In July 2025, all eyes were on Diddy for all the wrong reasons. After being on trial for multiple federal indictments—including racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and prostitution-related charges—the disgraced rapper, mega-producer and Bad Boy Records mogul, Sean Combs, aka Diddy and Puff Daddy, was convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and later sentenced to 50 months in prison. (He must still face 100-plus civil lawsuits filed against him since 2023.)
Now, a new unflinching and sprawling four-part Netflix documentary paints him as an alleged serial abuser and master manipulator who’s never wanted to face the music. Sean Combs: The Reckoning chronicles his sordid story via fascinating never-before-seen footage as well as a range of raw interviews from former collaborators, old friends, a former sex worker, past and present police detectives and even two of the jurors who delivered the mixed verdict.
Since debuting on Dec. 2, the documentary has become the most-watched TV program on Netflix. It’s also generated its own fair share of controversy. Of note: It is executive-produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, a longtime Combs foe who has publicly accused him on social media of knowing who murdered The Notorious B.I.G. and playing a role in rival Tupac Shakur’s killing in the 1990s. (More on that below.) Combs’s spokesperson has slammed the work for being “a shameful hit piece” that uses “stolen footage that was never authorized for release.” (More on that below too.) A Netflix spokesperson, meanwhile, has denied the accusation, contending that Jackson didn’t have creative control and nobody was paid to participate.
Still, there’s no doubt that Sean Combs: The Reckoning feels like the ultimate word on the star’s rise and chaotic downfall. Here are five of its most surprising revelations. (Trigger warning: The documentary and this article discuss physical and sexual abuse.)
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1. Combs may have been abused in childhood
Combs’s violent childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, is deeply probed in the first episode. Per his childhood friend and neighbor Tim Patterson, Combs’s mother, Janice, took on a strict disciplinarian role following the drug-dealing-related murder of his father, Melvin, in 1972, when Combs was just 3 years old.
“His [Combs’s] beatings made me scared, right?” Patterson says. “I got beatings … but when he got his beatings, it wasn’t a joking thing.” The “goofy” Combs, he adds, “didn’t know how to defend himself. Sean was a prince, and Janice—she didn’t want no princess.” The filmmakers feature a 2010 clip from the Bravo interview show Inside the Actors Studio, in which Janice, sitting in the audience, joked that her son received “a lot of beatings” as a child.
In connecting the historical dots, Patterson also shares that Combs was exposed to his mom’s wild house parties starting from a young age. As he describes it, “You got the ladies who looked like they were straight out of a Jet magazine. Some brothers up there. If you want to call them pimps, you can. If you want to call them hustlers, you can. You got a member of the New York Knicks, or two. There was a stage in her living room—literally, a stage. And that’s where we used to have to go and dance. And everybody’s calling you ‘Baby.’ And everybody’s saying, ‘Do that dance.’ And all of this stuff, he’s taking in.”
Janice Combs didn’t respond to a request for comments from producers, as noted in the doc.
2. He was heavily involved in Tupac and Biggie’s deadly feud
Did Diddy inflame the West Coast vs. East Coast rap rivalry that resulted in the murders of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Combs’s friend Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in 1997? By these accounts, yes. The series asserts in the second episode that the animosity stemmed from two gangs, the Crips (Shakur’s Death Row Records) and the Bloods (Wallace’s Bad Boy Records). In recordings, drug kingpin Duane “Keffe D” Davis, arrested for Shakur’s murder in 2023 and awaiting trial, can be heard saying that Combs stoked the animosity and offered to pay him $1 million for allegedly killing both Shakur and Death Row Records head Suge Knight. However, the money never materialized. (Davis claims he’s innocent; nobody has ever been arrested for Wallace’s murder.)
