I profiled Diddy. His rebranding as ‘Love’ was a ‘psychopath move’

Sean Combs sat down three years ago for a magazine profile in which he applauded #MeToo while waxing lyrical about this love of women – as he launched a rebranding as ‘Love’ himself in his latest name change. The entire interview was performative, the writer tells Sheila Flynn – and revelatory in new ways as Diddy faces a litany of civil and criminal charges

Sean Combs, pictured in 2018, was the subject of a cover interview story in 2021 for Vanity Fair as he rebranded himself ‘Love’ rather than ‘Diddy’ (AFP via Getty Images)

Veteran writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom called her mother after leaving the most stage-managed interview she’d ever conducted – with none other than Sean Combs, formerly known as Puff Daddy, formerly known as Diddy, then trying to be known as Love.

“I remember saying to my mom that he sounded like a child,” Cottom tells The Independent of the rapper she was profiling for Vanity Fair’s September 2021 issue.

Combs was in the middle of the ‘Love’ rebranding  – prompting an initial eye roll from Cottom, she writes in the piece – and invited her into his sprawling Malibu property for a sitdown, during which he repeatedly referred to himself in the third person as he boasted about his own handsomeness, she says.

“He kept talking about, ‘I’m an attractive young man,’” Cottom says of Combs, who was then 51 and several years older than the writer herself. “The way he would describe himself, first of all, was ‘young’ which I thought was bizarre. It was telling that he has created a character version of himself that is powerful and sexy and physically attractive when really, what he is, is rich.

Rapper and impresario Sean Combs, formerly known as ‘Puff Daddy’ and ‘Diddy,’ among other names, has been behind bars since his September arrest on a raft of charges including racketeering and sex trafficking (Getty Images)

“Absent the money and the star power, I’m not sure we would look at him and think those things, but that’s the kind of story a very scared, self-conscious little boy would write about himself, right?” she says. “The ladies love me. I’m so powerful. I’m so dope. I’m a playboy. That sounded like a child.”

The interview setup negotiations had been fraught and “aggressive,” Cottom says, with Combs’ manager demanding to know about the writer and the story framing while providing almost no one else from the mogul’s life to be interviewed for the profile. Combs was equally vague about why he was choosing that particular moment to promote his “Love” rebranding, which he’d first posited jokingly in 2017 before filing a petition two years later to change his middle name.

In May 2021, he pushed the name change into overdrive with an Instagram post showing off a photo of his driver’s license – “Sean Love Combs” written under his picture – and the caption: “Look what I just got in the mail today. IT’S OFFICIAL!!! WELCOME TO THE LOVE ERA.”

That Instagram post, along with almost all others from Diddy’s profile on the platform, has vanished in the wake of an avalanche of accusations against him in less than a year. He’d already settled a 2017 sexual harassment suit by a former employee, noted in Cottom’s piece along with a reminder that then rapper’s rep called that settled matter “a frivolous lawsuit by a disgruntled ex-employee who was fired for cause.” 

Three new lawsuits were then filed in November 2023, however, under a New York law offering adult survivors a one-year window to file suits regardless of the statute of limitations. Those lawsuits alleged Combs had drugged and raped three separate victims, which some allegations dating back decades; he continued to categorically deny all claims.

Sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom interviewed Combs for the cover story of Vanity Fair’s September 2021 issue (UNC Center for Information Technology and Public Life/Felicity Gancedo)

Cottom was welcomed into Combs’ sprawling mansion in the summer of 2021, more than two years before those suits were filed. But the legislation had passed in the New York Senate in June 2021, paving the way for the governor to sign it into law the following year; it took effect in November 2022, and the three Combs suits were filed right before the deadline expired.

As Cottom was setting up the 2021 profile interview with Combs’ people, she notes that they “were so aggressive; I never got it in the moment.

“The only thing that makes sense to me, in retrospect …I’m wondering if just knowing maybe the sheer volume of potential [in] claimants, that he was just trying to get out ahead of the extended time to file a civil case,” she says.

Whatever the reasons, the negotiations eventually succeeded, and she found herself walking with her grad student assistant into Diddy’s oceanfront home for a very over-the-top encounter. Combs’ staff said he was taking important last-minute business calls, so she observed the surroundings as he kept her waiting.

“The first floor was set up very deliberately,” she tells The Independent, describing a Ciroc bottle display in his bar and a wall of professional family photographs. “But there was a ton of activity I could hear, people, on the second floor … it sounded like there had to have been about maybe a dozen people upstairs.”

When Diddy did deign to descend from upstairs, she says, he orchestrated “one of the most deliberate acts of seduction I’ve ever been involved with.”

She describes his demeanor as “the way a man flirts with your friend’s mother … trying to charm her, but not in a serious, sexual way.”

Combs, pictured in court with his lawyers, has pleaded not guilty to all charges (REUTERS)

“My sense was he never really engaged with a woman like me, someone who didn’t really need anything from him,” she says. “And he was a little off his game … so he kept trying different approaches.”

