FILE – Sean Combs arrives at the Pre-Grammy Gala And Salute To Industry Icons at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Jan. 25, 2020, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Invision/AP, File)
If nothing else, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” shows ambition at its worst.
By Denise Clay-Murray
Because I consider myself a student of pop culture in addition to the SUN’s resident political analyst, I joined the millions of people who went to their Netflix accounts and checked out “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.”
The four-part documentary, directed by Alexandra Stapleton and executive produced by rapper/tv producer/ and Combs antagonist Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, talked about everything from the hip hop mogul’s childhood to the toll that his raging ambition took on, well, everyone in his path to his eventual arrest, trial, and imprisonment at the Federal Correctional Facility at Fort Dix.
It threw a bone to every conspiracy theorist who believes that Combs was somehow involved in the deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace.
But to me, the most important thing it did was show that a combination of money, fear and enablers can keep you from being held accountable for your actions.
Let’s start with Biggie and Tupac. According to Bad Boy co-founder Kurt Burroughs, who turned out to be one of the people that Combs damaged the most in what could be generously described as a reign of terror, the “peace tour” that Biggie was allegedly trying to do at the height of the East Coast/West Coast rap rivalry, wasn’t his idea.
Biggie wanted to get out of Los Angeles and was in fact looking forward to a European press tour that would take him out of town while the furor over Tupac’s death died down.
“He lied about it and let me know that’s a weak spot for him and he’s nervous about that information,” Burroughs said. “He ushered Biggie to his death.”
(Now, here’s where it would make sense to talk about how Combs commemorated Biggie’s death every year with a freak-off, which is what former sex worker Clayton Howard tells us in “The Reckoning”, but I won’t. Let’s just say that remembering a friend with a drug-fueled sex party isn’t for everyone.)
Now let’s get back to that combination of money, fear, and enabling and how that allowed Diddy, to basically, run amok for years.
While I find 50 Cent’s participation in this documentary problematic — he had started the project before handing it off to Stapleton — he was able to convince a lot of people to share their stories.
From Burroughs, who was abused physically, psychologically and financially by Combs to Aubrey O’Day, the former Danity Kane member who claims she was fired for not having sex with Combs, to Capricorn Clark, Combs’s former assistant who was kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to go with him to rapper Kid Cudi’s house to kill him because he was dating Cassie Ventura, the former girlfriend whose lawsuit led to the FBI investigation that eventually led to Combs’s indictment, there were a lot of people who shared their truth.
In a lot of ways, the segment that talked about Combs’s trial reminded me of the Bill Cosby trials in that most of the people proclaiming the innocence of both of these men were people that wouldn’t have acknowledged their presence unless they had to. As part of the documentary, there’s footage from Combs’s documentarian, who we learn was never paid for his footage by the way, where he’s interacted with fans in Harlem, and feels the need to disinfect afterward.
“Oh my God, I need some hand sanitizer,” Combs says. “I’ve been on the streets amongst the people. Yeah, I gotta take a bath. The amount of people that actually I’m coming into contact with, that’s what I have to do. You know what I’m saying? It’s like 150 hugs, you feel me? You gotta be realistic about what’s going on out here. It’s time to cleanse. I gotta go under the water, water got to be boiling hot, put some peroxide in that.”
That these were some of the same people who were out in front of the federal courthouse squirting baby oil on themselves in celebration of Combs’s beating the more egregious charges isn’t lost on me.
Two jurors from Combs’s trial were also interviewed and showed, at least to me, why no one reports sexual assault or domestic abuse. While the male juror showed that misogyny is a universal concept, the female juror showed that whoever was picking that jury didn’t do a good job. Having a Bad Boy fangirl on the jury wasn’t a good move.
While it left me with a lot of questions, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” gave me some insight into the music business and why some of the people who once called Bad Boy their musical home is out of the business altogether.
They probably still have nightmares.
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