The Transparent Cruelties of Diddy’s Entertainment Machine
9 min read
For decades, the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been one of the most influential men in the music industry. Last November, the singer Cassie Ventura, Combs’s former partner, filed a staggering 35-page lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping, drugging, and physically abusing her over the course of a decade. He and Ventura settled the suit out of court just one day later, with Combs not admitting to any wrongdoing. Six months later, after CNN published a graphic hotel-surveillance video that shows Combs assaulting Ventura in 2016, he claimed “full responsibility.”
In the weeks after Ventura’s accusations came out, several other women filed lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault, which he categorically denied. And in September, the singer Dawn Richard, a former member of two musical groups started by Combs, filed a 55-page lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting her, depriving her and her fellow Danity Kane bandmates of basic needs while requiring them to remain under his watch, and routinely refusing to pay his artists wages or royalties. (In a statement responding to the lawsuit, one of Combs’s lawyers said Richard had “manufactured a series of false claims all in the hopes of trying to get a payday.”) Last month, Combs was indicted and arrested on federal charges that include sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, and racketeering. Combs, who pleaded not guilty to all the charges, is now detained in New York City after being denied bail twice.
Central to Richard’s lawsuit is Combs’s alleged behavior during Making the Band, the competition series that he produced and hosted from 2002 to 2009. The MTV series attracted millions of viewers during its run; Richard’s lawsuit references numerous incidents that were filmed for the show, and included in the final product. Along with Ventura’s allegations, the suit prompts a broader reassessment of Combs’s cultural power—and pushes audiences to reconsider the hostile behavior that he often willingly broadcast to the public.
Though the worst of Richard’s allegations about Combs’s behavior were not depicted on Making the Band, the series did help lay the groundwork for many of the invasive, burdensome expectations of the modern music industry. Today’s young artists readily anticipate that their fans—and, more pressing, their record labels—want them to entertain the masses with their lives, not just their music. However benign a viral TikTok trend may seem now, Making the Band was an early experiment in training audiences to enjoy watching just how much control record labels wield over vulnerable musicians. The series laundered Combs’s open hostility toward a group of young women he was responsible for as an eccentric style of artist management—and his label, Bad Boy Records, profited from viewers’ interest in his abrasive displays of authority.
By 2005, when Richard joined Making the Band 3, Combs had already formed (and disbanded) a coed group that featured in an earlier iteration of the show. During the first run, Combs subjected contestants to outlandish, demoralizing tasks that had nothing to do with making music. One, which was later parodied in a famous Chappelle’s Show skit, required the artists to walk more than five miles to fetch him cheesecake from a Brooklyn restaurant. “Honestly, my feet felt broken and my knees felt like all the cartilage was gone,” one former band member told Essence in 2017. When they returned to the Midtown Manhattan studio to find that Combs had left, she said, “I wanted to cry.”
With Making the Band 3, Combs attempted, for the first time on the show, to create an all-female group—and his ruthless approach to artist development seemed to take a darker turn. Richard’s suit contends that the show’s environment enabled Combs to maintain alarming control over the young women, and that a TV-friendly version of his cruelty was projected to millions of viewers. One accusation is that Combs routinely made “disparaging gender-based remarks such as calling them ‘fat,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘bitches,’ and ‘hoes’” throughout filming and after the group was formed. Revisiting the show and how Combs promoted it at the time, I’m struck by just how often Combs tossed around similar language. Even when he used less objectionable words, he nonetheless conveyed the message that the women were not his equals. “I don’t think no human being has been able to just figure out the woman,” he told the Associated Press ahead of a season premiere, adding that he anticipated great TV because the female competitors would all need to deal with “having their monthly cycle coming together, and emotions and moodiness and competitiveness.”
Making the Band 3 spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on the young women’s bodies, and how Combs saw them. He treated the contestants’ physical presentation as alternately a disqualifying embarrassment, a reflection of his own star-making prowess, or an invitation to leer. The very first time Richard appears on-screen, during a group audition, Combs points to her as though he’s eyeing a romantic interest. “With the jeans on—she’s exceptional,” he says. After every stage of the selection process for the girl group, which ended up being called Danity Kane, Combs attempted to police how the women looked. For example, once the contestants made it past auditions and into a smaller cohort, the remaining contenders were constantly corralled into the gym, having food taken away from them, and belittled for not having six-pack abs. (It’s notable that not even five minutes into the first episode, one young woman swears, “I’ll work out ’til I kill myself.”)
