There has always been an allure to the public persona that surrounds Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Since the bombshell allegations leveled against him by ex-partner Cassie Ventura and a slew of other accusers, audiences all over the world have been tuned into the rapidly escalating legal case against Combs. The subsequent raid on his home and eventual arrest for sexual trafficking and racketeering have left a trail of discourse and theories surrounding Combs and his alleged long-standing abusive and violent behavior.
Some of these glaring, open-ended questions are answered in Peacock’s new documentary, “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.” The documentary, produced by Ari Mark, takes audiences back to Combs’ humble origins in Harlem and The Bronx, highlighting that Combs wasn’t always a powerful, allegedly violent music executive — but doesn’t cower from portraying Combs’ illuminating and steadfast characteristics: his ambition and determination to make it big in the music industry, no matter the cost.
In an interview with Mark, the executive producer discusses the public’s perception of Combs and how people thought they knew who Combs was because of his cultural significance. But “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” “peel[s] back some of these layers” to show a myriad of conflicting sides to Combs that audiences experience through his former friends, employees and peers.
Read Salon’s interview with “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy’s” executive producer, Ari Mark down below:
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You produce a lot of documentary work. What about this project drew you in or was different from your previous work?
I try to avoid projects that tell the same story over and over again, or rehash things just for the sake of it. For example, we did something about the Zodiac Killer, and when I was telling people I was working on that they were like, “Oh, it’s gonna be the same old thing. We all know the story. Here we go again.” But I wouldn’t have done that. It was really very much about something completely unexpected.
In this case, once it became clear that Peacock really wanted to do something that was really about the formation of Diddy and the origin story and evolution all the way through, they felt like there was an opportunity there to certainly re-familiarize everyone with some of the things that they’re seeing. It also [could] zoom out from the expected and traditional and go, “OK, where did this all come from? Are there people who are or were close enough to him that could shine a light on what’s behind the mug shot? Who is this guy and who really is he?” I think we achieved that. So for me, we have an opportunity here to be victim forward and give some of these victims a platform for speaking out, which is always worthwhile. But then on top of that, also give it a psychological lens that I think audiences are going to be really curious about.
What about Sean “Diddy” Combs’ life story was the hook — what was important to portray in this documentary?
His upbringing was really key in making folks understand that this evolution doesn’t happen overnight. As a society, we have come to share these cultural moments about this pop culture icon, and it’s something that we can all understand and remember together. I think being able to use those moments and then unpack them a bit more, for what truth lays behind them, is something pretty important to do and people will be drawn to not because it’s like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that he did these terrible things.” That’s not the draw. The draw is [that] I know this guy. I buy his music. I see him at home. I see him on TV. Especially if you work in the world of entertainment — We all know him. We all know him in quotes. To be able to remove the quotes and go, “OK, you don’t know him. You actually know nothing.” Let’s peel back some of these layers.
This is an intimate look at Diddy’s childhood from the perspective of his own friends, employees and peers — what was the process like getting these people on board?
It’s pretty hard. I’m not going to pretend that that’s because of me. The reason why I think folks participated in this project is because, number one, we had a couple of other really great executive producers, including Stephanie Frederic, who had some relationships with this community and some of these participants. There was a little bit of trust there, but more than that, you have a network partner that is willing to not only move quickly, but also move decisively, and be willing to say, ‘We want to make the smart version of this story, and we want to make something that has some substance.’ But it also makes my job a lot easier. I can have the honest conversation with [sources] and be like, “Look, you’re going to be approached by a gazillion outlets, you already have. Here’s what’s going to be different about this and here’s why this is probably the place for you to share your truth.”
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Everyone has their opinions on Combs and the allegations against him. How did this documentary weed out all the public noise and focus on the person at the center of this chaos?
The first thing is doing it — that helps. But the other piece of it is, we all know what the documentary about Sean Combs is probably going to be. Once the trial’s over and once this whole thing’s adjudicated, there will be a bigger picture, analysis of the behavior, because we can only know so much at this point because those many cases aren’t adjudicated. As a result, we don’t have the discovery to be able to have those documents. We can’t FOIA anything.
Legally speaking, what we’re really left with is voices. An ensemble of voices that could say, “I was with him at this part in his evolution. I was there at this point. The other one was there at that point.” So you can connect those dots and make something whole and ultimately something almost a little more. I really do think it’s more interesting at this stage because you really feel the fear and the tentativeness of the participants in a way that I don’t think you’ll feel later. That’s really important for audiences to see. Often with these types of projects where people are coming forward, it is about being silenced and it is about being able to be unsilenced. I don’t know that that opportunity is going to exist in six months. I feel like, not only is that an opportunity, but it actually really matters, and it gives me a reason to want to do this and be involved.
The documentary does that by focusing on very specific events in Diddy’s life and one of them is the City College Nine tragedy that made Diddy into a household name. How was he able to bounce back from a tragedy and continue to level up in the industry with seemingly no accountability?
I’m glad you brought up that story because it always felt like a part of the documentary that I was like, “Oh, are people going to really understand why this matters?” As sad as that is to say, because there were many victims of tragedy, but in the grand scheme of things, it tends to get overlooked. It’s one of my favorite parts of the documentary because how messed up is it that a tragedy like that helps make somebody and helps raise their profile?
I don’t want to get all sociological about it but it definitely speaks to where we are as a society and where we were. The fact of the matter is that sometimes making a lot of noise is the only thing that really matters, regardless if it’s good noise or bad noise. In this case, the bad noise helped him and it also demonstrated that he can get away with stuff. That was the other piece that felt really informative to me — the folks who spoke on camera about losing their loved ones. You really understand the stakes there. To him, it was promoting a concert and to everybody else, it was the big tragedy of their lives.
