This is a complex one. But highly interesting. And probably a little disturbing in places.
For anyone not familiar yet with this subject, I recommend fixing a drink and sitting in a comfortable chair first.
Although our focus is the music bigwig who used to be called Puff Daddy, this spiralling equation also takes in a lot more: from the tumultuous 90s era of Gangsta rap and the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, all the way to the deaths of even Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
And with a lot of alleged sexual misdemeanor along the way.
This will also get into the Jewish role in the rap and Hip Hop industries: which is something that really needs to be addressed honestly. Which also takes us into Kanye’s rants, and the recent rift between Conservative commentators Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro.
Which just demonstrates how complex this is. A lot of what we touch on in this article will be only brief – just enough to give a sense of the big picture. To focus in on each individual element would take way too long otherwise.
Underlying it all is the question of who or what ‘Diddy’ really is: what role has he been playing, and what outside influences might have been involved?
So let’s start with what happened last week.
The dramatic raids on the properties belonging to the music mogul and rap star ‘Diddy’ last week have prompted a lot of ‘I told you so’ type responses online.
‘Diddy‘, aka ‘Puff Daddy’, aka Sean Combs (aka an overrated and talent-deficient leech), has had allegations swirling around him forever, to the extent that some have even started calling him the ‘Black Epstein’.
Given that we don’t have full information yet concerning these raids or their findings, or even clarity about where the millionaire Hip Hop mogul is (claims that he has fled the country appear to be contradicted by other accounts), let’s hold off on any deep dive into the most recent allegations or legal cases.
It suffices to say that the ‘surprise raids’ on his homes are reported to be related to sex trafficking allegations: which is in keeping with various stories told about him – true or not – and his dubious ‘parties’ and other exploits over the years.
The raids were certainly dramatic looking: maybe excessively so, resembling a military operation or counterterrorism.
Again, rather than attempting to navigate the details of the most recent accusations or lawsuits, I instead want to take a broader look here at the scale and complexity of the rabbit hole that emerges once you start considering all the off-shooting connections.
Because the sheer depth and scale of the controversies and even criminalities that seem to underlie this side of the music/entertainment industry is pretty extraordinary.
To start simple, no doubt some comparisons will be made with another recently fallen pop figure: this being the even more talent-deficient R&B superstar R. Kelly.
Something both cases have in common (assuming that accusations against ‘Diddy’ are true) is that, aside from their individual crimes and abuses, there clearly has to have been an entire network of additional people who also took part in these crimes, people who helped facilitate their operations, and people who helped cover it up.
This is especially the case when it concerns systemised and ongoing activity that is essentially an ‘open secret’ – which is certainly the case with both R. Kelly and (allegedly) Sean Combs, because people were talking about Kelly’s offenses long before he ever faced legal action, and likewise with Combs.
Again, I’ll keep saying here that we don’t know for sure if Combs will be found officially guilty of anything yet.
For the record, he appears to have hired Ghislaine Maxwell‘s lawyer to help his defense: which is an interesting look.
But there’s no way that other high-profile figures, music industry insiders, celebrities, security, and also intelligence agencies, wouldn’t have been aware of things that were going on.
Yet what was striking about the R. Kelly situation was that he appeared to be the sole person brought to account. It seems odd that, as far as I’ve been able to tell, there weren’t additional or related court cases or prosecutions.
In the case of ‘Diddy’ (again, if allegations against him prove to be true), this will be even more interesting, because ‘Diddy’ operates a much bigger network of influence and control than R. Kelly did.
Sean Combs is seen as having been for decades an industry gatekeeper, particularly in the Hip Hop community: which is where the power dynamics stem from and is the context within which some allegations have persisted, such as (alleged) inappropriate sexual behaviour and/or rituals with the likes not just of young girls and young male rappers, but of pop pixies like Usher and Justin Bieber.
Again, *allegedly*.
