Trigger warning: violence against women, rape culture
“Do you think that hip-hop culture was on trial as much as Sean Combs was?” Robin Roberts asked woman–beating rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson about the four-part documentary he executive produced, Sean Combs: The Reckoning.
“No,” Jackson stumbled through his damning response. “My ulti—, if I didn’t say anything, you would interpret as, that hip hop is fine with his behaviors, because no one else is being vocal….It would allow the entire culture to register as if they’re for that.”
And this is the problem with the so-called “reckoning” of Sean Combs in this docuseries.
Sure, it’s a detailed accounting of Diddy’s 35-year reign of evil in the industry. Allegations in the documentary range from drugging and raping unconscious victims and showing videos of the attacks on big screens at his parties to orchestrating the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace. His co-founder of Bad Boy Records, Kirk Burrowes, lays out the vileness intrinsic to Combs’ 35-year climb in the music industry, aptly beginning with Combs becoming famous off the trampling deaths of partygoers at Combs’ first big event in New York. Endearing moments in history, like Combs throwing his “best friend” Wallace a lavish funeral in Brooklyn, get revealed as lies since Combs allegedly charged the funeral costs to the Wallace estate to cover, then set up “freak-off” celebrations every March 9 on Wallace’s death anniversary.
“I need your energy!” Diddy-Dirty Money band member Kalenna Harper recalls Diddy saying to her in a session, an exclamation that she took as complimentary at the time, when in reality it was instructive. All four episodes show Diddy as a destiny-swapping energy vampire that dimmed the lights of everyone rising around him—emotionally, financially, spiritually, physically—so that his light would burn brighter. It paints a picture of a record executive whose insecurity was deadly; who envied the talent of the artists he had helped to shape; who saw girlfriends as mere props to impress other men and prove his greatness by “taking” women from the higher-profile men they were with before him; a monster who grooms the people around him, from artists and employees to his own sons.
Diddy’s former childhood friends do their best to lay the blame for Diddy’s notorious abuse at the feet of the single mother that raised him, Janice Combs. But you can’t be evil unchecked for 35 years at the height of any industry—let alone one as globally impactful as hip hop—and not have a culture problem. You can’t “reckon” with Diddy without indicting the culture that made him. And 50 Cent has no interest in doing that, because that violent, misogynistic culture made him too. And his friends. They’d all have to go down. So, this doc is just about Diddy, an isolated evil who acted alone, who RICO’d alone. So, the documentary fails as a work of reckoning in the same ways the state failed in its prosecution of Diddy. ‘Conspiracy: party of one’ just isn’t a thing.
Netflix denies that Jackson had any creative control over the docuseries, leaving blame once again at a Black woman’s doorstep, director Alex Stapleton. Stapleton’s series invites no experts on domestic violence nor rape culture to appear in the series to contextualize either subject or connect Combs’ harm to the larger cultural and systematic oppression in which he was allowed to operate for 35 years.
Explaining Combs’ entry into the hip-hop world, the erased co-founder of Bad Boy Kirk Burrowes states that there were only two entry points at the time: Russell Simmons at Def Jam and his former protégé Andre Harrell at Uptown. Simmons has a documentary’s worth of rape allegations against him. This is a culture that rots from the top.
The docuseries doesn’t even mention his abuse of women during his short stint at Howard University in the late ‘80s til 1990, topped off with Howard granting him an honorary degree in 2014. In 2016, the same year he beat ex-girlfriend Cassandra Ventura on camera, dragging her back into his room as she tried to escape from him in a hotel, Diddy donated $1 million to Howard to give business school students scholarships in his name. Money erasing violence against women is a pattern that can only thrive in a culture that hates Black women. There’s no “reckoning” without that acknowledgment.
The lack of experts also explains the lack of care for the victims in the presentation of information for the doc. Though some of Diddy’s many victims have an opportunity to voice their pain in the series— including Aubrey O’Day, Joi Dickerson-Neal, Capricorn Clark, producer Lil Rod and Burrowes—this “Reckoning” is not for or about them. Echoing Combs’ public treatment of O’Day and Diddy’s longtime victim Cassie, Stapleton follows suit, giving these two particularly egregious treatment. O’Day reads—for the first time—a victim statement from someone who says she witnessed an unconscious O’Day being raped by Diddy and another man. There had to have been a more sensitive and thoughtful way to bring up this woman’s statement without this on-the-spot, salacious presentation.
And then poor Cassie. Years back, Diddy did a cologne commercial featuring a naked Cassie, two of the products he was selling, and it’s lewd and leering. Stapleton uses footage from this sexually violent commercial as background while the allegations against Diddy at his sex-trafficking trial are explained, conjuring images of Cassie as a willing participant in her own abuse. With no experts to dispel this idea, the docuseries perpetuates harm against survivors of abuse rather than offering them a healing voice.
Still, the #1 TV series on Netflix has caused quite the stir of hate and disdain for Diddy. When his paltry 4 year sentence for his crimes against male sex workers is up (he was acquitted of the charges against his women victims) he will not get a warm welcome home. People don’t play about Pac and Biggie—who were no strangers to violence against women themselves. The outrage I’ve seen on social media about why Diddy was allowed to wreak hell on everyone in his vicinity unchecked doesn’t square with the behavior I usually see on these platforms. Just this summer, when Black folks voiced concerns, distress, displeasure with Black events AfroTech, Essence Fest, and Culture Con, legions of folks came forward to try and squash those complaints, to dismiss the concerns as “jealousy” of successful Black people who actually have done something with their lives, unlike the complainers. This culture of protecting so-called Black Excellence (read: rich, capitalist class Black people) is the same culture that built Diddy and allowed him to abuse and terrorize unchecked for almost four decades. “For the culture.”
As for the doc, I said in my review for Contraband Camp, “As a history of Diddy’s vile character, the docuseries is thorough. As a ‘reckoning’ for the pile of victims, bodies and carnage in his wake, it’s woefully incomplete.”
Also read:
Iconic hip hop journalist, author and editor Aliya S. King wrote a fascinating piece for Vibe Magazine (remember hip hop journalism?!? sigh) back in 2010, interviewing notorious Harlem gangster Frank Lucas about Diddy’s daddy, Melvin Combs, which sheds more light on who the hairdresser-turned-drug dealer was before his murder than this documentary does.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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