Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Shutterstock
Nearly a year into the torrent of hellish accusations of sexual assault, physical violence, and drugging involving multimedia mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, a circus of suspicion swirls around everything he ever touched as people relitigate known controversies and tidbits we never much thought about before. In this new light, a 15-year-old video of 15-year-old Justin Bieber being offered a car and grills during a two-day hang with Diddy and a second clip of the mogul giving the kid grief for not hanging out with him more have set off people’s groomer sensors. There have been far-fetched conspiracy theories about old songs — like the suggestion that Bieber is singing the word “oil” in the chorus of My World 2.0’s “Baby,” in reference to the thousand bottles of baby oil Diddy apparently kept in his Miami mansion. The sleuthing follows the chain of command further to Usher, who signed Bieber in a joint venture with Scooter Braun to Raymond Braun Media Group, a label that has only ever touted the one artist. When he was 14, Usher was sent to live with Diddy, on LaFace Records exec L.A. Reid’s urging and with his mother’s permission, in a last-ditch effort to eke out a style for the singer, whose voice was changing; the raunchy Jodeci-adjacent vibe of his self-titled debut album and the orgies he claimed to have witnessed at Combs’s house in a 2004 Rolling Stone profile are inviting questions about whether those parties — and the Bieber meetup — were anything like the horrors alleged in the indictment files.
There’s an itch to depict Diddy as a Black Jeffrey Epstein, the ringleader of clandestine, A-list perversion. One hundred and 20 new accusers have come forward recently, a number of whom claim they met Combs as underaged prospective performers only to be drugged and assaulted. The scale of the misconduct alleged over the past year is breathtaking. But rumor baiting is eclipsing constructive reflection. The pattern seekers are more interested in uncovering a juicier story than finding justice for victims who must now compete with specious secret-society rhetoric and crude Diddy memes to be heard. There have been presumptuous attempts, for example, to pin Bieber’s pill and promethazine addictions on the fallout from his two-day stay with the Bad Boy Records founder. But it takes a sustained lack of oversight for a young singer to develop the problems with lean, molly, ’shrooms, and Xanax that Bieber had in the spiral between 2012’s Believe and 2015’s Purpose. Mismanagement can put pop stars on a path to tragedy — like the drug-related, drowning death of Aaron Carter. Chasing after a simpler trail of culpability keeps us circling back, decade after decade, to figure out how the music industry that enabled R. Kelly, a church of the almighty dollar where the hit is holy, has yielded yet another golden-eared terror. Conspiracy theorists contort the facts, heaping blame that should be spread across a field of suits, handlers, and enablers onto a single trending figure, overlooking painstakingly documented histories of youth-artist mistreatment.
Confronting Diddy’s accusations means reckoning with a long history of ignoring red flags from music-industry juggernauts who have exploited young boys for profit. Private time with a music executive has long been seen as a once-in-a-lifetime career-enrichment opportunity, especially in an era of debating whether meeting Jay-Z is worth half a million dollars. Usher’s “flavor camp” stint with Diddy exposes both the appeal and the danger of placing blind trust in hitmakers to have sharp moral compasses. (In my 2022 interview with Usher, I asked about his 1994 self-titled album, fishing for an admission that it was a questionable idea for a teen to be singing lyrics by Jodeci’s DeVante Swing on the sexually forward “Can U Get Wit It”; he stressed that it made history. But he has told Howard Stern he would not send his sons on the same journey.) In the ’90s, teen pop architect Lou Pearlman made millions for the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and others. The starmaker presented as a father figure and door-opener, dangling the keys to the kingdom in front of parents: Brian Littrell, one of the older Backstreet members, took over guardianship of a 13-year-old Nick Carter so he could tour with the group. The band later alleged in a 1998 lawsuit that their confidant and provider had helped himself to an unfair cut of their earnings, making himself rich while they could still barely cover their bills (The lawsuit later settled.) The troubles with Pearlman, who spent the final years of his life doing time for a Ponzi scheme targeting elderly bank savings, weren’t strictly business related: Members of Innosense and LFO alleged sexual misconduct that the Trans Continental Records founder denied.
