Another woman has come forward with sexual assault allegations against Sean "Diddy" Combs. Thalia Graves alleges that Combs and his bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, tied her up and violently raped her in a Bad Boys recording studio the summer of 2001, recorded the attack without her knowledge and later distributed the video as pornography.
In both her 26-page civil suit and a televised press conference held by her lawyer, Gloria Allred, Graves says she was 25 years old at the time of the assault and met the Bad Boy owner while she was dating a record producer who was working for the label. Graves alleges Combs invited her to a Manhattan recording studio where he offered her a drink that she believes was laced with drugs; she fell unconscious soon after drinking it. When she woke up, Graves claims she was naked with her hands “bound and restrained” with what she thinks was a plastic bag.
Graves says Combs entered the room naked and that he and Sherman, a.k.a. Big Joe, then took turns raping her vaginally and anally. When she tried to escape from under him, Combs slammed her head into a pool table, knocking her unconscious again. When she woke up, Graves alleges that Sherman slapped her and forced her to perform oral sex until she passed out a third time. The civil suit states that “both men were undeterred by the Plaintiff’s cries for help throughout the attack.”
Once she regained consciousness, she claims she found herself alone in the studio and ran out as fast as she could. The lawsuit alleges that she was “terrified of what Combs would do to her and her family if she reported him” and did not get a rape kit. When she confided in her then boyfriend, Graves says he discouraged her from disclosing the assault out of fear of how it could negatively impact his own career.
Graves says she never recovered from the 2001 assault, physically or emotionally, suffering from severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal ideations. She claims that both Combs and Sherman contacted her periodically over the years and “warned her to be silent.”
Graves is now the 11th plaintiff to file a civil suit against the hip-hop figure since last fall. In November 2023, singer Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura, an ex-girlfriend of Combs, detailed a decade of alleged abuse, coercion and sex trafficking suffered at his hands. Ventura’s bombshell filing was settled out of court within 24 hours of news breaking, but her accusations inspired many others to come forward with allegations of Combs’ sexual misconduct and violence. Other plaintiffs who’ve come forward with accusations against him include singer Dawn Richard, choreographer LaurieAnn Gibson and producer Rodney Jones as well as young women from the early 1990s.
Combs has repeatedly asserted his innocence through a firewall of statements made through lawyers in the last year, but when video of the disgrace magnate attacking Ventura in a hotel hallway from 2016 surfaced, he posted a public apology to her on his Instagram account.
In November 2023, around the same time of Ventura’s watershed filing, Graves says she learned for the first time that the mogul had videotaped himself and Sherman raping her and had shown the video to multiple men in order to humiliate her and her then-boyfriend. At the time of the attack, Sherman was the founder of Rhymes N Dimes Magazine, Inc. and Graves believes the recording of her assault was also distributed as pornography through the bodyguard’s media network. Learning this caused Graves to relive the assault and fall back into suicidal ideation.
Though Graves is now one of many civil filings, her accusations are the first since Combs was arrested on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges last week in New York. The federal indictment, which alleges that Combs used his record label, Bad Boy Entertainment, to operate a sex trafficking ring for his own gratification, mirrors the narratives in many of the civil court suits.
Combs pleaded not guilty to all charges listed in the indictment and is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn awaiting trial.
Copyright 2024 NPR
