Photo Credit: NoWah Bartscher
A hotline for victims of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, encouraging them to come forward, has been flooded with over 12,000 calls in 24 hours.
Attorney Tony Buzbee publicized a hotline earlier this week for victims of Sean “Diddy” Combs and those who knew about his crimes. The number has been flooded with over 12,000 calls in the first 24 hours since Buzbee made it public — a massive influx from the approximately 3,200 they received in the hotline’s first 10 days.
“When I made the announcement that I was going to pursue these cases, the floodgates really opened,” said Buzbee in a statement to Law & Crime. “The volume of calls has been overwhelming, and it’s been kind of shocking.”
“So, our Herculean task is to try to sift through every one of these calls and make sure that we’re identifying those who are victims and those who are witnesses and collect evidence,” he continued, explaining that he has around “100 people working on this task,” and they expect to begin filing civil cases within 30 days.
The hotline received around 3,200 calls within 10 days of going live. But after Buzbee’s press conference last week, which made the number more well-known, they received a whopping 12,000 calls in only 24 hours.
The 54-year-old Combs was arrested in Manhattan last month following a federal probe into alleged sex trafficking crimes, which include accusations of drugging and raping victims. Buzbee has expressed that his team already has enough evidence to file 120 victims’ lawsuits against the rapper. Out of those victims, 25 have been identified as underage at the time of the abuse, with at least one as young as nine.
“This individual, who was nine years old at the time, was taken to an audition in New York City with Bad Boy Records,” Buzbee disclosed at the press conference. “This individual was sexually abused, allegedly by Sean Combs and several other people at the studio, in the promise to both his parents and to […] himself of getting a record deal.”
Buzbee explained claims are coming from victims who were seeking television or music careers and to whom promises were made allegedly to secure their stardom. Some claims are also coming from those who were invited to Diddy’s now-infamous parties.
“Any entities or other individuals that either were involved, participated, facilitated, egged it on, provided the venue, benefitted from it, profited from it, that sort of thing,” said Buzbee, telling Law & Crime he and his team are seeking “every potentially liable party” to include before filing additional claims.
Though Buzbee and his team were initially shocked by the sheer volume of calls, the attorney says they’re sifting through over 25 years of alleged behavior by Sean Combs. These have taken place at studios, album release parties, Combs’ well-known White Parties, his so-called “Freak Off” parties, and numerous other events.
“I have no doubt that there are people right now who know that they were somehow involved in this, who are now scrubbing their social media, who are searching their memories, who are deleting their texts, probably deleting pictures, and trying to distance themselves from this, and we know who they are, or we will find out who they are,” warned Buzbee. “This is not something that’s going to happen overnight, but I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg.”
Buzbee said there was a discernable “pattern of behavior” at Diddy’s parties, and it was an open secret throughout Hollywood. “We want to be very careful about who we name,” he said, explaining that some of the cases about to be filed include names that the public would find “shocking.”