As an addendum, Bad Boy Records co-founder Kirk Burrowes recalls that Combs proclaimed that he was going to throw “the biggest funeral for Biggie [that] New York has ever seen.” But Burrowes says that when Combs did the math, he realized that he didn’t want to personally foot the bill. He instead made the funeral a recoupable charge so the rapper’s estate would have to pay it off. (Wallace’s estate did not respond to a request for comment.)
3. Aubrey O’Day says she may have blacked out during a reported assault
So chilling. Early on in the docuseries, Aubrey O’Day—a former Bad Boy artist and member of the girl group Danity Kane, formed by Combs in 2005 for the MTV reality show Making the Band—reads a sexually charged email that Combs sent her in 2008 after she was fired from the group. (PG version: He wanted to have sex with her and was thinking of her while watching porn and masturbating.)
But in the fourth episode, O’Day says a lawyer reached out to her in regards to an affidavit from an alleged female assault victim for one of Combs’s civil lawsuits. Reading the document aloud, O’Day says the unidentified woman witnessed her in 2005 being sexually assaulted by Combs and another man at Bad Boy studios. While looking for a restroom, the woman said she opened a door to find the men engaging in sexual acts with O’Day, who was not fully clothed and “sprawled out on a leather couch, looking very inebriated.” The woman added in the affidavit that she was “100% certain” that it was O’Day in the room.
“Does this mean I was raped?” O’Day says on camera. “I don’t even know if I was raped, and I don’t want to know.”
4. Combs was desperate to change his image leading up to his arrest
Throughout Sean Combs: The Reckoning, viewers see Combs just days before he was arrested by federal law enforcement in September 2024. In footage taken by a videographer he hired himself, the visibly anxious and angry Combs is sequestered in his room at the Park Hyatt hotel in Manhattan and pleading with his legal team over the phone that he needs to take control of the spiraling narrative.
First, the former music executive suggests hiring a communications expert. “We have to find somebody that will work with us, whether they’re from this country or another country,” he says. “It could be somebody that has dealt with the dirtiest, dirty business of media and propaganda.”
At another point, Combs—often flanked by his grown sons, Justin and Christian—levels with his attorneys about his dire situation. “Listen to me,” Combs says. “I’m going to let you professionals look at the situation and come back to me with a solution. … Y’all are not working together the right way. We’re losing.” He also instructs the videographer to get “cutaway shots” of the uniformed officers who appear to be watching his hotel room from a nearby building.
Jackson and director Alexandria Stapleton have refused to divulge how they obtained this exclusive footage.
5. Two jurors defend their not-guilty verdicts
Two jurors from Combs’s trial speak for the first time in the fourth installment. Producers show but don’t name juror 160 (a Black woman) and juror 75 (a South Asian man, per court records), both of whom stand by the decision to acquit Combs on the more damning sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. (A conviction would have resulted in a longer jail sentence.) “One hundred percent,” juror 75 said when asked if he felt that justice was served.
Interviewed separately, the pair repeat the defense’s main arguments. Juror 160, who said she “grew up listening” to Combs’s music but was not a “personal fan,” was asked whether she believed that Combs was a “violent person.” Her answer: “He can be.” She also noted that ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura’s witness testimony about drug-fueled “freak-offs” was disturbing and that the surveillance footage of Combs brutally assaulting her in a hotel hallway in 2016 was “unforgivable.” The problem was that Combs was not specifically charged with domestic violence, and she struggled to apply the counts of sex trafficking and racketeering to what she saw and heard about the pair’s relationship.
Juror 75, meanwhile, described the dynamic between Combs and Ventura as “loving” but complicated, and pointed to the affectionate text messages the two sent to each other following the hotel assault that were presented during the trial. “If you don’t like something, you completely get out—you cannot have it both ways,” he says. “Have the luxury and then complain about it? I don’t think so.” He added that he had no prior knowledge of Combs’s career.
Combs, currently serving his time at New Jersey’s FCI Fort Dix, is scheduled to be released in May 2028.
Sean Combs: The Reckoning is now streaming on Netflix.
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