âŚBy the time he appeared onstage a few months later at a business conference in Atlanta, the record producer, rapper, fashion designer, liquor plugger, serial entrepreneur and assiduous self-promoter was settling into a more recent persona: social justice warrior. Combs was rolling out Empower Global, an online market for black-owned businesses, saying he wanted to âuplift Black entrepreneurs.â In a year when Hollywood was roiled by an actors walkout, heâd cast himself as Batman in an online short for Halloween, grabbing a fictitious studio executive by the throat and forcing him to end the strike. He was in the process of turning over his share of the music publishing rights to many artists and songwriters formerly on the record label heâd founded, Bad Boy Entertainment, some of whom had complained bitterly over the years about how heâd handled their business relationships. Combs said in a radio interview he needed to hold himself accountable before demanding that corporate America march to his beat. Now, standing onstage in sunglasses and a loose-fitting, beige, Nehru-collared shirt with matching trousers, Combs told the 20,000-person Invest Fest audience that the corporate world was still segregated. Just as there were once black-only bathrooms, companies pigeonhole products as primarily fit for black or white consumers, and this is what heâd experienced with Diageo. âThey just wanted to keep me in the colored sectionâ, Combs told the largely black crowd. âI want to be treated equally like everybody else. Thatâs what this fight is about, and itâs just not me fighting for me. Iâm fighting for us.ââŚSharpton also rallied to Combsâ side. The civil rights activist said Diageo stripped Combs of his CĂŽroc income in retaliation for the rapper having the effrontery to raise questions about its handling of DeLeĂłn. âItâs almost like theyâre going to whip him in lineâ, Sharpton told Businessweek in early November, warming to the metaphor. âItâs like a slave master beating a slave.â
âŚCombs said in his lawsuit that he had plenty of evidence to support his claim. Heâd enthusiastically promoted a full spectrum of CĂŽroc flavors, including pineapple and French vanilla, but said heâd been reluctant to sign off on CĂŽroc Limited Edition Summer Watermelon because he was concerned about racist tropes. (He eventually did.) In 2019, Diageo had presented him with watermelon again, this time as a flavor for DeLeĂłn, despite his misgivings. Diageo responded in court records that watermelon CĂŽroc was Combsâ idea and that the watermelon tequila was only one of many flavors it suggested. Combs also accused Diageo of channeling its supply of agave to its other tequila brands during a shortage, doing âslapdashâ redesigns of its bottles without his input and suspending sales incentives for both DeLeĂłn and CĂŽroc. Diageo disputed these accusations. Meanwhile, Combs alleged that Stephen Rust, Diageoâs president of new business, had revealed the companyâs âtrue attitudeâ toward the Bad Boy founder and the black community during a meeting in October 2019. He said that Rust told him Diageo bosses resented him for making so much money, but the situation would have been different if Combs had been Martha Stewart, that embodiment of white suburban femininity. Diageo responded in court papers that it was Combs, not Rust, who invoked Stewart.
Combs had always taken what might best be described as an eccentric approach to doing business with Diageo, say 3 executives who worked with him but didnât want to be named because of the now-withdrawn lawsuit. Meetings tended to take place wherever he happened to beâat his home in Beverly Hills, on a movie set, or in Atlanta or some other city where he might be working on a project. Diageo executives would arrive only to be told the meeting had been canceled or rescheduled to the next day. When Combs did show up, often hours late, he might retire to the pool for a leisurely drink before joining his guests. He might be accompanied by other celebrities, high school chums and family members, whoâd offer their advice about the design of a new CĂŽroc bottle. One time, Combs arrived with a large teddy bear he insisted take part in the meeting, according to one of the executives. (Someone else who declined to be identified for fear of violating confidentially agreements says this never occurred.)
Then again, he could be astonishingly creative and invigorating to work with. âYou never knew which Diddy you were going to getâ, says one of the other executives who attended these sessions.
