Three years before his arrest, Diddy made it obvious he is just a ‘self conscious little boy’ who was ‘popular’ not ‘powerful’

For many, the downfall of Sean “Diddy” Combs might have come as a shock. But for those who have had the misfortune of interacting with the disgraced rapper in person, the chilling revelations about him and his true face have only confirmed what they always knew but didn’t voice.

One such individual was Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist who had profiled and interviewed Diddy three years before his arrest for Vanity Fair’s 2021 issue. Months after his incarceration, Cottom sat down for a chat with The Independent and looked back at her profile with newly opened eyes and laser focus as she identified the wholly performative nature of Diddy and his staff’s behavior, one intended to portray a particular “vibe” at total odds with the true nature of the man himself.

Sean Combs has gone through several major “rebrands” designed to keep his brand relevant in a changing landscape, from “Puff Daddy” to “P. Diddy” and even just “Diddy.” When Cottom was writing her profile, Combs was in the midst of his latest rebrand — to “Love.” This is a chilling change in retrospect, something which Cottom identifies in the article.

“I think that is particularly egregious. After everything came out, choosing ‘Love’ felt like a psychopath move. It wasn’t enough to try to rebrand himself and do all the reputation management, but that seemed like a very sort of particular thumb in the eye to his victims. That, to me, pushed it into being, you know … sick.

For Cottom, the entire interview — from the words spoken by Combs himself to its staging, and the attitudes and behaviors of the staff surrounding Combs — was a performance. “I had walked into the Truman Show,” she said of the over-the-top staging. Diddy has given strange interviews before, such as his sexually-charged Elle interview, but Cottom’s profile was on a whole other level. She describes the event as in the “top tier of strangeness” she’s encountered in her lifetime.

She was brought into a “very deliberately” staged part of the house, where a wall filled with professionally taken family photos was on display. When Combs finally met with her, Cottom was subjected to one of the “most deliberate acts of seduction” she’d ever seen, a kind of fawning attempt at charm she described as “the way a man flirts with your friend’s mother.”

“I do remember thinking, everything that is not being said here is as important as what he is saying – so who is here, where they’re standing, who is silent, the people who kept entering and exiting the room and somehow knew exactly what they were supposed to do … all of that, to me, was as much a part of the story, and it was extremely unique.”

According to Cottom, staff didn’t even want to tell her their names. When it came to the actual interview with Combs, Cottom is clear that despite Combs’s attempt to orchestrate a “vibe,” she was getting something entirely different from him. Combs wanted to be seen as sexy, young, and powerful, but she saw through the act.

“Absent the money and the star power, I’m not sure we would look at him and think those things, but that’s the kind of story a very scared, self-conscious little boy would write about himself, right? ‘The ladies love me. I’m so powerful. I’m so dope. I’m a playboy.‘ That sounded like a child.”

Despite Diddy’s projection of power and influence, his so-called charm failed to work on Cottom and he was visibly out of his depth, uncomfortable with not being in control of the situation. While she described him as a man who was “capable of having done almost anything” — given the shocking nature of the many allegations against Diddy, that’s not hard to believe — she also recognized that “he was popular, but that’s not the same thing as powerful,” which is probably why he failed to escape the consequences of his actions.