But again, if we assume that any sex trafficking operation or ritualised abuse system involving ‘Diddy’ is likely to have been even more systematic than what R. Kelly was up to for years, then *looking* at what Kelly was doing and how many people must’ve been complicit tells us how much worse and more widespread any alleged ‘Diddy’ operations are likely to have been.
I actually put together a whole piece on the R. Kelly scandal about a year-and-half ago, but never published it. Given how this whole subject has come up again, I’ll probably publish that here in the next few days.
The thing with ‘Diddy’ is just how vast and interconnecting the rabbit hole could potentially be, if the stories about him are true.
The media’s coverage of these dramatic looking raids on Combs’s mansions have focused on either allegations of sex trafficking or the recent legal cases brought against him in relation to sexual assault. See here.
But one thing the mainstream reports haven’t connected the raids to is that just months ago a major arrest was made in relation to the murder of Tupac Shakur.
And Sean Combs has long been implicated by various people with having been involved in the 90s rap icon’s death, including allegations that he was the one who put the hit out.
This idea has persisted for so long that even Eminem directly stated it on one of his tracks.
Certainly, Combs was one of the most significant players in that equation, as the owner of the Notorious B.I.G, the gangsta rapper who Shakur was in a supposed feud with.
Duane Davis (or ‘Keefe D‘) was charged as a participant in Shakur’s fatal shooting months ago.
Davis is significantly linked to Sean Combs, and was in fact publicly complaining about how ‘Diddy’ hadn’t done anything to help him in his life despite Davis “looking after” him (‘Diddy’) all those years (whatever that means).
The thing is that the police announced the ‘Keefe D’ arrest as though they’d solved the crime of the century and had grafted long and hard to bring the 90s rapper’s killer to justice. In fact, Davis had been openly bragging about having been involved in Shakur’s murder – in interviews on YouTube, for example.
It hardly took top-notch detective work to connect him with the infamous shooting.
It’s odd then that they suddenly decided to arrest him after all that time and make a big announcement about it.
Davis is the only survivor among the individuals thought to have been directly involved in the attack on Tupac Shakur’s vehicle on the infamous night of the Tyson fight in 1996. The others didn’t outlive Shakur by much.
Except for Sean Combs. But Combs was never implicated as having been part of the actual hit squad: only implicated by some as an orchestrator.
Combs has also long been accused by various observers of having been involved in the killing of his own man, the Notorious B.I.G, not long after Shakur’s death.
I don’t want to go into all the details, theories, claims and counter-claims about the Tupac/Biggie stuff here: lots of rap enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists have filled the Internet with those arguments for years, and they’re better versed in that subject than I am.
I recently watched an interview with Gene Deal (Diddy’s former head security guy), who was present for all those events, including ‘Biggie’s’ fatal shooting: and his accounts strongly suggest Combs being complicit in the murder.
I’m also not saying that these Homeland Security raids last week are about old gangsta rap killings – they’re probably about sexual crimes, as the media is suggesting.
I just wanted to note that the timing is interesting, given that someone previously linked to Combs was just charged in relation to the Tupac Shakur killing.
Whether or not Combs was complicit in either or both of those infamous murders, what’s indisputable is that it was Notorious B.I.G’s death that allowed ‘Diddy’ to become a Hip Hop star in his own right and not just a background/management figure.
Combs rode the gangsta rapper’s murder to fame and glory: and could be cited as the person who benefited most from it.
The song he released in direct tribute to B.I.G (a shameless retread of The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’) became the first Hip Hop single to open at the top of the Billboard Top 100.
After that, his fortunes grew and grew, year by year, allowing him to leave the gangsta rap controversies behind and become a successful businessman and entrepreneur, as well as continue as a music producer, manager, owner, and still hugely successful recording artist.
He has been intimately and centrally involved in the careers of numerous stars in the industry.
Combs, as of 2022, was reported by Forbes to be worth $1 Billion.