But as Combsâ relationship with the company frayed, he often spent much of his time at these meetings railing against Diageo and blaming it for the shortcomings of his brands, say some of these same people. Diageo said in court filings that Combs had threatened to go public with his racism allegations unless the company poured more money into DeLeĂłn in mid-2020âaround the time of George Floydâs murder. Diageo said that when it informed Combs of its plan to donate $100 million to help pandemic-devastated bars and pubs, he demanded the company pay him the same amount and vowed to âburn the house downâ if he didnât get a check.
âŚBut in November, as Combs and Diageo were exchanging legal jabs in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the sexual assault suits against Combs started flooding in. Former Bad Boy singer Casandra Ventura, better known as Cassie, filed a complaint so lurid it was prefaced with a trigger warning. Among other things, it alleged that Combs, whom she met in the mid-aughts when he was 37 and she was 19, had beaten her and forced her to have drug-addled sex with male prostitutes while he filmed the encounters and pleasured himself. The next day, Combs agreed to settle the suit, with his attorney stressing this was âin no way an admission of wrongdoing.â Over the next month, 3 more accusers stepped forward. Combs denied all their accusations, some of which dated to the 1990sâŚSinger Cassie Venturaâs attorney subsequently filed another on behalf of a 4th accuser under a New York City lawâŚthere was something else Combs became synonymous with: controversy. He made headlines in 1999 when he and 3 associates assaulted an Interscope executive in a dispute over a music video. (Combs apologized to the executiveâs mother and agreed to take an anger management class.) The following year he was accused of trying to pay his driver to claim ownership of a gun after he and then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez fled a New York club where thereâd been a shooting involving another of Bad Boyâs artists.
âŚAnother frequent white Party guest was Jacquie Lee, then head of multicultural marketing for Diageo. She says she thought Combs would be the perfect candidate to get clubgoers swilling CĂŽroc, a vodka made using French grapes, the sales of which had been stuck at around 65,000 cases a year, according to S&D Insights. âHe was a night crawlerâ, Lee says. âHe knew how to make people raise their glasses ⌠dance and party.â She arranged for Combs to meet Diageoâs top 3 North American executives in New York. Lee recalls Combs grabbing a CĂŽroc bottle and saying, âLook, this is a rocket, but Iâm the fuel. I will grow this business beyond your imagination!â The Diageo guys, all of them white, were smitten. The challenge was persuading the leadership in London, who were aware of Combsâ less savory history, to sign off. âThere was a perception that he was a gangster rapperâ, Lee recalls. In the end, it was the invitation to the Diana tribute that convinced her London bosses. âThatâs what sealed the dealâ, says Lee, who now runs her own marketing firm in Rochester, New York.
âŚCompanies doing business with Combs fled. Suddenly the threat of black activists marching behind the rapper to make Diageo pay for depriving him of his vodka income seemed ridiculous. A liquor company wanting an alleged sexual predator as the face of its alcohol brands was even more absurd. The day after the first lawsuit, Diageo said as much in its letter to the judge in the case, and after more women came forward, it wrote again asking him not to compel Diageo to put up more cash for ad campaigns featuring Combs, saying the mogul himself knew these lawsuits âmake it impossible for him to continue to be the âfaceâ of anything.â Combs and his attorneys were uncharacteristically silent.
If Combs has been the master of anything throughout his career, itâs been promoting his personal brand regardless of the circumstances. As recently as November 2023, his corporate website boasted that heâd âcemented himself as one of the most successful entrepreneurs and cultural icons of all timeâ, despite Bad Boyâs waning cultural influence. He showed up last spring to the Met Gala in a gaudy outfit worthy of a modish Star Wars lord, and fashion bloggers swooned that it was the rebirth of Sean John heâd promised, even though there was no follow-up. Revolt was hardly the âdriving force in music and cultureâ that Combs Global described. Nor was CĂŽroc still âwildly popular.â As long as Combs said things like this, people were inclined to believe them. Instead of cashing out when he had the chance, Combs wagered that he might be able to shame the company into a Clooney-size payout, while positioning himself as a civil rights defender. Perhaps he miscalculated. Rather than knuckling under, Diageo vigorously pushed back on his racism charges, and his reputation crumbled at the very moment he most needed it intact.
See Also: