Entertainment
Column: This is what it took to expose Sean 'Diddy' Combs' abuse of his girlfriend
Thank God for hotel security cameras.
Last week, CNN obtained and broadcast footage of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs brutally assaulting a young woman in the hallway of a posh Los Angeles hotel in 2016.
As the video begins, a barefoot young woman is seen fleeing down a corridor toward elevators, stopping to hurriedly put on her shoes. Moments later, Combs emerges from a room wearing only socks and a white towel wrapped around his waist. He chases the woman down, throws her to the ground, kicks her, punches her, drags her by her hoodie and hurls a vase at her.
All while deftly managing to keep his towel in place.
The victim is R&B singer Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura. In November, she filed a 35-page federal lawsuit against Combs and his label, Bad Boy Records, alleging that he had physically and sexually abused her for years and frequently forced her into encounters with male prostitutes that he watched and recorded.
The lawsuit, which left me feeling ill, lays out a disturbing narrative of extreme abuse, coerced drug use and sexual perversion over the course of the pair’s 13-year relationship, which began in 2005. When they met, she was a 19-year-old aspiring singer, while he was a 37-year-old rap icon and record label executive. He held her future in his hands, and she describes being trapped in a classic cycle of abuse.
For more than a decade after he signed Ventura to his label, the suit alleges, Combs orchestrated most aspects of her life, regularly hiding her away in hotels — she alleges one such three-week stay in Hawaii — so the black eyes and split lips he inflicted would heal.
Naturally, Combs’ attorney Ben Brafman feigned outrage at the idea that his client was an abuser:
“Mr. Combs vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations,” he told the New York Times. “For the past six months, Mr. Combs has been subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship, which was unequivocally rejected as blatant blackmail.”
Au contraire, retorted Ventura’s attorney Douglas Wigdor: “Mr. Combs offered Ms. Ventura eight figures to silence her and prevent the filing of this lawsuit. She rejected his efforts.”
It took tremendous courage for Ventura to file her lawsuit, which was made possible by New York’s Adult Survivors’ Act. The law gave victims a one-year window to file lawsuits for sexual misconduct alleged to have happened before 2019 for which the statute of limitations had expired. About 3,000 lawsuits were filed before the window closed in November, including, most famously, by E. Jean Carroll, who claimed that Donald Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in 1996. A jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual assault, which the presiding judge said was rape by another name.
Strangely enough given Combs’ professions of innocence and victimhood, Ventura’s lawsuit was settled confidentially less than two days after it was filed. At the time, his lawyer emphasized that the settlement in no way implied that Combs was guilty.
Except, come on now. The explosive video perfectly matches many of the allegations made in Ventura’s lawsuit; she doesn’t appear to have been making it up.
The lawsuit alleges that people in Combs’ orbit — his attorney, the president of his record label — pressured her to return to him when she tried to escape. “Each time Ms. Ventura tried to run away,” the lawsuit alleges, “Mr. Combs and his powerful network would force her back to him.”
On Sunday, all too predictably, a teary Combs posted a video on Instagram.
“I was f—ed up,” he says. “I hit rock bottom. I got into going to therapy, going to rehab. I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry.”
Me, me, me, me. Not a word about the hell he put Ventura through nor even a mention of her name. And anyway, when, exactly, did he hit rock bottom and have his epiphany?
After all, Ventura alleges that in September 2018, more than two years after the hotel hallway incident, he raped her at her home after they met for dinner in Malibu to discuss the end of their relationship.
Within months of Ventura‘s lawsuit, four other lawsuits were filed accusing him of sexual assault and other offenses, including one by a woman who was in college when she alleges that Combs drugged and assaulted her, and another by a woman who was a high school junior when she alleges she was sex trafficked and gang raped by Combs and the longtime president of his record label.
It’s unfortunate that Combs cannot be prosecuted for what he did to Ventura in that hallway. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it is powerless to act because the statute of limitations has expired.
But Combs’ troubles may be just beginning. In March, his homes in Miami and Los Angeles were raided by agents of the Department of Homeland Security, who seized computers, hard drives and guns, according to news reports, which said the raids were part of a sexual assault and sex trafficking investigation of Combs, a father of seven. He has not been charged with a crime.
Someone leaked photos of the aftermath of the Holmby Hills raid to TMZ. The rooms looked as if a tornado had swept through — papers, clothing, children’s shoes and stuffed animals strewn all over. News video showed two of Combs’ adult children in handcuffs outside.
It was sad, yes, but an apt visual metaphor for the mess Combs has made.
Movie Reviews
Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror
I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.
Let’s get into the review.
Synopsis
When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.
Roll on 18 Wheleer
Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.
I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End
In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.
The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.
Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026
Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Movie Reviews
‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel
It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”
Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?
I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.
The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.
FINAL STATEMENT
You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.
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