For greater than a decade, Casandra Ventura and Sean Combs lived what gave the impression to be a cheerful life collectively. Performing as Cassie, the R&B singer signed to the hip-hop mogul’s label in 2006, when she was 19 years previous, and the couple walked aspect by aspect on crimson carpets till their breakup in 2018. The yr prior, Ventura was inside photographers’ frames when Diddy, in a attribute show of insouciance, sprawled himself throughout the steps main as much as the Met Gala.
The unraveling of those photos, when it arrived a couple of yr in the past, was sudden, jarring, and full. For the lawyer behind the grievance that precipitated Combs’s tailspin, it was one thing of a trademark.
“My follow has at all times concerned, for essentially the most half, attempting to evaluate folks’s credibility,” the lawyer Douglas Wigdor lately stated. “She struck me as somebody who was extraordinarily credible and struggling to at the present time.”
Wigdor LLP primarily handles issues of employment discrimination and sexual misconduct. For the reason that agency’s founding in 2003, its namesake has taken on more and more high-profile litigation, particularly because the #MeToo motion sparked heightened consciousness round strategies of recourse out there to victims of intercourse crimes dedicated by well-known males.
Wigdor did, he acknowledged throughout a dialog in his Manhattan workplace this previous summer season, need to discover unfamiliar media channels when he took Ventura on as a consumer. He has been combing by Black on-line gossip emporiums similar to The Shade Room and Lipstick Alley, taking a specific curiosity within the work of one TikTok user who has been probing Combs’s authorized scenario (and singing Wigdor’s praises). The core of the duty, although, might recall to mind any variety of lawsuits he has pursued in opposition to defendants similar to Harvey Weinstein, the NFL, the Recording Academy, and as of final week, Garth Brooks.
In November 2023, Wigdor filed a grievance on Ventura’s behalf in opposition to Combs. The go well with alleged a cycle of violence and sexual abuse that spanned the course of the couple’s relationship, and it launched the now notorious time period “freak offs”: elaborate, drug-fueled, days-long sexual performances that, Ventura’s go well with claimed, generally concerned Combs forcing her to have intercourse with male prostitutes as he filmed.
The grievance started with a set off warning, an unusual flourish that was regularly famous in media protection and on-line dialogue of the allegations. If this framing was legitimately useful—the go well with contained detailed accounts of Combs’s alleged abuse—it additionally spoke to Wigdor’s facility for shaping public narrative. Ventura and Combs settled the following day, however by the point they did, the worldwide press had a brand new and indelible portrait of a cultural titan.
The aftershocks of the go well with are nonetheless being felt. Within the months that adopted the settlement, Combs confronted greater than 10 additional lawsuits involving alleged sexual assault. (A type of complaints was additionally filed by Wigdor.) Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee said final week that he’s representing 120 accusers in forthcoming sexual misconduct fits—and thru these, he promised in a press convention, “many highly effective folks shall be uncovered.” In September, when prosecutors introduced federal intercourse trafficking and racketeering fees in opposition to Combs, the indictment made important reference to Ventura’s allegations. (He has pleaded not responsible and denied any wrongdoing in reference to the lawsuits he faces; his lawyer has stated, concerning Buzbee’s shoppers, that Combs can not “handle each meritless allegation in what has turn out to be a reckless media circus.”)
Given the larger-than-life status Combs had loved for many years prior, the cascade could have by no means begun with out Ventura submitting go well with.
Combs and his authorized staff made a “colossal mistake,” Wigdor stated. In lots of cases, an accusation posing this stage of reputational danger could be resolved confidentially, earlier than a lawsuit is filed in public view.
“Perhaps there was the sense that we have been bluffing, that we weren’t going to file,” he added.
Wigdor professed by no means to bluff in such situations, an assurance delivered with little bravado. He has a crisp, equanimous method—to a generally unsettling diploma—however hardly a domineering one. Whereas it could be troublesome to say, as he sat surrounded by framed press clippings describing him with superlatives similar to “America’s most outstanding #MeToo lawyer,” that he was apologetic about his standing, he didn’t fairly declare it both.
It was his bearing, he hypothesized, that set him other than different attorneys pursuing comparable varieties of work. He did appear to take some satisfaction on this. “I haven’t sat in on conferences with folks like Gloria Allred,” Wigdor stated as a caveat, however “I really feel like loads of attorneys get into these conferences with shoppers and possibly they attempt to ingratiate themselves with the consumer or potential consumer by getting them extra overestimated.”
“I’m attempting to suppose if I’ve ever hugged a consumer,” he continued, pausing for a second to verify. “I don’t suppose I’ve.”
The posture additionally offers Wigdor a sure blankness, or slipperiness, that has naturally added a level of intrigue to his motivations. In 2017, he represented greater than 20 people making claims in opposition to Fox Information together with sexual misconduct and racial discrimination, in addition to Juliet Huddy in her sexual harassment allegations in opposition to Invoice O’Reilly and Jack Abernethy. (O’Reilly and Abernathy denied the allegations, and twenty first Century Fox privately settled with Huddy.) A Bloomberg Businessweek headline described him as “The Trump-Loving Lawyer Who Received’t Cease Suing Fox Information.”
