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Entertainment | Diddy admits beating ex-girlfriend Cassie

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FILE – Sean “Diddy” Combs arrives at the LA Premiere of “The Four: Battle For Stardom” at the CBS Radford Studio Center on May 30, 2018, in Los Angeles. Newly released video Friday, May 17, 2024, appears to show Combs beating his former singing protege and girlfriend Cassie in a Los Angeles hotel in 2016. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)

This frame grab taken from hotel security camera video and aired by CNN appears to show Sean “Diddy” Combs attacking singer Cassie in a Los Angeles hotel hallway in March 2016. (Hotel Security Camera Video/CNN via AP)

“I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,” the music mogul said in a video statement posted Sunday to Instagram and Facebook.

The security video aired Friday shows Combs, wearing only a white towel, punching and kicking Cassie, an R&B singer who was his protege and longtime girlfriend at the time. The footage also shows Combs shoving and dragging Cassie, and throwing a vase in her direction.

Cassie, whose legal name is Cassandra Ventura, sued Combs in November over what she said was years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. The suit was settled the next day, but spurred intense scrutiny of Combs, with several more lawsuits filed in the following months, along with a federal criminal sex-trafficking investigation that led authorities to raid Combs’ mansions in Los Angeles and Miami.

He had denied the allegations in the lawsuits, but neither he nor his representatives had responded to the newly emerged video until Sunday.

“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Diddy says on the video. He adds, “I went and I sought out professional help. I got into going to therapy, going to rehab. I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry. But I’m committed to be a better man each and every day. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.”

Combs is looking somber and wearing a T-shirt in the selfie-style apology video, and appears to be on a patio. It is the hip-hop mogul’s most direct response and first apology after six months of allegations that have threatened his reputation and career.

Meredith Firetog, who represents Ventura and other women who have sued Combs, said the apology was “more about himself than the many people he has hurt.

“When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday,” the lawyer said in a statement. “That he was only compelled to ‘apologize’ once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation, and no one will be swayed by his disingenuous words.”

In December, after Ventura and at least three other women had filed lawsuits against him, Combs posted a statement on Instagram broadly denying the truth of all of them.

“Let me absolutely clear. I did not do any of the awful things being alleged,” that post said.

The security camera video, dated March 5, 2016, closely resembles the description of an incident at an InterContinental Hotel in the Century City area of Los Angeles described in Ventura’ lawsuit.

The suit alleges that Combs paid the hotel $50,000 for the security video immediately after the incident. Neither he or his representatives have addressed that specific allegation. CNN did not say how it obtained the footage.

The suit said Ventura had been trying to get away from a sleeping Combs, who had already punched her in the face before the video began.

Combs is not in danger of being criminally prosecuted for the beating. The statutes of limitations for the assault and battery charges he would be likely to face expired years ago.

The same is true of many of the allegations in the lawsuits, but the federal investigators following Combs are likely looking for potential crimes they can bring under the law.

Ventura signed to Diddy’s label in 2005. The two had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship for more than a decade starting in 2007.

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'Back to Black' misses Amy Winehouse's point of view

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Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in Back to Black . Olli Upton/Focus Features hide caption

Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in Back to Black .

The new music biopic Back to Black chronicles the life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. The film stars Marisa Abela, and follows Winehouse as she records her breakthrough album, gets married, and struggles with addiction. But does the movie do justice to the singer and her music?

• Amy Winehouse

"The Vein" Book Review

Written by Zach Rosenberg

Published by Dark Matter INK

Written by Steph Nelson 2023, 150 pages, Fiction Released on August 8th, 2023

Little towns in rural regions are the lifeblood of horror. The places with the dark secret, the people who won’t quite meet a newcomer’s eyes. The flat lands and the great mountains combining to create landscapes that should not be possible and where all sorts of clandestine secrets or creatures can hide. Steph Nelson takes us to such a town in her debut novel, The Vein .

It’s 1989 and Syl Dixon has retuned to Pate, Idaho. Reconnecting with roots she left behind thanks to her grandmother’s disappearance, Syl’s homecoming is cut short by the discovery of a corpse near the old silver mines. Asked to investigate, Syl is plunged into a web of murder and darkness that spans back a century before learning of a dark evil that has haunted Pate for generations.

Nelson is a superstar of a writer. Combining subtlety with a rare viscerality, her prose is on point and sublime. Her characters are complex, living beings whose stories are told with a strong narrative voice. The book is a mix of horror and crime fiction, a mystery organized by sections that take the reader back in time to view different pieces of Pate’s history.

