A former personal assistant to Sean Combs testified on Thursday about a grueling work environment in which she was subjected to sleep deprivation, violence and multiple instances of sexual assault by her boss.
The woman is taking the stand at Mr. Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial under the pseudonym “Mia,” but jurors were shown her real name. In the witness box, she described a fast-paced, often exciting job that could quickly descend into chaos based on the fluctuation of Mr. Combs’s moods.
“The highs were really high and the lows were really, really low,” she testified.
During her eight years working for Mr. Combs, Mia testified, he would lash out if he was unsatisfied with her performance, in one instance throwing a bowl of spaghetti at her and, in another, a computer — both of which missed.
“He’s thrown me against the wall,” Mia testified. “He’s thrown me into a pool. He’s thrown an ice bucket on my head. He slammed my arm into a door.”
Looking down, her voice quieting to a whisper, she said that Mr. Combs had also sexually assaulted her multiple times. Prosecutors said they would return to the subject in detail later, but they had previewed her account for jurors by saying that Mia would testify that Mr. Combs forced her to perform oral sex and sneaked “into her bed to penetrate her against her will.”
Mia said she was in her mid-20s, living in New York and working to ascend in the entertainment industry — she had already been a personal assistant for Mike Myers — when she began working for Mr. Combs in 2009.
