New video has surfaced of Sean ‘Diddy
In footage obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com, Diddy, 54, stands, champagne glass in hand, like a dictator on his balcony as he calls in the quid pro quo for the hospitality so far extended.
‘We fed you all, we gave you drinks, now it’s time to enjoy life,’ he says. ‘This is a celebration of life. This is the real White Party.
‘Kids have an hour left [then] this thing turns into something that when you get older, this is something y’all gonna want to come to… so let’s just start to get our groove on, put the kids away. It’s all good.
‘All right DJ let’s hit it. Let’s do it.’
It’s impossible to hear his words today without catching in them a sinister overture to the sort of debauchery which now sees the rapper charged with a slew of heinous crimes and held without bail on suicide watch in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
Diddy’s name will be forever tarnished by the charges he now faces of sexual assault and violence, kidnap, arson and possession of firearms – and the revelations of sexual ‘freak offs’ which allegedly lasted days and saw participants – often sex workers – forced to rehydrate via an IV drip in their aftermath.
But back in the day, before he stood accused of running a ‘criminal enterprise’ and was deemed a threat to society and justice, celebrities clamoured for an invite to Diddy’s era-defining White Parties held at his East Hampton home between 1998 and 2009.
Images obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com show the glittering guest list – a who’s who of movie and music industry fame – all of whom have remained conspicuously silent since the music mogul’s arrest in New York earlier this week.
Among them is Jennifer Lopez, who famously dated Diddy between 1999 and 2001 and went to more than one of the parties that he instituted to cement his reputation as a latter-day Gatsby and industry mover and shaker.
In pictures she is cozying up with her then-beau, all smiles and kisses for the man now charged as a serial predator.
Paris Hilton, too, was a regular guest who attended the first party, held on September 7, 1998, that she described as ‘iconic’.
Photos of the gatherings are like a time capsule of late Nineties, early Noughties celebrity. Howard Stern, Kelly Osbourne, Aretha Franklin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon, ‘it’ couple Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, a young Kim Kardashian… anybody who was anybody was there, and proudly so.
Poignantly, Diddy’s ex, Kim Porter, mother of three of Diddy’s children, who died in 2018 aged 47, is also there. In some shots she sits next to Diddy, smiling with their twins D’Lila and Jessie James Combs on her lap.
There is no hint in her demeanor and appearance of the violent abuse she allegedly suffered at Diddy’s hands, which is exposed in a new memoir, In Kim’s Words, which published alleged entries from journals Porter left behind.
And, though there is no suggestion that the celebrities who attended the parties were involved in any of Diddy’s illegal activities, once the kids went home, things got wild.
In pictures shot at Diddy’s penultimate party in 2008, scantily clad, half-naked girls cavort in the swimming pool. A tangle of limbs, they pour champagne into the open mouth of a male guest.
In others, two girls, wearing only bikini bottoms, kiss while champagne flows over their bare skin.
According to former music industry insider Tom Swoope, who has recounted his own memories of ‘surviving’ Diddy’s White Parties on his YouTube channel, ‘First Off In My Opinion: Story Time’, the parties were separated into ‘tiers’ of access.
There was ‘general admission’ then a series of ‘tiers’ ending with entrance to the inner sanctum where the ‘real’ partying went on. This allegedly included sexually humiliating male and female guests on the promise of record deals or money.
Swoope and others have spoken about the drugs that were present – ecstasy, cocaine – being snorted off all sorts of surfaces including the bodies of guests.
As an industry ingenue when he first attended the party, Swoope describes an eye-popping reality.
Speaking to Oprah in 2006, Diddy told her that the intention behind the first White Party was to integrate hip-hop into the echelons of the mega-rich, to find an intersection of both worlds.
He said, ‘I wanted to strip away everyone’s image and put us all in the same colour, and on the same level.’
Swoope recalled it as more of a power trip for the rapper.
At one point, finding himself in the same room as Diddy, Swoope alleges that Diddy told a young artist to perform a sex act on his bodyguard in return for $100,000 and a record deal, before claiming it was a joke when the young man was on the cusp of submitting.
Swoope recalls Diddy wielding his power with words that echo the threat contained in allegations in the lengthy criminal complaint unsealed on Tuesday.
Chillingly, Swoope claimed Diddy told him, ‘I can make anybody do anything because this life is what they want, and I got the keys to the castle.’
For his part, Swoope said he left the party thinking, ‘If this is what goes on behind the curtain and you’re all comfortable with this… nah I don’t want this life’.
‘There were so many celebrities there who were cool with who he was and what he did to entertain them. It’s not isolated,’ he added.
‘You all need to think of everybody when you think of him and the access and amount of people who were there.’
