Employee #1:
One female Sean John ex-employee shared a harrowing account about a time Combs grabbed her face following a disagreement about a creative decision. “He didn’t like that I wasn’t agreeing with him, and he wasn’t interested in hearing my point of view,” the former employee recalled.
Instead, Combs allegedly began to yell and compared himself to a renowned fashion designer. “When you speak to me, you should imagine that you’re talking to Karl Lagerfeld,” she recalled Combs telling her. “Anything I say, assume that it’s coming from Karl Lagerfeld.”
Employee #2:
Another former employee told The Daily Beast that he was fired after making eye contact with Combs, visibly expressing disappointment when the mogul showed up hours late for a meeting. From the employee’s perspective, Combs “took the look that I gave him personally.”
“There was erratic behavior, there was definitely what I would consider mental abuse, [with] how he spoke to us as employees,” the person said, adding that he often worked from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. because of Combs’ demands and the “culture of fear” the rapper had created in the workplace. There was “a lot of profanity, kind of aggressive, in your face—physically in your face—kind of stuff,” the employee said.
Employee #3:
“When people ask me about it, I always tell them it was the worst experience I ever had in my life.”
After inquiring with Sean John’s CEO Jeffrey Tweedy about whether an unidentified woman at an event was Combs’ girlfriend, the employee said the rapper seemed “possessive” over his gal pal.
He claimed the rapper grabbed him “very forcefully,” walked him to the elevator, and declared, “We want this to work out. You can’t ask questions like that… This is New York.”
Employee #4:
“It was as if you’re walking down the street and someone randomly threw a brick at your head out of the blue,” this former Combs employee said. “Out of the blue, if he was unhappy with something that you might not have done but he thought you did, you ‘caught a brick,’” they continued, recounting how Combs verbally attacked him until “I was surrounded by security guards, [who] rushed over—while he’s six inches from my face, screaming at me, telling me I fucked up.”
Employee #5:
“There was a lot of cursing, a lot of talking to people crazy, a lot of [calling women] bitches, [saying], ‘Fuck you,’ or ‘Stupid,’” or “‘I’ll fire y’all bitches right now.’” She said that in her experience, she’d “never seen him be like that with men” unless they had no “power or stature in the industry.”
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