Former Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith accused Sean “Diddy” Combs of threatening her life over a 1997 cover dispute in a new first-person essay for the New York Times.
Within the lengthy contribution, published Friday, Smith detailed her interactions with the embattled rapper and hip-hop mogul, who has been accused of numerous sexual assaults and documented on a 2016 surveillance tape beating his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura. Smith recalled how in 1997 Diddy — then known as Puff Daddy — demanded to see dual covers of Vibe depicting him as alternately an angel and a devil. She refused and he allegedly called to tell her he would see her “dead in the trunk of a car” if she didn’t comply. When she asked him to “take it back,” he swore at her and told her he knew her exact location at that moment.
Smith did not show him the covers, and the servers that contained the final version of the magazine were stolen from the office before its scheduled print time. An art director had a copy of the issue on CD, so the magazine came out as planned, despite the theft.
Smith also shared a troubling incident in which she and other female friends were having cocktails with Combs’ wife Kim Porter when the rapper burst in and demanded she return home immediately, dumping out the contents of her purse on the table.
“He snatched up her bank cards to the beat of: You ain’t got. No business. In here. You need. To be. At home. With. Those. Kids. Combs yelled something like, ‘Get home as best you can.’ From the sidewalk, I saw Porter being hustled into the limo in which we arrived. One of the friends, more tired than terrified, shot me a look: You good? And they were gone,” Smith wrote.
She recalled another time at a party thrown by Epic Records when Ventura, best known by the mononym Cassie, was “uncharacteristically alone,” and asked her how she was doing. Smith sensed the singer was on the verge of telling her something important. “We each wanted to say something. It seemed that neither of us could find the words,” Smith said. (Cassie refused to comment for the article.)
It wasn’t just Combs who made things difficult for Smith. “There’s no safe space for an ambitious woman. Not anywhere, and definitely not in the entertainment business. Men keep it dangerous so they can keep it theirs,” she wrote.
She described an incident where a media executive bullied her at a bar: “[He] made it clear he was going to walk me to my hotel room. It was obvious that he wanted sex. In his pulsing nostril was resentment about the job I had. He had the focused look of a person who believes you have stolen something from him, and that something is actually you.”
You can read the entire essay here.
