The Diddy documentary cycle has begun and is already proving problematic | Sean “Diddy” Combs

Sean Combs is his mother’s child. According to Tim Patterson, a close friend who lived with embattled label founder Bad Boy Records in the ’70s, Janice Combs was known for hosting parties at her home in Mount Vernon, New York, particularly popular with pimps, drug dealers and others Unsavory types were popular. It was not uncommon for the boys, who were quite young at the time, to naively walk into rooms and find partygoers having sex. “That was just Saturday night,” Patterson said.

The legend of those first “freak-offs” is among the headline-grabbing revelations in Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy – a new Peacock documentary that attempts to trace the Combs bell curve from its middle-class beginnings to the peak of cultural influence on the Crash that culminated with Cassie Ventura’s explosive sexual abuse lawsuit. The film joins the tidal wave of Diddy documentaries that have flooded the market since Combs was charged with sex crimes last September, sandwiched between a three-part series from TMZ (The Downfall) that debuted in April and a four-part one Max series (The Fall), which is due out later this month. The Netflix production “Diddy Do It,” loudly and proudly announced by rapper mogul 50 Cent, a perennial Combs skeptic, is still pending.

“The Making of a Bad Boy” feels like a rush job to take advantage of this choppy market. And the film doesn’t do much to satisfy viewers who have either followed Combs for the past three decades or watched Jaguar Wright and other industry “insiders” with their definitive tinfoil theories. Among other things, the documentary looks at the 1991 celebrity basketball game that sparked a stampede at New York’s City College as more than 5,000 spectators poured into a 2,700-seat gym and survivors who had lost family members in the crush reunited. And although you’d have to have a stony heart not to feel sorry for Sonny Williams – who reluctantly accepted a $50,000 settlement for his sister’s death, even though Combs, then an aspiring hip-hop impresario, more than was worth $40 million (“a slap in the face,” Williams called the offer)—the tragic anecdote isn’t enough to confirm the central theory: that Diddy was a good, bad boy was.

The documentary promises never-before-seen images that will get to the heart of the matter – sepia-toned Polaroids of Combs in smart clothes, a young hustler; Behind-the-scenes footage of him at home when he was still a cultural juggernaut, supposedly filmed just before one of his explosive temper tantrums – but the dots in between never quite connect. Worse, the subject matter experts getting the most airtime are the same speakers who have been the loudest about Diddy since the lawsuits began: Mylah Morales, the makeup artist who went public as a witness to Combs’ mistreatment of Ventura after Leaked CCTV footage confirmed this (“I was shit,” Combs declared, seeking remorse); Gene Deal, the Diddy bodyguard who saw everything and stopped nothing; Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, the victim advocate in the spotlight-grabbing guise of old woman advocate Lisa Bloom – who of course also shows up.

But somehow more disturbing than this shock doc’s anonymous interviews with alleged attack victims of Combs (more on her claims later) is the recurring presence of psychoanalyst Carolyn West, whose main job is to link Combs’ alleged horrors to childhood trauma. They estimate it goes back to Combs’ father Melvin – an associate of Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas. Melvin, a dapper fashionista and ladies’ man nicknamed “Pretty Boy,” was arrested for drug possession in 1971 and released when his crew’s $5 million heroin distribution chain was busted. Less than a year later, Melvin was found shot to death – and word on the street was that he was killed for betraying the entire operation. (Lucas explicitly rejects this in his biography, calling Melvin “one of the few people I considered a friend.”)

Sean was just three years old at the time. Although Combs has reflected on this loss over the years, including in a documentary for his own cable network Revolt TV, the Peacock crew leaves it to West to poke fun at Combs’ arrested emotional development and remaining feelings of abandonment and insecurity . The film relies on West’s psychologization to bridge his transition from pretty, spoiled mama’s boy to an actual gang member with his own street name – Puff Daddy.

Statements from Combs’ legal team, played through slowly flashing title cards intended to deflect certain accusations against Combs while affirming his innocence, only seem to encourage the production to present even wilder ideas – not least whether Combs had something to do with Death of Tupac and Tupac had to do with Biggie. A woman, who remains anonymous, claims that Combs, with the help of staff, snatched her from a club and covered her with baby oil that “felt like acid” before raping her with a TV remote control. She recalls going into a “catatonic state” before fleeing to a neighboring house to call the police – who, she further claims, reluctantly wrote down her report. Mitchell-Kidd, the woman’s attorney, confirmed this, but when the production requested evidence from law enforcement, it was rebuffed. That might have been the end if Albert Brown III didn’t have more to say about our bad boy.

Brown, most notably under the stage name Al B Sure! is a prominent antagonist in Combs’ villain story – the new jack swing superstar who was climbing the R&B charts when Combs started at Uptown Records. In one of many ironic asides, Brown recalls a recording session when his girlfriend Kim Porter was holding their newborn son Quincy when Combs walked in and said, clearly enough for bystanders in the room to hear, “I wish I had one.” “beautiful girl like The.” (Cut to years later: Combs introduces Porter as his girlfriend and Quincy as his son…) Brown remained close to Porter until her death in 2018, which conspiracy theorists blamed on Combs. And while pneumonia was determined to be the official cause of death for Porter, that hasn’t stopped Brown from suspecting foul play over the years. In the documentary, as elsewhere, Brown directly calls Porter’s death a murder. “Should I say that? allegedly“He purrs into the camera.

Brown further claims that Porter was working on a memoir at the time of her death – a claim her children, including Quincy, have strenuously denied. Additionally, Brown does not rebut conspiracy theorists who blame Combs for Brown’s own near-death experience in 2022, which he describes as a hit-and-run crime. Finally, to get to the point, Mitchell-Kidd – again: a lawyer – refers to Combs as “an embodiment of Lucifer.” By the time West, the psychiatrist, returns to the question of personal responsibility, the documentary’s 90 minutes are all but exhausted. Meanwhile, far more interesting avenues along the Combs arc remain largely unexplored, such as who was in his network of enablers and how they were dispatched.

It’s notable that the filmmakers managed to get this past NBCUniversal’s management consultant. It shows how far the standards for documentary filmmaking have fallen, but also shows how easy it is to attack Combs at this low point. While it’s true – as Patterson, the childhood friend who lived with Combs, claims – that “monsters are created over time,” Combs wasn’t a Marvel character doomed to an unfortunate timeline. He was a man who had all the resources to solve his father’s problems through therapy. Why would a documentary bother apologizing for him when he himself was barely willing to do so?