Sean “Diddy” Combs allegedly threatened former Vibe magazine editor-in-chief Danyel Smith to be “dead in the trunk of her car” when she refused to let him see his magazine cover before it was published.
Smith said in a personal essay published on Friday in The New York Times Magazine that she chose Combs as the cover star for Vibe magazine’s December/January double issue in 1997. The photos for the shoot were inspired by the poster for Warren Beatty’s 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, which featured Combs wearing white angel wings. In a split run of the cover, each would have a separate motif: “one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones.”
Following the picture shoot, she remembered Combs asking to see the covers. Smith said she declined his request because it violated the magazine’s guidelines. After telling him no, she learned that Combs “planned to come to our office and force us to show him what we’d chosen—and to make us choose something else if he didn’t like what he saw.”
Smith was aware that Combs had been convicted of criminal mischief in 1996 for threatening a photojournalist for the New York Post with a gun, but she also knew she “had to have him on the cover.” Fearing what Combs would do, Smith stated that Vibe employees “put together a plan” to keep her safe if Combs appeared at the workplace.
Smith claimed that Combs came into the office with two security guards one day and asked the receptionist, “Where’s Danyel?” The employees, who had already been alerted by the receptionist of Combs’ arrival, then “shuttled” Smith from office to office, allowing her to narrowly escape in a taxi with the paper proofs of the covers in hand.
The next day, she claimed that Combs called the office and made a threat. “He asked to view the covers. “I was still on message: it’s not what we do,” Smith said. “It was then that Combs warned me, as I’ve repeated hundreds of times over the years, that he would find me ‘dead in the trunk of a car.’ Without skipping a beat, I informed him he needed to withdraw that threat.”
When Smith threatened to contact her lawyer if he did not “take back” his alleged threat, she claimed Combs told her, “I know where you are right now. “Right on Lexington.” After Smith contacted her personal lawyer and legal action was threatened, she claims Combs faxed her an apology two hours later.
However, immediately after the incident, the magazine’s servers were taken from the workplace. The entire issue was saved on one of the servers, fueling speculation that crew members from Combs’ label Bad Boy Entertainment were involved in the crime. The problem was eventually resolved since Vibe’s art director had it on a disk.
The New York Times said that Combs, through representatives, declined to comment on the record for this piece.
This accusation comes nearly two months after security video from 2016 surfaced showing Combs reportedly violently beating his ex-girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura. Combs apologized in an Instagram video posted on May 19. “I was fucked up — I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses,” the man stated. “My behavior on that video is inexcusable.”
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