Again, as far as the conspiracy theories concerning the gangsta rap murders go, I’m not going in-depth here with these different claims or theories. You can look them up online.
And it’s worth saying that, when it comes to various accounts or accusations made by various ex-associates, supposed eyewitnesses, or individuals who were part of that music/crime scene, it’s difficult to know how much is being exaggerated, fabricated or misremembered.
There’s a lot of it out there. And some of it might even be just attention-seeking in nature, or even driven by old beefs and personal issues.
Then again, the persistence of these sorts of allegations and the widespread nature of them suggests there might be some underlying truth.
If Hip Hop culture watchers online are to be believed, ‘Diddy’ might be implicated in a number of other deaths too.
Again, I don’t want to go through all of them here (you can look these things up elsewhere), but, for example, Cassie Ventura – who brought the recent sexual assault lawsuit against him – claimed in that same action that Combs was responsible for a car explosion targeting rapper Kid Cudy.
And sure, rap is seen as a sometimes dangerous, feud-heavy and often violent arena, but a lot of this even extends outside of the rap or Hip Hop game – sometimes involving people you would not expect at first glance.
That rabbit hole goes to curious places.
And yes, we should always be careful when dealing with sometimes over-enthusiastic online ‘theorists’. But again, there’s often some underlying truth to persistent allegations: and some of the connections are interesting.
‘Diddy’, for example, was mentored by long-time industry mogul Clive Davis – and is alleged to have had a sexual relationship with him.
Davis, a former boss of Colombia Records and Arista Records (and now in charge of Sony Music Entertainment), has been involved in the careers of all kinds of people from sixties legend Janis Joplin (with whom he also had a sexual encounter) to Luther Vandross, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Whitney Houston, and numerous others.
Davis is implied by some to have been involved in Whitney Houston’s death.
Even if he wasn’t, his behaviour around Houston’s death has been flagged up: for example, by Chaka Khan in this interview.
We won’t detour into all the theories about Houston’s death here: but accounts have it that Davis and his various VIP and celebrity guests continued partying downstairs even after Houston’s deceased body had been discovered in a bathtub upstairs in the same hotel.
It was Davis who helped Combs set up Bad Boy Records in the early 90s: which put Combs on his career path and was a central factor in the proliferation of the gangsta rap culture into the mainstream.
Just as curious a link is that a shady figure named Faheem Muhammad, who was head ‘security’ for ‘Diddy’, also happened to be on the scene for Michael Jackson’s death. He was apparently the other person in the room with Dr Conrad Murray.
This was something raised by American Conservative commentator Candace Owens shortly before she was fired by Ben Shapiro‘s Daily Wire a few weeks ago. The assumed reason for her being pushed out of the Daily Wire was ‘antisemitism’ related to comments about Israel’s war on Gaza.
However, she had also been persistently sympathetic towards Kanye West‘s anti-Semitic meltdown a year or so ago, in which he had implied that Jewish interests controlling Hip Hop were out to get him.
I’m not one to typically peruse right-wing media, but I find it vaguely interesting when Conservative commentators turn on each other.
Given that the Conservative Daily Wire platform is entirely pro-Israel, Owens’ perceived defense of Kanye, even including giving credence to his claims about a ‘Jewish gang’ involved in Black entertainment, must’ve been a part of this rift that recently occurred.
Especially given that Owens was being publicly threatened and attacked by the sex-obsessed Rabbi Schmuley and his dildo-selling daughter.
Funny enough, Schmuley – who you may have recently seen showing up frequently on Piers Morgan’s show, championing the War in Gaza in increasingly psychotic fashion – was also heavily involved with Michael Jackson: and was in fact mentioned in Michael Jackson’s infamous ‘enemies list’.
A list that, as has been noted, mostly contained the names of Jewish individuals in the music and entertainment industry. Jackson and Kanye had something in common, apparently.
The reason to bring that all up here is because Owens talked a lot about ‘Diddy’ in the same podcast: this was a few weeks ago, before these raids on Diddy’s houses.
