For a lot of, the downfall of Sean “Diddy” Combs may need come as a shock. However for many who have had the misfortune of interacting with the disgraced rapper in particular person, the chilling revelations about him and his true face have solely confirmed what they all the time knew however didn’t voice.
One such particular person was Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist who had profiled and interviewed Diddy three years earlier than his arrest for Vainness Honest’s 2021 challenge. Months after his incarceration, Cottom sat down for a chat with The Unbiased and regarded again at her profile with newly opened eyes and laser focus as she recognized the wholly performative nature of Diddy and his workers’s habits, one meant to painting a specific “vibe” at whole odds with the true nature of the person himself.
Sean Combs has gone by way of a number of main “rebrands” designed to maintain his model related in a altering panorama, from “Puff Daddy” to “P. Diddy” and even simply “Diddy.” When Cottom was writing her profile, Combs was within the midst of his newest rebrand — to “Love.” It is a chilling change on reflection, one thing which Cottom identifies within the article.
“I feel that’s notably egregious. After the whole lot got here out, selecting ‘Love’ felt like a psychopath transfer. It wasn’t sufficient to attempt to rebrand himself and do all of the status administration, however that appeared like a really form of specific thumb within the eye to his victims. That, to me, pushed it into being, you recognize … sick.
For Cottom, the whole interview — from the phrases spoken by Combs himself to its staging, and the attitudes and behaviors of the workers surrounding Combs — was a efficiency. “I had walked into the Truman Present,” she stated of the over-the-top staging. Diddy has given unusual interviews earlier than, comparable to his sexually-charged Elle interview, however Cottom’s profile was on an entire different stage. She describes the occasion as within the “prime tier of strangeness” she’s encountered in her lifetime.
She was introduced right into a “very intentionally” staged a part of the home, the place a wall crammed with professionally taken household photographs was on show. When Combs lastly met together with her, Cottom was subjected to one of many “most deliberate acts of seduction” she’d ever seen, a type of fawning try at allure she described as “the best way a person flirts along with your buddy’s mom.”
“I do keep in mind considering, the whole lot that isn’t being stated right here is as essential as what he’s saying – so who’s right here, the place they’re standing, who’s silent, the individuals who stored getting into and exiting the room and someway knew precisely what they have been speculated to do … all of that, to me, was as a lot part of the story, and it was extraordinarily distinctive.”
In keeping with Cottom, workers didn’t even wish to inform her their names. When it got here to the precise interview with Combs, Cottom is obvious that regardless of Combs’s try to orchestrate a “vibe,” she was getting one thing fully completely different from him. Combs needed to be seen as attractive, younger, and highly effective, however she noticed by way of the act.
“Absent the cash and the star energy, I’m unsure we’d take a look at him and assume these issues, however that’s the type of story a really scared, self-conscious little boy would write about himself, proper? ‘The women love me. I’m so highly effective. I’m so dope. I’m a playboy.‘ That appeared like a baby.”
Regardless of Diddy’s projection of energy and affect, his so-called allure did not work on Cottom and he was visibly out of his depth, uncomfortable with not being in charge of the scenario. Whereas she described him as a person who was “able to having accomplished nearly something” — given the surprising nature of the numerous allegations towards Diddy, that’s not onerous to imagine — she additionally acknowledged that “he was fashionable, however that’s not the identical factor as highly effective,” which might be why he failed to flee the results of his actions.