With the commencement of the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial comes a slew of incels and women who think they are bulletproof, posting “Why Cassie didn’t leave?” as if they didn’t also see video evidence of what happened when she tried to. As if these weren’t the same people speculating about the suspicions of Kim Porter’s death. As if it wasn’t revealed that he blew up Kid Cudi’s car when he was seen taking an interest in Cassie.
People wish they were rich because of the power that money can buy, and then turn around and feign that a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars and had someone doing hard time, for shooting a woman in the face, even though the woman herself pinned the shooting on Combs, lacks power. Many people with I.Q.s rivaling room temperature have painted Cassie out to be a gold-digger as if Diddy hasn’t stolen MILLIONS from his own artists, or as if even being a gold-digger somehow warrants being kicked in the stomach by someone who claims to love you.
These people believe that Diddy, in all his success and business savvy, was somehow duped by a woman who was an infant when he graduated from high school.
Cassie, in her immense gold-digging schemes, could’ve had multiple children by Diddy but decided to have multiple children by his personal trainer instead, even though that’s not how gold-digging works.
We live in a world where men are automatically seen as the heads of households. Men make more than women for the same jobs, and women traditionally take their husbands’ last names upon marriage. People will have children without being married, and the expectation is that the child should still have the man’s last name, even if he is a part-time participant in the child’s life. Our society is built on patriarchal standards, and while men desire these standards, they will simultaneously deny they exist and/or deny their harm. We see the corruption that comes with power in authority figures outside of the home, but somehow, the power dynamic present inside the home is incorruptible. A man whose wealth rivals a tiny nation doesn’t have the power to coerce his significant other into sexually exploitative acts, and yet, how many unemployed men still beat and sexually assault their significant others?
There is a reason that H.R. frowns upon people dating their bosses, or companies pay out millions of dollars for sexual harassment cases—because the former is a breeding ground for an unhealthy power dynamic, and the latter is the result of that unhealthy power dynamic.
It is unlikely Bad Boy Entertainment had an HR department or at least one worth its salt. However, what is apparent is that a 19-year-old with a budding career, signed to a label and began dating the very rich, very powerful and much older owner of said label, shortly thereafter. There are women sex trafficked all over the world, who literally work outside and still can’t leave, so it’s troubling that people are asserting, even if implicitly, that women who are in domestic violence relationshops don’t desire to leave—especially when people stay in less shitty situations all the time.
One in four women experiences intimate partner violence in their lifetime.
The most dangerous time to be in a domestic violence relationship is when you are trying to leave, and because of this danger, it generally takes a woman, on average, seven times to leave before she finally does. Abuse is not just physical, and most often starts off with psychological manipulation. People don’t just wake up and hit you in the face; an abuser gradually reduces who you are as a person. The next thing you know, someone you love, someone you have made memories with, someone you hope for better with, has hit you and promised that it was the last time, and you truly want to believe that. Many women don’t leave because they can’t, because they have children, because they are financially abused, because they have nowhere else to go, because when they do leave, his security detail seems to always find them.
The assertion that Cassie stayed because she is a gold-digger, as if Diddy hasn’t made getting money his entire persona, is laughable.
Cassie is not on trial; Diddy is. Cassie is not getting paid based on the outcome of this case; he settled the VERY NEXT DAY, remember.
This case is about Sean Combs being a sex trafficker, committing racketeering and transporting people across state lines to engage in prostitution. This case is about the person who has been sued by over 100 people for sexual abuse and assault, engaging in coercive behaviors and using his power as a record executive and multi-millionaire to get people to engage in sexual acts. And yet, so much of the conversation is that she stayed, after friends of hers have publicly stated they tried to protect her from him after Dawn Richard sued Diddy and claimed that she was physically intimidated into staying in the group, after members of Da Band and Day 26 allege that they were traumatized by Diddy’s actions and even after Diddy’s own former bodyguard alleges Diddy abused Cassie, people still need proof that he is a bad person.
Diddy is so powerful that not only is he capable of doing all these unspeakable acts and paying to keep them covered up, but even crazier, he has millions of people who are too stupid to believe he could do them and are defending him for free.