Another important figure in this story is Al B. Sure, Kim Porter’s ex. He shared that his son, Quincy Brown was never formally adopted by Diddy and that he was instructed to stay away from him. He recalled Porter saying, “Don’t get involved, you will get killed.” How did you get Al to share this sensitive information?
I just leveled with him. I said, “Hey, this is what we want to do. We are not looking for you to reveal some giant bombshell. We’re not looking for you to tell us this secret, or that secret. We’re not looking for you either to rehash what you’ve said on social media. We’re looking for you to have a platform, if you feel like in this emotional journey, this is the time to be able to not necessarily tell your whole story, but to at least start telling your story and start the process.”
[Al] and a lot of the other participants — but him in particular — understand we didn’t have a very strong agenda, which sometimes isn’t necessarily a good thing from a directorial standpoint. But in this case, really approaching it as, “Hey, we’re learning here, and I’m not an insider into that community by any means. I’m just trying to get a better understanding of all the noise out there. How do you respond to that noise? Where’s your head at?”
We’re never gonna be able to untangle the very complex Kim Porter relationship and the relationship with his son. That’s for him to deal with. But as far as understanding that he was really intertwined with Diddy on a professional level at Uptown Records and it’s not a great track record for those guys. I think that him making that clear to audiences and giving him his moment to make people understand that he really was a big part of the creation of Diddy and the other ones are people who were mostly deceased. That, in itself, is an important piece to share.
There are multiple different sources in this documentary, you have the Bad Boy employee and people alleging assault. How do you as an executive producer protect critical sources like this from intimidation or threats?
The key is letting the alleged victim participants take the lead. So sometimes you’ll get people where terrible, terrible things will happen to them, and they’re like, “I want to go on camera. I want everyone to see my face. And this is what I want to say.” Usually, those are cases where a lot of time passed. In the Zodiac case, for example, these people were children, and now they’re coming forward talking about what happened to them in that documentary.
In this one, it’s also fresh. So I don’t even think it’s necessarily a question of legality at all. It’s really much more about being a human being. Even if this is public record, this person doesn’t need to be recognized on the street. This person does not need that and people don’t realize that’s a real thing. We get people chasing after us, and we’re just producers. Imagine what these folks have to go through. Once somebody has the courage to go on there and use the platform to say what they want to say, just knowing the blowback, knowing what it means for them, emotionally and personally reliving it — the mental health component. If we can minimize that in any way, we will.
From a legal standpoint, you have these accusers coming forward about Diddy. What was the experience like dealing with his legal team, especially since they repeatedly denied all the claims in the documentary?
It’s a pleasure. I love dealing with legal teams. We requested an interview. He declined through legal and then we have a very large paragraph of legal language that explains what they’re after, but we’re super careful. Just because somebody is being accused of something, doesn’t mean we have a right to unnecessarily drag people through the mud without the proper legal to tape around it. These things are always tricky, but we really do work really hard to make sure that we’re being fair. It would have been nice, certainly, to be able to interview the guy. That would be freaking amazing. Nothing [would have made me] happier, but we weren’t surprised that he declined.
There were whispers about Diddy’s afterparties and his Bad Boy employee confirmed some of these alleged rumors. Why were these rumors ignored or brushed aside in the industry?
It’s so much bigger than that. It’s really in any industry, really powerful people you know can control the narrative for a very long time. That’s what he’s been able to do. Now that narrative is starting to unweave itself. Some of it will be messier than other parts of it. Some of it will be just black and white facts and some of it will be opinion and some of it will be alleged this and alleged that.
But at the end of the day, powerful people are able to silence the less powerful. We see this time and time again in entertainment and every industry. But you see a lot of it in entertainment, particularly because there are so many people who want so badly to be part of the entertainment world. Powerful people tend to kind of prey on that vulnerability.
So many of the people formerly around Combs struggle to come to terms with the many different sides of the former hip-hop mogul. In your perspective, what was it like watching these people have to reconcile with these conflicting parts of him?
It was fascinating. You just touched again on something that nobody else seems to really pick up on. It is a real feeling of working through things in the interviews. There’s a lot of that and we really wanted to make sure that you felt that because, again, it matters. It allows audiences to lean into it and go, “I wonder what it was like for that person being part of that world. I wonder what it must be like for them now, looking back.” You feel like you relate in a weird way because nobody can predict the future and nobody can fix the past.
Not to get all heady about it but you get the sense that there’s folks sitting there going, “I don’t know how I feel about this.” That’s because it’s not clean-cut. That’s what makes the most interesting stories and that’s what makes the most interesting characters, and certainly what makes most interesting interviews. In this case, I hope, and I imagine what will be clean-cut is that this was a man, who from a young age, this sort of stage was set for him to want to prove himself, to gain power, or regain his power by whatever means necessary, regardless of what shakes out in the lawsuits and in the cases, I don’t think that’s deniable. We all know that this was somebody who had achieved a lot by way of power. We know what power can do to people.
What do you hope people will understand about Diddy’s persona after watching this documentary?
I hope that the focus remains on the victims who came forward. I want people to look at their eyes, look at their gestures, hear their voices, and realize that no matter who you are, no matter how much power you have, we’re all humans. You can’t silence people. It’ll never work and it’s wrong.
“Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” is available to stream on Peacock.
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