He showed off the view, his journal, pictures with Biggie, anything he could do to impress her, she says. His staff was “very, very deferential.”

“I think I asked him at one point about how he runs a tight ship, and he was like, ‘No … they know the kind of vibe I need to work with, and everybody’s job is to maintain that vibe.’”

Cottom herself felt like “I had walked into the Truman Show,” she tells The Independent.

“I do remember thinking, everything that is not being said here is as important as what he is saying – so who is here, where they’re standing, who is silent, the people who kept entering and exiting the room and somehow knew exactly what they were supposed to do ... all of that, to me, was as much a part of the story, and it was extremely unique.

“And I like to think I’ve talked to some strange characters in my time, but this was in the top tier of strangeness.”

Staff, she says, “didn’t want to tell me their names – so it was that level of just extreme sort of paranoia.”

The writer “tried very hard to be deliberate in my word choice for describing the setting, for example, because I did want to try to capture … how clear it was to me, in the moment, that it was very much a performance.”

Combs tried to set her up in an outdoor “sexy” situation overlooking his stunning view, calling for staff specifically to bring her a “pashmina” – “so deliberate; he says it because he wants that written down,” she tells The Independent – while gushing about how he loves caring for women and enjoying their company.

Combs delivered the commencement speech and was conferred an honorary degree in 2014 at Howard University, which he attended before dropping out to pursue a career in entertainment; the university revoked the honor earlier this year after CNN published 2016 footage of Combs brutally beating then-girlfriend Cassie (AP)

She writes in the piece how she was surprised that Combs brought up MeToo before Black Lives Matter. Looking back, she says, that now seems strategic – as well as hollow.

Combs is quoted in the VF profile lauding the movement and how, “when they said in the #MeToo, when it was over, it was over … The #MeToo movement, the truth, is that it inspired me. It showed me that you can get maximum change.”

Cottom pushed him beyond that, she says, asking about why the movement affected him and what he thought as a girl dad – but she didn’t get very far.

“He couldn’t even perform it well ... It was another one of those moments where it was clear that it was out of context, the quotes,” she says. “He wanted it to make the piece, but he didn’t have anything to make it significant. And he did get very uncomfortable when I asked follow-up questions.”

Now that Combs is suffering his own #MeToo moment – not only sexual assault lawsuits but a litany of criminal charges and damning video footage of him beating one victim – Cottom has a far more sinister interpretation of his “Love” rebranding.

“I think that is particularly egregious,” she says. “After everything came out, choosing ‘Love’ felt like a psychopath move. It wasn’t enough to try to rebrand himself and do all the reputation management, but that seemed like a very sort of particular thumb in the eye to his victims. That, to me, pushed it into being, you know … sick.”

She was horrified by the 2016 footage obtained and published by CNN in May depicting Combs brutally beating then-girlfriend Cassie in a hotel – its public release eventually eliciting an apology from the rapper.

Before that, however, Cassie’s lawsuit – filed under her legal name, Casandra Ventura – prompted Cottom to go “ back through my notes, looking at it through those eyes.

Combs dated Jennifer Lopez while known as Puff Daddy, then changed his name to P. Diddy, then Diddy, then Love - the final moniker change he explained in his interview with Cottom; the writer believes the mogul’s teflon reinvention days are now over (Getty Images)

“What was most surprising to me is that my notes match the person she described,” Cottom says, noting “everything from the extreme amount of control to how hard he tried to seduce me” in the interview.

She was also reminded of how Diddy’s team offered up no sources or friends who could round out the profile “on the record ... about his new era or whatever.”

“I remember that being very strange,” she said, adding: “I think it is because he had become isolated.”

“I wish I had properly pulled at that piece, like, why aren’t people willing to talk about him? Why doesn’t he have any friends? Why aren’t his business associates willing to talk to us?

“And then I also just felt ... a little dirty,” she says. “I always knew it was part of this relaunching of himself, and I hated to think that I had been complicit in his PR campaign.”

She does, however, feel that the rebranding “eras” are indeed over for Diddy.

“I think what matters now is he has probably been successfully prosecuted in the court of public opinion and, unlike a Harvey Weinstein, he doesn’t get to come back. I don’t think there’s a redemption story for Diddy.

“He wasn’t powerful enough,” says Cottom, who is also a sociologist. “He was popular, but that’s not the same thing as powerful. So I’m pretty sure this is the end ... I think somebody who looked the way he looked, when he hit Cassie in that video and then shrugs it off, the way he did — the moment where he snaps back into character – [was] so chilling to me.

“I think that person is capable of having done almost anything.”

When asked this week whether Combs had any comment about the Vanity Fair profile, his quotes within it or the timing of the cover story and ‘Love’ name change, his PR team offered the following response: “We have no idea what you’re asking about.”