The Backstreet lawsuit, and a similar suit involving ’N Sync, couldn’t shake the demand for Pearlman’s business expertise. In 1999, Pearlman and Bunim Murray Productions created Making the Band, a show born out of his interest in working his formula again with the group O-Town: “clean cut, fair-skinned kids with pinup-ready looks and hip-hop-tinged pop material,” as the Tampa Bay Times put it in a 2000 profile of the mogul promoting the series amid acrimonious splits with his other groups. “I think it’s an endless cycle … as long as God’s making little boys,” Pearlman told the paper, “he’ll be making little girls and they’ll love each other.” He inspired a wave of talent shows about kids trying to grab the attention of a music-industry titan. Diddy would go on to follow in his footsteps. By 2002, the year American Idol debuted, Diddy had escaped a gun charge and abandoned the Puff Daddy moniker. He got a shot at image reform by giving Making the Band a hip-hop revamp, taking the reins from Pearlman. Diddy used MTV to flash business bona fides and form groups like Danity Kane and Day26. But recent allegations of abuse under the cover of career mentorship, including a bombshell lawsuit from Danity Kane’s Dawn Richard, cast a pall over the series: She claims the hip-hop vet known for shepherding hits at Daddy’s House Recording Studio once called a room full of “lethargic” and inebriated young girls a “buffet” while he and other associates took advantage of them.
The tide of underaged artists being shuffled into adult situations, sexualized by industry elders, granted access to drugs and alcohol, and dropped when the financial returns diminish has continued unabated for years. Predation heralded tragedy when the late Aaron Carter came off the teen-pop assembly line $2 million in debt with a drug addiction. (He, too, settled a lawsuit against Pearlman in the early aughts.) On the West Coast, manager and filmmaker Chris Stokes wrote and directed 2004’s critically reviled, quietly beloved You Got Served, a showcase for the gifts of Marques Houston and B2K, acts from his label, the Ultimate Group. By 2008, he had been accused of molestation by signees like late singer Quindon Tarver, who claimed Stokes orchestrated sexual abuse. (Stokes maintains his innocence; in January, his ex-wife, MonYee Morton, expressed regret on Instagram that she “married a perpetrator.”)
In recent weeks, the conspiracy trail has gotten more unwieldy. One fake Bieber song that’s begun circulating features what sounds like an AI voice model singing over a blithe synth-pop track, “I lost myself at a Diddy party / Didn’t know that’s how it go.” Piers Morgan platformed R&B singer Jaguar Wright’s unsupported claims about Aayliah’s death, while 50 Cent is sharing Diddy memes followed by links to his merch page on social media — and this is the guy producing a Netflix documentary about the Diddy accusations. The well seems poisoned. The discourse has lost the plot. The AI parodies and the tenuously evidenced theories only make it harder for people to know what to believe when victims need moral clarity and support.
We have to stop pretending the story here is dark forces corrupting a few promising men each generation, when the truth is that money papers over any misdoing. It’s a disservice to people who continue to or may have yet to come forward accusing wealthy and respected men of crimes. Meanwhile, young men are still being socialized by figures harboring errant notions about masculinity. Lifestyle coach and media personality Andrew Tate enjoys a massive following while on house arrest in Romania on suspicion of rape, trafficking, and sex with a minor. Boosie Badazz gets grace for admitting to hiring sex workers for his young sons but worrying his queer daughter will “contaminate” them. Russian Kick streamer Vitaly Zdorovetskiy hosts hip-hop stars to create “to catch a predator” like content, in which they beat up predators who are lured by decoys, then frequently released without calling police. The stratosphere of hip-hop entertainers and commentators is dotted with toxicity masquerading as family values. There is a choice between tiptoeing mindlessly down a bread-crumb trail of what-ifs and taking issue with a business structure and culture of never-ending, disconcerting enablement, a choice between gorging on memes and supporting victims who continue to come forward highlighting abuses of power. Anyone who is not itching for change in the anything-goes industry that let a young Usher run around with rappers and brought great pain into the lives of Quindon Tarver, Justin Bieber, Aaron Carter, and a constellation of mishandled teen stars is continuing the horrific status quo.
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