"You have to really idolize him and see him as an icon": Diddy's employees at Sean John reveal harrowing tales about rap mogul's behavior

Sean “Diddy” Combs’ supposed former employees from his lifestyle company Sean John and his now-closed-down advertising agency Blue Flame have recently accused him of workplace violence. The five alleged employees anonymously shared their accounts of what they had experienced under the rap mogul’s employment in conversation with The Daily Beast.

They accused Combs of sustaining his abusive behavior at the workplace by berating and threatening them. In one of the instances shared by a female employee, the Bad Boy Records founder allegedly grabbed her face after they disagreed with a creative decision. She told the publication:

“He didn’t like that I wasn’t agreeing with him, and he wasn’t interested in hearing my point of view.”

The employee claimed Combs began to yell at her and compared himself to a celebrated German fashion designer. She recalled him telling her:

“When you speak to me, you should imagine that you’re talking to Karl Lagerfeld. Anything I say, assume that it’s coming from Karl Lagerfeld.”

She continued:

“At that point, I didn’t have a response to that, and he reaches out and he grabs my face…He puts one hand on both sides of my cheeks and says ‘Stick out your tongue,’ and then he squeezes my face harder and yells at me to stick out my tongue, forces his hands on my face.”

The female employee recalled Combs telling her he wanted to check if her tongue was bleeding since she was biting it. She told the outlet that she immediately started searching for another job after that incident:

“I just wasn’t interested in being there to deal with that kind of treatment. You have to really idolize him and see him as an icon. I didn’t. I was just there to do my job.”

The former employee referred to the 2016 hotel footage where Diddy was seen assaulting Cassie Ventura and said the release of the clip did not surprise her. She added:

“I’m sorry that it took this long…I hope he gets what’s coming to him.”

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More about Diddy's alleged toxic workplace behavior

Another former Sean John staffer who worked under Sean “Diddy” Combs, told The Daily Beast how the record executive sacked him. He said he made eye contact with Combs and expressed his disappointment in him for arriving a few hours late to a meeting. However, the employee claimed Combs fired him after he:

“Took the look that I gave him personally.”

The male staffer continued:

"There was erratic behavior, there was definitely what I would consider mental abuse, [with] how he spoke to us as employees."

He accused Combs of creating a "culture of fear" at their workplace and making demands that made the employee often work from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The male staffer continued that there were:

"a lot of profanity, kind of aggressive, in your face—physically in your face—kind of stuff."

He compared the work environment at Sean John with that of Game of Thrones where everyone walked on eggshells and some of his colleagues threw others under the bus to stay in their boss’s good graces. The staffer recalled a designer once informed Diddy that his team was overwhelmed with work and could not complete a particular project. But the rapper stopped in the middle of a presentation and told the designer:

“he wasn’t inundated with sh*t, and to say it one more fucking time, and walked up to him face to face, lip to lip, and said, ‘Say it one more time, motherf***er.’”

The former employee recalled another instance while attending a Fashion Week, he asked Jeffrey Tweedy, Sean John’s CEO about an unidentified woman who might have accompanied Diddy at the event. He wanted to know if the woman was the Combs’ girlfriend. Upon learning of the ex-staffer’s inquiry, the mogul allegedly grabbed him forcefully before the employee left, and threatened him:

“We want this to work out. You can’t ask questions like that… This is New York.”

This employee also expressed he was not shocked at all after watching the surveillance footage of Cassie getting assaulted that CNN released in May.

Another former employee of Sean John recalled how fear prevailed in the company under Diddy’s supervision. This ex-staffer claimed one of the company directors used to leave the building every time Diddy arrived as they were terrified of him. They recalled employees leaving the job was quite frequent with some lasting only six months.

Another ex-employee said the term “catching a brick” was used around the office when Combs’ ire targeted a staffer.