“The day will come when we will name names other than Sean Combs. And there’s a lot of names,” Buzbee said at the news conference.
“The names that we’re going to name, assuming our investigators confirm and corroborate what we’ve been told, are names that will shock you,” he added. “I’m talking here about not just the cowardly but complicit bystanders, that is those people that we know watched this behaviour occur and did nothing. And I’m talking about the people that participated, encouraged it, egged it on. They know who they are.”
According to Buzbee, more than half of the alleged victims reported their assault to police or at a hospital. Toxicology reports found that some of the alleged victims had horse tranquilisers in their system, he said. Combs and his associates will also be accused in these lawsuits of threatening victims to stay silent, and making $10,000 hush money payments.
Most of the alleged victims are African American and nearly a third are white, Buzbee said. Of the 120 alleged victims, 25 were minors at the time the alleged assaults. Some of the alleged victims have been in contact with the FBI, he said.
In November, Combs’ former protege and girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie (Cassandra Ventura), sued him, alleging years of sexual abuse, including rape. The lawsuit was settled the day after it was filed, but other alleged victims began speaking out.
Combs – who has generally denied all accusations against him – has previously been sued for sexual assault nearly a dozen times, by women and men, and has been held without bond in a Brooklyn jail since he was arrested last month on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
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Buzbee and Van Arsdale’s law firms called for potential victims to come forward after the arrest. Over 10 days, they received more than 3,000 responses, said Van Arsdale. They narrowed that number to more than 100 cases they were able to corroborate and considered credible.
On top of violent sexual assault and sexual abuse, lawyers said they also plan to accuse Combs of facilitating sex with a controlled substance, false imprisonment, dissemination of video recordings and sexual abuse of minors.
Van Arsdale told The Washington Post he was struck by the similarities in the accusations. Many of the alleged victims were trying to break into the music industry, he said.
Source Agencies
