Who is Cassie? The stalled music career of the Sean Combs trial’s star witness

This report mentions physical and sexual violence.

This week, federal prosecutors in the case against hip-hop mogul Sean Combs have had one of their prime witnesses on the stand in Manhattan. Casandra Ventura, better known by the stage name Cassie, was once Combs’ girlfriend and protégé in the music industry, and her career is a story of unfulfilled promise.

From an early age, Cassie Ventura already seemed destined for some kind of stardom. Her debut single, “Me & U,” exploded when she was just 19 years old — and by then she had already been a successful model for years. She signed with the famed Wilhelmina modeling agency at age 15; by the next year, she was strutting the runways at New York Fashion Week.

“I had remembered her from her Delia’s catalog days,” remembers Hillary Crosley Coker, a cultural journalist and historian who was writing about hip-hop and R&B for Billboard magazine at the time of Cassie’s debut. “And so when her videos began to come out, I said, ‘I know that face.’ … It was a perfect, fun little club song, and you really got the sense that she had the opportunity to do something bigger if she just had the runway to do it.”

“Me & U” soared to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and would become one of the biggest singles of 2006. That song, and her first album, were released by Bad Boy Records, the label co-owned by Combs.

“It was there on that chart for 27 weeks,” Crosley Coker says, “which is hard to do if you are just a sort of flash in the pan. You could stay on there for a couple of weeks — two, three. But if you’re on there for 27 weeks, then the song is growing and people are playing it in different places in the country. Not only was Bad Boy Records at that time doing a significant press push and radio push to promote her, but people actually wanted to hear what else she had to say and what else she had to sing about, because she was fun.”

Cassie was a newcomer, but her deal with Bad Boy was a stunner. She signed a 10-album contract, a spectacularly long arrangement in the mid-2000s, longer than the ones signed by artists like Rihanna and Britney Spears. Crosley Coker points out that with a deal of that length, Cassie was going to be tied to Combs — artistically, professionally and financially — for many years to come.

“In hindsight, it does feel like a control move, as opposed to something that could actually benefit her career,” she says. “I think at that time, maybe she didn’t have representation that could fight back for her, or could say, ‘That’s a really long time.’ “

Crosley Coker says that at the time, Bad Boy was famous for being controlling in its artist deals: Other artists on the label had agreed to similar terms, owing perhaps to Combs’ reputation as a kingmaker.

“I remember specifically The LOX, which was a group that was initially signed to Bad Boy and then moved over to Ruff Ryders Records,” she recalls. “They were verbally fighting with Sean Combs on [New York radio station] Hot 97, saying, ‘Give us our masters, let us out of this deal.’ And so there were a lot of disgruntled artists around Bad Boy.”

Cassie never replicated anything close to the success of “Me & U.” A second single called “Long Way 2 Go” made it to No. 97 on the Hot 100, then vanished after just a few weeks; it was her last song to reach any kind of mainstream popularity.

This week, Ventura testified that Combs began physically, sexually and emotionally abusing her in 2007, around the same time the two of them began dating. That alleged abuse has been at the center of her testimony at Combs’ trial.

On the stand, Ventura said that during her 11-year relationship with Combs, she recorded hundreds of tracks under his direction. She now calls those efforts busywork, saying that her main job was organizing and participating in multi-day marathons of sex and drug use directed by Combs, which Ventura said happened hundreds of times over the years. Combs’ defense lawyers say her participation was entirely consensual, and Combs has pleaded not guilty to all the criminal charges against him.

As for her recording career, Cassie went on to release just one more mixtape, in 2013 — seven years after her promising debut.