he can romance me somewhere besides the hotel room. I just wanted to be properly romanced on my birthday."
"Nobu is also fine dining, right?" Geragos asked.
"Sure," Jane replied, in what sounded like a half-hearted tone.
Geragos brought up the fact that in her messages, Jane frequently accepted Diddy's requests for hotel nights, and sometimes even suggested them.
In Jane's telling, she did all that under "pressure" from Diddy.
"My options in this relationship were... if I see him, there's a request for a hotel night," she explained. "There are some times I suggest things under the pressure of my lover."
"I'm just going along with it because this is what he wants," she said at a different point.
Geragos also brought up that in his messages, Diddy would occasionally say he and Jane should break up if she objected to the hotel nights. Jane said that while the mogul's messages might say that, it's not what he meant. If she did leave, she said, he would pursue her obsessively.
"He would say [that he wanted to break up], but his actions would come back to me," Jane explained. "He would blow up my phone, have other people blow up my phone, he'd be right in my face, [and] I'd be back in his love."
At one point, Geragos brought up diamond jewelry from Van Cleef that Jane received as a gift from Diddy.
"You wanted diamonds, right?" the attorney asked.
"I just wanted Sean," Jane replied.
Geragos also shared numerous loving messages Jane sent to Combs in the immediate aftermath of hotel nights, and pointed out a number of occasions during their relationship where the two had spent time together without any escorts. Additionally, the attorney brought up that the nights made Combs happy and brought him "peace," and that Jane had frequently said she wanted to please the man she referred to as her "lover."
"You were really happy that you made Mr. Combs happy, right?" Geragos asked about the aftermath of one 2023 hotel night.
"Yes," Jane replied.
At one point towards the end of the day, Jane said of the hotel nights with Combs, "I resent him for all of it."
"You agreed, right?" Geragos insisted. She said that while Jane may now regret her decisions to participate in the hotel nights, she consented at the time.
Jane's cross-examination wraps up on Thursday. One of the next witnesses to be called will be Jonathan Perez. While Perez' relationship to the case has not been confirmed as of this writing, a person by that name has an online resumé that lists him as a former "Senior Day to Day Assistant to the Chairman and CEO" at Diddy's company Combs Enterprises.