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“…Reading through the filing, I found myself weeping. Ventura alleged not only that #SeanCombs kicked & beat her on frequent occasions, hiding her in hotels while her bruises healed, but that he forced her into sex acts w/strangers, & that he recorded them. Further, Ventura claimed that he often kept her drugged & ‘on multiple occasions’ had her ‘personal medical records sent directly to his email address.’

“I wept because, despite #Cassie having been in my consciousness for nearly 2 decades, this was the first time I saw #CasandraVentura. Ventura was only 19 yrs old when #SeanCombs ‘discovered’ her in 2005 & signed her to his label, Bad Boy. When they officially began dating—after rumors of a long pursuit—she was 21, & he was a 38-yr-old man.
“I wept because no one, including myself, had thought this relationship was weird.
#law #ViolenceAgainstWomen #SexualAssault #abuse #power #misogyny #HipHop

“I wept because, if anything, we’d probably thought that she was lucky. I wept because I’d never seen her as a person. I wept because she had existed for me solely as a product & an accessory to #SeanCombs’s male genius.

“I wept because I felt that somehow in all of this, I’d been complicit.”

“…I never could pinpoint when I fell in love w/ #HipHop; it had simply always been there. But I remember, distinctly, the moment when I realized it had been a #dysfunctional & perhaps even #abusive relationship. I’d been working on a playlist for a friend’s birthday, compiled exclusively of #rap tracks considered classics of the genre, & was giving it a listen while on a run.

“I’d heard these songs hundreds of times over the years, but that day—as a #woman in her 30s making a playlist for a man who’d recently had a baby #girl—I was suddenly hearing them anew. The volume seemed turned up for every mention of ‘hos’ & ‘bitches,’ like someone had taken a sonic highlighter & run it over every verse about devious, promiscuous, & generally disposable #women.

“#HipHop had undoubtedly shaped my worldview, my politics,& my sense of self. I’m sure that, by then, I’d skimmed over countless think pieces about #misogyny & #sexism in the music. But only that day did it dawn on me that I’d spent my formative years w/hip-hop whispering into my headphones that I, as a #woman, was worthless—that #women were interchangeable accessories, extras in songs & videos, not to be trusted, certainly not to be believed.
#SeanCombs #law #ViolenceAgainstWomen #MusicIndustry

“I didn’t stop listening to #HipHop. I mean, come on. But I did find myself turning songs off on my walks, avoiding certain artists, gravitating far more toward R&B, old soul, & classic salsa. There is much in hip-hop music & culture that I loved & still love. But after that day, it’s never been the same.”

“It’s not just that I hear the music in a different way; I look at my past in a different way. All the girlfriends I used to hit the clubs w/now look back & wonder: What choices did we make because we’d been listening to that message for years? What judgments did we cast upon other #women because of it, because we’d been conditioned to be #indifferent to one another? What didn’t we notice?”