Even after the final group was chosen, Richard alleges, Combs continued to exert authority over the musicians’ bodies. When she or “her Danity Kane bandmates requested meals or rest, Mr. Combs refused and chastised them with derogatory comments like ‘you bitches don’t want this’ or ‘y’all are not hungry enough’ or ‘I’m paying you bitches to work,’” the lawsuit claims. Although some of his belittling comments made it onto the air, Combs’s casual delivery belied the apparent severity of his off-camera control over the women’s basic needs: Richard alleges that Combs often sent his associates to wake the Danity Kane members in the middle of the night so that he could watch them rehearse; the studio sessions sometimes went on for three to four days, during which the singers felt forced to choose between eating and sleeping.
Part of why Combs’s televised mistreatment of Making the Band contestants didn’t draw much mainstream pushback at the time is that he was hardly alone in his valorization of hard work—and he was adept at reframing workplace abuse through the language of artistic self-sacrifice, often by referencing his own career. “It’s a blessing to be in the recording industry … but there’s a lot of misconceptions,” he says at one point. “A lot of times when people get into this, they don’t realize how hard they’re gonna have to work to achieve the goal.” As Combs’s business empire expanded in the new millennium, he presented himself as the bootstraps exemplar—a poor Black boy from Harlem who’d hustled his way into becoming a multimillionaire. (In a statement issued after his arrest, Combs’s lawyers leaned on some of these tropes, defending their client as “a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community.”)
On Making the Band 3, Combs sometimes praised the contestants’ vocal abilities—but more often, he reminded them that any natural artistic inclination mattered far less than a Sisyphean work ethic. By creating a false dichotomy between talent and dedication, Combs justified the show’s grueling demands of contestants, his role as their kingmaker, and his explosive anger when the women failed to meet his expectations. Combs appeared to relish the opportunity to degrade the women, often criticizing them in front of one another and then pausing to let the harsh words sink in for the whole group. “Some of you are gon’ be broken on your own; some of you are gon’ step up to a challenge and shine,” he warned them after showing up unannounced in their dormlike living quarters one night.
Making the Band purportedly offered the young women a clear, albeit grueling, path to stardom. But in practice, the show seemed to prioritize providing Combs access to them: In his host commentary, Combs gleefully remarked on the fact that he had “19 girls under one roof!” In hindsight, his blithe delivery accentuated his seeming confidence that neither MTV executives nor the show’s audience would raise significant concerns about his televised mistreatment of the young musicians. During the show’s run, Combs’s on-screen cruelty was all but unremarkable: Hip-hop, and the music industry more broadly, has a long history of devaluing women as expendable sex objects. Women who raise objections to alleged abusive conditions have often been met with indifference, skepticism, or outright hostility, including being shut out from work. When Combs equated the breaches of his artists’ autonomy with the pressures of making it in music, he played directly into this familiar dynamic.
Competition shows such as Making the Band also tapped into a much more widespread belief that fame—or the chance to attain it—justifies any pains that may be suffered as a result. When the series premiered, it joined a growing number of reality-TV programs that drew viewers in by glamorizing the benevolent tyrant chosen to host—and by disguising the soul-crushing takedowns they regularly meted out to contestants under the guise of constructive criticism. Richard’s suit alleges that Combs’s behavior created “an atmosphere of uncertainty and intimidation.” That assessment could have been applied to other reality-TV judges, on shows such as America’s Next Top Model, The Apprentice, The Biggest Loser—and there’s no shortage of clips in which a host excoriates a young participant over something trivial.
For viewers who consumed a relentless stream of media that surveilled and antagonized celebrities, perhaps the judges’ treatment of the artistic hopefuls seemed to be part of life in the public eye. Some of these audience attitudes persist today, despite the evidence of how damaging such environments can be for contestants: Former cast members from several modern reality series have filed lawsuits alleging that the production staff on their respective shows subjected them to inhumane working conditions, depriving them of sleep, food, and other basic needs to make them more vulnerable to camera-friendly conflict. Now, 15 years after Making the Band ended, it’s clear how the series—and Combs’s star power—was key to ushering in an era of entertainment predicated on humiliating young people as they pursued their artistic ambitions.
Combs’s apparent disdain for the aspiring musicians on his show still pervades multiple spheres of culture, including newer platforms. Audiences who tune in to vocal-competition series may not run major record labels, but they have their own kind of power now: Because algorithm-driven social-media feeds function as de facto audition stages for entertainment-industry hopefuls, individual listeners can change the trajectory of an artist’s career just by proselytizing online. And dedicated fans are not the only ones wielding these newer tools. Stirring up negative sentiment about an artist, especially through baseless mockery, has become its own pastime, rewarded by the thrill of a negative feedback loop. And on modern reality-TV shows, participants often find themselves navigating destructive conditions optimized to extract drama for viewers’ amusement. If there’s anything that Making the Band proves now, it’s that suffering is easy to ignore when an entire industry treats it like a joke.
