Netflix airs “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” docuseries produced by 50 Cent, defying cease and desist letters from the imprisoned music mogul’s legal team
NEW YORK: Netflix has released an explosive docuseries about Sean “Diddy” Combs, defying legal attempts by the imprisoned music mogul to block its broadcast.
The four-part series “Sean Combs: The Reckoning” chronicles the career and dramatic fall of the 56-year-old rapper and record executive.
Combs was sentenced in October to 50 months in prison for prostitution-related crimes.
His trial heard how he coerced his former girlfriend Casandra Ventura into performing so-called “freak offs” with hired men.
The Netflix series features interviews with associates detailing his allegedly predatory behavior and two people who claim he sexually assaulted them.
Combs’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Netflix a day before the Tuesday release, claiming a copyright violation.
They pointed to footage in the show of Combs speaking with his legal team days before his September 2024 arrest.
In the footage, he urges them to “find somebody that will work with us, that has dealt in the dirtiest of dirty business of media and propaganda.”
Combs’s spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said the artist had been capturing the video to “tell his own story, in his own way.”
“It is fundamentally unfair, and illegal, for Netflix to misappropriate that work,” Engelmayer told AFP.
Netflix said the footage of Combs was legally obtained, according to a statement cited by the Washington Post.
Engelmayer also complained about rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson executive producing the series, calling him a “longtime adversary with a personal vendetta.”
The pair have a feud dating back to the mid-2000s, when 50 Cent released a diss track accusing Combs of knowing who murdered The Notorious B.I.G.
Combs was convicted in July of two counts of transporting people across state lines for prostitution.
A jury acquitted him of the most serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
He is currently held in a low-security federal prison about 80 miles south of New York.
Combs is due to be released in May 2028. – AFP
