POLLY VERNON
COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR
WHEN I SAW leaked CCTV footage that appears to show musician Sean Combs attack his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura in a hotel corridor in 2016, I felt all the same things you did. Horrified, mesmerised. Wretched with that nausea-inducing jolt you get on witnessing a thing that just should not be happening – a big, raging man grab a small, unresisting woman by the back of her neck, throw her to the ground, kick her, drag her around – but which just is happening. Chilled by the understanding that real life violence is so much worse than TV violence, so much more ordinary, perfunctory, distressing. Bemused by how just… weird it is, that the man allegedly doing the attacking is the same one you’ve seen a thousand times before, suited and booted, polished and poised, well-lit and wellmanaged, in music videos, on red carpets, at premieres, on stage. Struggling to reconcile the celebrity you kinda felt you knew (a bit?), with this guy. Towel-around-his-waist guy. Battering-a-woman-in-a-hotel-corridor guy.
I did say ‘allegedly’, yes – not because I’m some weasly amoral agent of the mainstream media who’s either too weak to denounce domestic violence when she sees it or too indoctrinated with misogyny to think it counts, but because there’s a legal framework to this world, and it’s important to abide by it. Though Combs does seem to have admitted his involvement. Two days after the CCTV was leaked, he posted a video on Instagram saying, ‘I was f ** ked up… My behaviour on that video is inexcusable… I’m disgusted… I’m so sorry.’
But here’s the last thing I felt on seeing that CCTV: guilt. Sneaky, creepy, rotten, unmistakable, inarguable guilt. Because even though I know domestic violence happens all the friggin’ time (an estimated 2.1 million people experienced it in England
