Why Was Diddy a Lovable Pop Culture Icon For So Long?
He's accused of ordering the hit on Tupac!
Suge Knight is believed by many experts to have ordered the hit on Biggie Smalls.
Diddy is believed by many experts to have ordered the hit on Tupac.
And yet, until recently, the portrayal of the two record company moguls couldn’t have been more different. Diddy was hip-hop’s teddy bear, the guy who subbed on Live With Regis and Kelly when Regis Philbin couldn’t make it. He was celebrated for his wealth, ubiquitous on magazine covers.
Meanwhile Suge Knight, similarly successful in music in his heyday, was practically a pariah. When Jimmy Kimmel interviewed him, he wore a bulletproof vest.
What separated them, of course, was their charisma. Suge came off as dark, a bully. In the above video, for example, he seems to insinuate that Eazy-E was killed because someone injected him with the AIDS virus.*
*Of course, this is preposterous. How would you obtain a needle full of the AIDS virus? Why would you choose to kill someone this way? And why wouldn’t Eazy have said anything?
Diddy, meanwhile, came off as the life of the party. At the height of his pop culture ubiquity in 2010 he starred in the big-budget comedy Get Him To the Greek, in which he played a goofy-yet-depraved music executive. It was funny when he ordered Jonah Hill’s character to stick a bag of heroin up his butt, in order to help the rock star played by Russell Brand get it through security, because it seemed so ludicrous.
One could be forgiven, then, for being gobsmacked in May, when CNN released shocking video of Diddy physically assaulting his ex-girlfriend, the pop star Cassie, at an L.A. hotel.
Since then, a tidal wave of lawsuits been filed against him, including, most recently, one alleging that he raped and drugged a 13-year-old girl. He is also facing federal criminal charges for racketeering and sex trafficking, among other crimes.*
*I’d add that he has denied all of the charges, except that new charges arrive so frequently that his lawyer hasn’t had time to deny them all.
Beyond the formal charges, countless people have come forward on social media and in the press with other accusations. Diddy’s downfall has inspired a cottage industry of sorts, dedicated to further tarnishing what’s left of his public image. In fact, the other day I saw an ad from a law firm soliciting allegations from Diddy victims for a class action lawsuit.*
*The ad was on Instagram!
There’s no doubt that many of these accusations are true, but there’s also no doubt that some of them aren’t.
Perhaps most dubious has been…