Diddy is making headlines again, this time from ex-employees who allege that he fostered a “disturbingly toxic workplace environment.”
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Five former Combs employees have come forward to The Daily Beast alleging that the mogul’s abusive tendencies in his personal life extended to his business world.
The former staffers spoke to The Daily Beast under the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution but described instances of “erratic” behavior from Diddy while working at Sean John and Blue Flame, his now-shuttered advertising agency.
Diddy’s Former Employees Detail Alleged Instances With Mogul
One female ex-employee detailed an alarming encounter where Combs allegedly grabbed her face during a disagreement and told her to stick out her tongue.
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She recalled to The Daily Beast, “He puts one hand on both sides of my cheeks and says, ‘Stick out your tongue,’ and then he squeezes my face harder and yells at me.”
She recounted how Combs then told her he “just wanted to see” if her tongue was bleeding because she was “clearly biting it.”
“I started looking for a job immediately after that moment,” she said. “I just wasn’t interested in being there to deal with that kind of treatment. You have to really idolize him and see him as an icon. I didn’t. I was just there to do my job.”
Other alleged instances of erratic behavior from Diddy included when he reportedly fired an employee for making eye contact with him after he showed up hours late for a meeting, and when he yelled in another ex-employee’s face.
Described as “catching a brick,” the latter of the former employees alleged that he was subjected to Diddy’s ire unprovoked.
“It was as if you’re walking down the street and someone randomly threw a brick at your head out of the blue,” the former Combs employee told The Daily Beast. “Out of the blue, if he was unhappy with something that you might not have done but he thought you did, you ‘caught a brick,’” they continued, recounting how Combs verbally attacked him until “I was surrounded by security guards, [who] rushed over—while he’s six inches from my face, screaming at me, telling me I f****d up.”
“That’s when I learned what a brick is. I caught my first brick, my only brick.”
Diddy Allegedly Acted Aggressively To A Staffer Over An Unnamed Girlfriend, Accused Of Being Especially Disrespectful To Women
In another alleged instance, a former staffer described Diddy exploding after a Fashion Week event where he asked about a woman believed to be the mogul’s girlfriend.
Source: ABC
“You can’t ask questions like that… What are you doing?” the person alleges that Sean John’s CEO Jeffrey Tweedy told him.
“Then Puff came over and didn’t even look at me and said, ‘What did he say?’ And then Jeff said to Puff, ‘He was asking about your girl.’” Combs, the employee claimed, glared at him, shook his head, and walked away.
He later said at the end of the night the rapper grabbed him “very forcefully,” walked him to the elevator, and declared, “We want this to work out. You can’t ask questions like that… This is New York.”
Ultimately, several of Diddy’s former employees compared his work environment to Game of Thrones, where they were “walking on eggshells,” in particular when it came to female employees.
“There was a lot of cursing, a lot of talking to people crazy, a lot of [calling women] b***s, [saying], ‘F*** you,’ or ‘Stupid,’” or “‘I’ll fire y’all b****s right now,” a former Blue Flame employee told The Daily Beast.
“She said that in her experience, she’d “never seen him be like that with men” unless they had no “power or stature in the industry.”
Read the entire report HERE.