But above all, Nelson never forgets this is a scary time of a book. Pate feels like a lived-in town. One forgotten by most of the world. Or worse yet, completely unknown to it. It’s a place where horror and mystery are allowed to thrive because it is utterly beneath the notice of most of the world.

The book feels like a careful blend of horror and noir. A story about returning and new discoveries, through the lens of complex family dynamics coupled with loss and longing. With The Vein , Nelson absolutely goes for the jugular.

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‘Back to Black’: Amy Winehouse’s Biopic Is Seriously Out of Tune

• By David Fear

Amy Jade Winehouse could have been any young woman growing up in 1990s London — palling around with her mates, sneaking lagers, shagging dudes, getting into trouble, getting her nose pierced, and getting expelled from drama school for it. (That, and a few other reasons.) Until she opened her mouth, at which point she seemingly became possessed by a 1940s jazz chanteuse channeling centuries-old lust and sorrow. Winehouse went from a kid with a bluesy, contralto wail that almost felt like a parlor trick, considering that it was coming from a tiny white teen from Southgate, to being a recording artist signed to Island Records, former home of Bob Marley and U2. Then she added Grammy-winning superstar, paparazzi catnip, cautionary tale, and 27-club casualty to her résumé. All she ever hoped for, Winehouse said, was to be remembered for her own spin on a classic sound: “I just want people to hear my voice, and forget their troubles for five minutes.”

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It comes not to blindly praise she who refused to go to rehab, no, no, no (and eventually did), but dear lord, does it ever come to bury her. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Back to Black tries to be both a back-to-basics music biopic — complete with an early eureka moment (see: a young Amy gingerly working her way through the chords of “What Is It About Men” off her first album, Frank ), success, setbacks, and a phoenix-like rise before the eventual fall — and a grittier, less-glamorous, more-complex look at an artist who lived her songs not wisely but too well. That it succeeds in neither aspect is not exactly surprising, given how at odds the movie seems to be with its subject and itself. Yet you do admire the fact that the film occasionally hints at something bolder, more unique hidden in its margins. Taylor-Johnson came out of the art world before she became a director, and there is an uncomfortable rawness in moments that adds textures and toughness to Winehouse’s headfirst plunge into an intoxicating union with a charming fuckup.

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From the moment she spots her pre-incarcerated Blake (Jack O’Connell), leaning on the bar and emanating pure, 100-percent rogue charm, you can tell that Winehouse is a goner. He seduces her with strong booze, strong arms, and her own songs on the jukebox; the finishing move is introducing Amy to the Shangra-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” and the entire notion of Sixties girl groups. The film wants a supporting cast of heroes and villains: Though Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy, which we suggest viewing as both a complement and a counterpoint to this re-creation of greatest hits-and-misses, treats Mitch Winehouse as an enabler as much as a nurturer, Back in Black more or less treats him as the only thing standing between her and oblivion. No such clemency is given to Blake Fielder-Civil, unless you count the fact that it portrays Winehouse dipping into hard drugs solo to feel what he feels, rather than suggesting he introduced her to such vices firsthand. Not that it matters to those telling this story, per se. In their eyes, the real narcotic is Blake himself.

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Ever since Bohemian Rhapsody kicked off a new gold rush of gold-record artists’ success stories, taking generic concert sequences and recording-booth epiphanies to task for being cliché has become the de facto criticism for the genre. When it comes to Back to Black, you’d kill to have more sequences of our faux-Winehouse onstage, tearing into more tunes, to balance out the indistinguishable paparazzi attacks and stock miserablism. You know the people involved in making this have great admiration, and possibly even love for her too-brief body of work, yet the movie seems almost embarrassed about having to cede the spotlight to it. There’s no sense of a gradual descent as seen through her suffering through songs — there’s just the suffering, period.

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Music Review | Muse

Riding Through the Veins of History on a Triumphal Wave of Sound

By Kelefa Sanneh

• Aug. 8, 2007

There are bands that shuffle humbly onto the stage of Madison Square Garden, happy to be there and nervous about filling the room with sound. (And with fans.) Then there is Muse.

Muse, a famously bombastic trio from Britain, is now established as one of the biggest bands in Europe. American fans are coming around too: “Black Holes and Revelations” (Warner Brothers), the most recent Muse album, has sold about 350,000 copies in the United States. So Monday’s concert at the Garden made sense: It was an impressive, cheerfully overblown performance by a band that has never pretended to think small.