And Kanye’s perceived anti-Semitic meltdown included attacks on one P Diddy, who he outright accused of both working for the ‘Feds’ and of being ‘controlled by Jews’.
Which could be just a classically unhinged Kanye rant: or, alternatively, it could explain why Combs has been seen as untouchable for so long.
The FBI, and other agencies, would surely have been fully aware of any sex trafficking operations going on involving a millionaire rap star and industry gatekeeper.
So why a sudden raid of his properties now?
I mean that shit looked hardcore: it looked like fully suited-up soldiers and military vehicles. What were they expecting to encounter?
It’s probably relevant that this was Homeland Security conducting these raids and not the FBI.
And we know there have been instances where different agencies or departments have been actively operating counter to each other, almost to a farcical extent.
Was Kanye right that Diddy has been an asset for the ‘Feds’?
Is this an Epstein like situation? It’s hard to gage yet. Though Combs has reportedly hired Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer, which is interesting.
He also previously shared a lawyer with Harvey Weinstein.
And it’s funny how all these circles overlap: implying, rightly or wrongly, that there is a common underlying dynamic at work.
And, apologies in advance, but this is where we have to come back to the Jewish/Israeli connections, as previously alluded to with Michael Jackson and Kanye West.
As I covered here in the past, Harvey Weinstein was aided and abetted by all kinds of Israeli intelligence operatives, including Mossad – primarily via the Black Cube organisation (again, see here).
And as I argued in the same article, Weinstein and his network were behind a lot of the media’s allegations against Michael Jackson – for strategic reasons to do with deflecting attention away from Weinstein himself.
This was still going on even after Jackson’s death.
And of course Epstein and Ghislaine were essentially Israeli intelligence assets: and their sex trafficking operations have to be viewed with that taken into account.
There’s an obvious pattern here of intelligence operatives – particularly connected to Israel – being involved in both sex trafficking operations and the entertainment industry.
And when we bring it back to Sean Combs specifically and to Hip Hop in general, the connections are interesting.
The aforementioned mogul Clive Davis, Diddy’s ‘mentor’, is Jewish: which might or might not be what Kanye was alluding to.
And the Jewish involvement in rap and Hip Hop has been well established.
This article, for example, highlights how many pioneering Hip Hop stars had Jewish managers, as well as in general how much Jewish involvement there was in the development of the rap and Hip Hop scenes into commercial commodities.
Today, it’s common for high profile rappers to boast about their ‘Jewish lawyers’, even in their lyrics.
And as this Jewish blogger points out in an article broadly celebrating the Jewish connection to rap, it was well known that ‘Diddy’s’ notorious parties in the Hamptons had a ‘guest list reads of the who’s who of Jewish society‘.
Diddy’s business partner, Bruce Philip Rockowitz, is a Jewish Canadian and CEO of Global Brands Group, which owns the majority of Diddy’s clothing line.
Jewish individuals being influential in the entertainment industry is nothing new or revelatory: but when you look at the most famous or high profile instances of alleged sex trafficking operations or high level sexual abuse circles – specifically Epstein/Maxwell, Weinstein and now possibly Sean Combs – and how there’s some common threads between them, you have to ask questions.
And if we still might consider those connections innocuous, how about the fact that FBI documents released under an FOIA request revealed that something called the ‘Jewish Defense League’ had issued death threats against Tupac Shakur?
You’ve probably never heard of that, right?
Well, here’s the FBI doc.
And here’s what Israeli newspaper Haaretz said about it.
Given the significant Jewish involvement in rap and Hip Hop, the idea that a Jewish group was issuing death threats against famous rappers really should raise questions about the dynamics of these relationships. Easy E from NWA was also targeted.
It just gets stranger and stranger, doesn’t it?
With ‘Diddy’ specifically, given how significant a figure he is or was in the development of both gangsta rap and in the growth of Hip Hop into the best selling, most marketed and most culturally influential music genre (it displaced rock a long time ago), this raises some questions.
How much of this phenomenon was organic and how much of it was engineered by outside influences?
And what role does a Sean Combs play in that story?
Bear in mind, ‘Diddy’ is connected to the biggest names in rap and Hip Hop culture and its mass proliferation: from the likes of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G in the first instance, to Jay Z, Kanye West, R. Kelly, Jennifer Lopez, Usher, and many of those who’ve been commercially successful and become culture influencers.
Is it odd that this same gatekeeper also happens to be suspected of sex trafficking operations and other crimes – and has apparently been able to get away with it for so long?
Does it suggest a special arrangement of protection or immunity – at least until now?
In that scenario, the only reason such an individual would have such protection is if they’re an asset or they’re either doing something for higher powers or agencies or have previously done something for those higher powers or agencies (and were therefore rewarded with protection).
That’s just my speculation, or course, based on everything discussed here.
There’s been a lot of rappers or people involved in the scene who’ve been implied to be Federal assets at various points: and this makes some sense when you consider how many of them have done jail time or been charged with major criminal offenses, therefore making them vulnerable to certain arrangements.
For example, one of these, according to some, was Snoop Dogg (a former Death Row label mate of Tupac).
But Diddy is something different. For one thing, Diddy has never done jail time.
Which is curious, given that practically everyone else has: and considering that Diddy has allegedly been involved in everything from drug related crimes and persistent sexual misconduct to his proximity to murders.
By contrast, look at how many times someone like DMX went to jail. That’s arguably the difference between someone who is under some kind of special protection and someone who isn’t.
What’s also curious about Sean Combs is that, unlike most people in the gangsta rap scene, he doesn’t appear to have come from ‘the streets’ so much or been a natural product of the ‘ghetto’ life or of gang culture.
In fact, he graduated from a good high school and did a business degree.
How someone like that ends up being at the very heart of the ‘gangsta rap’ scene is curious.
It’s just as curious as how, again, someone so closely connected with the two era-defining homicides in rap was able to go on to have such a glittering career at the very heart of the mainstream music industry.
To the extent that a fifteen year-old Justin Bieber literally had to go live with him for two days before he could progress with his superstardom.
What the fuck was that about?
Diddy literally said at the time that Bieber was owned by Usher and Usher had sent the child to Diddy for what has been referred to as ‘ Puffy’s Flava Camp’.
Usher himself, as is widely known, went through the same initiation when he was thirteen years old – he spent months living with ‘Diddy’ and under his guardianship before breaking into the industry is become a star.
What were Usher or Bieber’s parents doing while their underage children were sent to stay with ‘Diddy’?
And again, we’ve only touched the surface here – to explore all of the various claims, accusations and theories in full would take a whole series of articles.
Also, I wrote a long piece after the death of DMX, concerning the ‘rap music conspiracy’: more specifically the claim that the Gangsta rap business might’ve been partly manufactured by corrupt record companies in conjunction with the prison industrial complex in the early 90s.
It also explored the published evidence that the CIA had been behind the drug epidemic in the Black inner city communities, fuelling the Bloods and Crips and the gangsta culture.
P. Diddy wasn’t mentioned in that article, but the Tupac and B.I.G killings were: and Diddy’s central role in that violent rap era is indisputable.
That article could therefore be read as something of a companion piece to this one: as it explores the possible hijacking of rap music and manipulation of the culture for nefarious purposes.
Whatever comes to light regarding the Artist Formerly Known as Puff Daddy and this current investigation, it’s going to be interesting to see either how far it goes or how limited it ends up being. As well as who else is implicated.
It’s very possible Diddy is being set as the lone fall guy. It could also be that the reason his houses were raided was to remove incriminating evidence implicating high profile figures involved in sex crimes. It might be that the recent legal cases against him made him a liability for too many others, and it was decided to do something about it quickly.
We’ll find out, I guess.
