Sean “Diddy” Combs is facing even more legal woes after half a dozen lawsuits were filed against him in Manhattan federal court on Monday. All of the anonymous defendants—four men and two women—are represented by the Buzbee Law Firm, whose head Tony Buzbee announced several weeks ago that he has 120 suits against the Bad Boy mogul in the pipeline.
Now that the first six of those 120 are public, we can look at them—alongside Buzbee’s initial press conference on October 1—to draw some conclusions about what exactly we can learn from these suits, and what we might expect from Buzbee’s firm’s remaining 114 legal actions. Here are the takeaways.
A quick note before we get started: civil cases are different from criminal ones. No jail time is at stake here. The only relief defendants can ask for in order to be made whole is money. It is possible that at least some of the complainants here are also talking to federal criminal investigators, but it seems unlikely we will know that with certainty anytime soon.
1. Corporations are targets
The suits name a number of businesses. The ones Diddy runs, of course—see below for details about that. But a few of the lawsuits also name businesses that “conspired with and enabled Combs to” commit the alleged assaults. Macy’s, the flagship store of which was the site of one of the alleged assaults, is a defendant in one suit. In a second suit accounting an alleged assault at a hotel, Marriott International, Inc. is named.
This choice of plaintiffs matches Buzbee’s rhetoric at his early October press conference. He mentioned then that “corporate entities” would be among the targets in his suit, part of his mission to “expose the enablers.”
2. Diddy’s organization is under scrutiny
All of the six suits name a collection of Diddy’s businesses. The theory is clear, and set out in near-identical language in all of the complaints: The mogul’s businesses aren’t just incidental to the story of his alleged sexual abuse, they’re “central.”
“On the surface, each of these businesses served a legitimate purpose related to entertainment, music and other subjects,” the suits read. “But in reality, Combs, by and through himself and his agents, employees and contractors, used these businesses to sexually assault, abuse, threaten and coerce hundreds of individuals through sexual quid pro quo schemes, as well as to take advantage of individuals with impunity thinking the victims would never seek recourse.”
This is a similar theory to the government’s. Their criminal complaint against Diddy states right at the beginning: “For decades, SEAN COMBS…abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct. To do so, COMBS relied on the employees, resources, and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled.” It calls that business empire a “criminal enterprise,” a literal racketeering conspiracy, with Diddy at the head.
3. The suits are seeking to establish a pattern
At his press conference, Buzbee said that “90 percent” of the cases he was filing followed a similar pattern: victims are lured somewhere, given a drink spiked with a drug (the sedative Xylazine was mentioned at the press conference, and GHB is named in some of the suits), sexually assaulted, and “passed around” as others “enjoy the show.”
You can see that scenario, or something nearly identical to it, described in several of the suits. One describes a man working security at a White Party in 2006 before allegedly being drugged (via a drink) and raped by Diddy; and there’s a suit from a second man who was allegedly drugged, again by a drink, at a party thrown by Diddy in 2021 and subsequently sexually assaulted by multiple attendees. It seems reasonable to expect that many of Buzbee’s firm’s subsequent suits will have variations on this theme.
4. We’ve seen our first underage plaintiff—and there will be more
At Buzbee’s press conference, he said that 25 of his plaintiffs were minors at the time of the alleged assaults—the youngest of which, he said, was just 9 at the time. We’ve now seen the first of these: a man who claims he was 16 when Diddy sexually assaulted him at a White Party in 1998. There are, if Buzbee’s initial count is to be believed, 24 more of these to come.
5. The suits are filed in New York for a reason
As mentioned, all of the suits are filed in Manhattan federal court. One obvious reason for that is that Diddy has done business in New York, and many of his businesses are headquartered there. It’s also the same district that is handling his criminal case.
But there’s one more reason as well. The alleged events in the suits happened in years spanning 1995 to 2021. Many of them would be outside the statute of limitations in a lot of jurisdictions.
That is not the case in New York, thanks to a very specific New York City law: the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act. Passed in early 2022, the law opened up a two-year window, from March 1, 2023 to March 1, 2025, for people who claim to be the victims of an attack motivated by gender to file a civil suit, regardless of when the original alleged incident was. All six suits cite this law.
As Buzbee’s firm’s hundred-plus more cases drop a few at a time (he’s promised “many more cases over the next several weeks”), we can expect the patterns established in the opening half-dozen to be repeated.