I thought I was done with Diddy.
After covering his trial this summer—talking to his friends, running into Kanye West at the elevator bank, and writing dozens upon dozens of news stories from opening arguments to closing ones—I thought I was done. I even had my final say on what the key element missing from the whole ordeal was.
And then 50 Cent got involved.
Fif’ has been trolling Diddy for years now, of course. But now he has taken the next step by producing a multi-part Netflix documentary, directed by Alexandria Stapleton.
This week, Sean Combs: The Reckoning finally arrived. And it’s doing what its makers (or at least Netflix) probably wanted: delivering plenty of headlines for several shocking claims made by its participants.
But what is truly interesting in the four-episode series isn’t what’s new—most of the factual material, and many of the allegations, have been publicly available in some form or another, sometimes for decades. Nor is what’s notable the early-career recap (Episode 1) or the zillionth re-litigation of the The Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac beef and murders (Episode 2).
(As a side note: one moment worth paying attention to comes when Derrick Parker, the original NYPD hip-hop cop, shows up to take viewers through Diddy’s Steve Stoute and Club New York controversies. However, Parker didn’t share any of his stories about J-Lo’s mom, which are always entertaining.)
What I did think was notable about Sean Combs: The Reckoning wasn’t any shocking new information about either the recent or distant past. Rather, what got my attention were the patterns the series works to establish. Diddy, the series argues, is truly a creature of habit.
Diddy's patterns
Throughout the course of the four episodes, we see Diddy do the same thing again and again. When it focuses on his romantic relationships, it shows the mogul courting people who are already dating powerful men he admires, resents, or is jealous of. He goes after Kim Porter as a young man while she’s dating his record label’s biggest star, Al B. Sure. He starts dating Misa Hylton knowing that she’s a then-recent ex of Erick Sermon, someone who was making classic, game-changing albums with EPMD when Diddy was still in college.
According to the show, Diddy even attempted to date a woman who was in a relationship with Suge Knight, going so far (per Kirk Burrowes’ interview in the series) as to buy her $50,000 worth of jewelry. Even Cassie fits the pattern, the show says, because she came into Diddy’s orbit while she was dating producer Ryan Leslie.
Another, more morbid pattern the series presents is Combs using fatal tragedies as springboards to launch himself to a new level of fame. The first example of this we see is the 1991 CCNY celebrity charity basketball game, which Combs co-hosted with Heavy D, and which resulted in nine deaths when overcrowding caused a stampede. No less a personage than Sermon says that the tragedy—and more to the point, the onslaught of news coverage that resulted—was “how [Combs] got super-famous. That’s the beginning of Puff Daddy.”
The doc series finds a parallel in the murder of Biggie, which launched Diddy’s solo career as a performer. It was, of course, Combs’ ode to Biggie after his death, “I’ll Be Missing You,” that cemented the label owner as a solo star, winning him a Grammy and topping the charts in 15 countries (as well as, the series argues, making him into an icon through his classic 1997 VMAs performance of the track).
Another pattern the series takes pains to point out is him allegedly not paying his artists and employees. One of the main voices throughout the episodes is Kirk Burrowes, who claims Diddy forced him to turn over his 25% stake in Bad Boy under the threat of violence. Producer Lil Rod, who worked on The Love Album: Off the Grid, similarly says he was promised a quarter million dollars that he never got. Former Bad Boy artist Mark Curry, a big voice in the series, has said similar things about Diddy’s alleged propensity to double- and triple-dip, taking money for himself out of artists’ shares for doing things like having their tracks recorded at his studio, producing their songs, or appearing in their videos. Dawn Richard, who does not appear in the series, filed a lawsuit against Diddy last year that likewise accuses him of “withholding her rightful earnings.”
Not actually a final reckoning
Perhaps the most disturbing alleged pattern the doc addresses is of shooting people in recording studios. Some time is spent in the second episode on the time 2Pac was shot at Quad Studios in New York in 1994. Combs has vehemently denied any involvement, saying, “It is beyond ridiculous and is completely false. Neither Biggie nor I had any knowledge of any attack before, during or after it happened.”
Pac’s cousin William Lesane appears to question this in the documentary, urging viewers to “look at the facts.”
“Puff is there. Pac has been shot in New York under your watch,” he says. “The question would be, 'Who knew that he was pulling up?'”
In the final episode, there’s an event that provides an eerie reflection of the Quad shooting: a story from Lil Rod about an alleged incident in 2022. Rod says he saw Diddy and his son Justin arguing with a man, and then the three moved to a nearby bathroom. Rod says he heard gunshots, and then saw the man bloodied on the bathroom floor.
Diddy has called all of Lil Rod’s claims “complete lies.”
The story of Sean Combs is still playing out. He is appealing the verdict in his trial, and scores of civil suits against him are still in progress. Sean Combs: The Reckoning is, title aside, more of a Cliff’s Notes than a final reckoning. But, like much art, examining it for themes rather than plot is where its true value will be revealed.