Sean Combs ordered to pay $100 million after failing to appear in court in sexual assault case

For almost a year, rapper and businessman Sean Combs has been hit with one lawsuit after another, with the plaintiffs — nearly all women — accusing him of sexual assault, abuse, rape, sex trafficking and a series of chilling attacks that are specified in detail in the court documents. So far, none of the eight lawsuits have reached trial. However, on Tuesday, a previously unknown case secured the first judgement against the musician formerly known as Puff Daddy or Diddy.

What had appeared as just one more in the string of accusations against him has led to court sentence, with a Michigan judge sentencing Combs to pay $100 million in a sexual abuse case filed by a 51-year-old man named Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith. What’s more, the huge amount — which Combs will have to start paying within a few days — is because the singer failed to appear in court to contest the allegations.

Cardello-Smith — who represented himself at the trial — is incarcerated in the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility in the town of Muskegon Heights, in the west of Michigan. He is serving a 75-year prison sentence for sexual crimes and for a kidnapping. During his time in prison, Cardello-Smith studied law, and last June, decided to file a lawsuit against Combs, in which he accused the rapper of sexually abusing him in 1997.

According to court documents — obtained by local media outlets such as MetroTimes and USA Today — the two met when Cardello-Smith was working in restaurants and hotels in the Detroit area. He says he was drinking with Combs one night and went to a hotel room with him and two women. He began having sex with one of the women when Combs started touching his buttocks. When he asked her to stop, the musician gave him a drink, and after drinking it, he began to feel dizzy and fall asleep. According to his complaint, Combs told him: “I added a little something to it for you. I will get that from you anyway, one way or another.” Afterward, he recalls waking up bleeding and in pain. He filed a police report at that time, but says he decided to drop the case because he “knew that I was never going to be able to tell anyone about this.”

However, Cardello-Smith — apparently moved by the wave of lawsuits against Combs — decided to file a lawsuit in June, although it was not made public at the time. Despite this, Combs learned of the suit, and went to visit Cardello-Smith in the Muskegon Heights prison: documents from the penitentiary center show the rapper’s name in the visitation record. At that meeting, the three-time Grammy Award winner offered to pay him $2.3 million to drop the lawsuit, but Cardello-Smith refused.

On August 7, a Lenawee County judge named Anna Marie Anzalone went one step further step, and issued an order against Sean Combs to prevent him from selling assets that could be used to pay for damages in the case. At that same hearing, Cardello-Smith told the court that when he told the rapper that he did not want to accept an out-of-court settlement, Combs replied: “You know how we get down.” Cardello-Smith told the court that he responded: “I disagree with how you get down.”

Judge Anzalone scheduled another virtual hearing for September 9, which Combs or his attorneys had to attend. However, when Monday arrived, the artist did not appear at the Lenawee County courthouse, and the judge awarded a $100 million default judgment against Combs, who will have to start paying the money in 10 installments of $10 million, starting this October 1. A default judgment is awarded when either party in a case fails to respond to a summons or appear in court, and according to court documents, no appearances or answers were filed on behalf of the rapper.

A day later, Combs’ lawyers did make an appearance and released a statement to several media outlets that said “Mr. Combs looks forward to having this judgment swiftly dismissed.” “This man is a convicted felon and sexual predator, who has been sentenced on 14 counts of sexual assault and kidnapping over the last 26 years,” the statement added, in reference to the plaintiff. “His resume now includes committing a (sic) fraud on the court from prison, as Mr. Combs has never heard of him let alone been served with any lawsuit.”

Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith’s lawsuit joins the long list of lawsuits that have been filed against the musician since November last year. The first to file a suit was his ex-girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, an R&B known as Cassie. According to her suit, Combs raped her, subjected her to constant beatings (as seen in an explicit CNN video), drugged her, forced her to participate in orgies and other sexual encounters, and kept her away from her family and friends. Although Ventura dropped the lawsuit just one day after filing it, many other plaintiffs followed.

Just days after her lawsuit, another woman, Joi Dickerson-Neal, accused Combs of raping her in 1991, when she was a 19-year-old student, and of having recorded a video of the rape. A third woman, Liza Gardner, claimed that he and another singer, Aaron Hall, sexually abused her and a friend in 1990.

In early December, an anonymous woman accused him (providing images and videos) of gang-raping her in 2003, when she was 17 years old. In the 14-page lawsuit, she recounts a harrowing story. One night she met Combs and Harve Pierre, a former longtime president of Combs’ record label, at a bar in Detroit, Michigan. They convinced her to travel with them on a private jet to New York City, but before leaving the bar, Pierre forced her to smoke crack cocaine and abused her in a bathroom, forcing her to perform oral sex on him.

In February, producer Rodney Jones Jr. alleged in another lawsuit he was sexually harassed by Combs, pressured to engage in sexual acts, forced to procure sex workers for Combs and witnessed Combs giving drinks laced with drugs to people at parties

In May, two other women came forward: a model named Crystal McKinney, who said that in 2003 he forced her to perform oral sex after drugging her in his studio; and April Lampros, who said he assaulted her when she was studying fashion in New York.

The last known case was in July, when a woman named Adria English, who worked at a party in the Hamptons in 2004, accused Combs of sex trafficking, forcing her to drink alcohol and take drugs and offering her to friends for “sexual exchanges.”

In March, U.S. federal authorities also raided the singer’s homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

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