The set began with a whooshing ride through “Knights of Cydonia,” in which a long overture gives way to Matthew Bellamy’s crooned invitation: “Come ride with me through the veins of history.” In Muse’s world, this counts as idle banter.

Mr. Bellamy’s voice is often compared to the operatic moan of Thom Yorke, from Radiohead, although Mr. Yorke might beg to differ. At times, Muse sounds like what Radiohead has strenuously avoided becoming: a theatrical arena-rock juggernaut, unafraid of ridiculous lyrics or huge space-age riffs.

Muse embraces prog-rock trappings that many young bands shun, filling songs with triumphal modulations and flashy solos. In the process, the band seems to have discovered an underserved segment of the market. If you’re a fan searching for an unabashedly big-sounding rock band — well, you don’t have lots of options.

It helps, too, that the members of Muse have figured out a way to make just about every song sound like a potential radio hit. “Take a Bow,” the first song from “Black Holes and Revelations,” is based on a series of electronic arpeggios that create a feeling of infinite ascension. Despite the disaffected lyrics (Mr. Bellamy seems to be addressing a prime minister or a president when he sings, “You will burn in hell, you burn in hell for your sins”), the song sounds ecstatic, going up and up and up.

The band’s drummer, Dominic Howard, helped the music crash and splash, and Chris Wolstenholme’s bass lines sometimes hinted at the propulsive precision of dance music. But mainly this was Mr. Bellamy’s show. He worked overtime, singing and peeling off fuzzy guitar solos and sometimes switching to piano. During the plodding, piano-heavy middle of the set, it wasn’t hard to wish he would switch back to guitar. But then he did, and (almost) all was forgiven.

There’s a reason that the 1970s-style virtuoso became the laughingstock of rock music; the relationship between rock star and music nerd has long been uneasy. But seeing a band like Muse in a place like this makes it easy to believe that lots of fans are missing out. When the lights are flashing, and the rhythm section is pounding, and Mr. Bellamy drops to his knees to tap away at his fretboard — well, the proper technical term for this moment is “awesome.”

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Between the Temples

A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student.

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Ken Russell 's "The Music Lovers" is an involved and garish private fantasy which Russell, alas, presents to us as the life of Tchaikovsky. Poor Tchaikovsky. I know it is against the rules to complain that this or that detail may not be precisely accurate, or that Tchaikovsky may not have been dealt with in the fairest possible manner. I know, because I get letters from graduate students, that I must resolutely examine the film itself or the "film itself" as they put it--and put aside considerations from real life. What difference does it matter whether Tchaikovsky actually existed as Russell portrays him--as long as Russell has made a good film?

Well, I suppose there's something to be said for that point of view, had Russell made a good film and not said it was about Tchaikovsky. But "The Music Lovers" is libelous not only to the composer but to his music. I am no composer, Lord knows, but I have a notion that even the greatest of composers must have spent most of their time hard at work composing. I doubt whether their great works came to them, full-blown, in moments of sexual, religious, political, or sporting ecstasy. I doubt whether any great work in any field of art "comes" to anybody. Great novels are not produced by automatic writing, so why should great symphonies be?

Russell apparently thinks they are. And so although his film is more visually daring and more sexually explicit than other biographies of composers, it rests on the same fallacious assumption: That a sunset, or a woman (or a man, in Tchaikovsky's case), or a famous naval victory, or something could inspire the composer to sit down and dash off a few inspired moments.

Lest you accuse me of exaggerating, let me just mention that Tchaikovsky's mental image, when the cannons roar in the "1812 Overture," is supposed to be a friend's head being blown off. Better we should have a movie in which Russell's image, during the same passage, is of his own head being blown off. We would save the head for last, of course, in order to deal with lesser extremities of the minor works.

"The Music Lovers" is totally irresponsible, then, as a film about, or inspired by, or parallel to, or bearing a vague resemblance to, Tchaikovsky, his life and times. It is not, however, a complete failure. Ken Russell is a most deviously baroque director, sucking us down with him into his ornate fantasies of decadent interior decoration, until every fringe on every curtain has a fringe of its own, and the characters have fringes, too, and the characters elbow their way through a grotesque jungle of candlesticks, potted plant stands, incense sticks, old champagne bottles, and gilt edges, and it is almost certain that something is happening in the movie. But what?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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