I thought I was finished with Diddy.
After spending the summer covering his trial—talking to his friends, bumping into Kanye West at the elevator bank, and writing countless stories from opening arguments to closing statements—I figured I’d closed that chapter. I even wrapped things up with a final take on what the whole ordeal lacked.
And then 50 Cent stepped in.
Fif’ has been trolling Diddy for years, but this time he went further by producing a multi-part Netflix documentary directed by Alexandria Stapleton.
This week, Sean Combs: The Reckoning finally dropped. And it’s doing exactly what Netflix likely hoped: sparking headlines with shocking claims from people featured in the film.
But the most compelling part of the four-episode series isn’t brand-new revelations—most of the information and allegations have existed publicly for years, sometimes decades. Nor is it the early-career history recap in Episode 1 or yet another retelling of the Biggie and 2Pac saga in Episode 2.
(A quick highlight: Derrick Parker, the original NYPD hip-hop cop, offers a fascinating walk-through of Diddy’s Steve Stoute and Club New York incidents. Sadly, he leaves out his always-entertaining stories about J-Lo’s mom.)
What truly stands out in The Reckoning isn’t fresh evidence. It’s the clear patterns the series lays out. The doc argues that Diddy is, above all, a creature of habit.
Diddy’s patterns
Across the four episodes, the same behaviors appear over and over. In his romantic life, the show paints a picture of Diddy pursuing women who are already connected to powerful men he admires or envies. As a young man, he chases Kim Porter while she’s dating his label’s biggest star, Al B. Sure. He dates Misa Hylton knowing she recently split from Erick Sermon, who was making genre-defining music with EPMD back when Diddy was still in college.
The doc even claims Diddy once tried to pursue a woman involved with Suge Knight, allegedly buying her $50,000 worth of jewelry. Cassie, the series argues, also falls into this pattern—she entered his orbit while dating producer Ryan Leslie.
Another, darker pattern the series highlights is Diddy allegedly turning fatal tragedies into career accelerators. The first example it points to is the 1991 CCNY celebrity charity basketball game he co-hosted with Heavy D, which ended in a deadly stampede that killed nine people. Erick Sermon bluntly states that the tragedy—and the wave of media coverage that followed—was “how [Combs] got super-famous. That’s the beginning of Puff Daddy.”
The series draws a parallel to Biggie’s murder, which paved the way for Diddy’s solo career. His tribute song “I’ll Be Missing You” didn’t just top charts in 15 countries—it won him a Grammy and, according to the documentary, transformed him into an icon after his emotional 1997 VMAs performance.
Then there’s the recurring allegation that he didn’t pay the people around him. Kirk Burrowes, one of the documentary’s central voices, says Diddy forced him to sign over his 25% stake in Bad Boy under threat of violence. Producer Lil Rod claims he was promised $250,000 he never received. Former Bad Boy artist Mark Curry recounts similar stories, accusing Diddy of triple-dipping and taking money out of artists’ shares for everything—from studio time to music video appearances. Dawn Richard, who isn’t featured in the series, filed a lawsuit last year echoing those same accusations.
Not actually a final reckoning
One of the most disturbing alleged patterns the doc touches on is shooting incidents at recording studios. Episode 2 revisits 2Pac’s 1994 Quad Studios shooting. Diddy has long denied any involvement, saying, “It is beyond ridiculous and is completely false. Neither Biggie nor I had any knowledge of any attack before, during or after it happened.”
Pac’s cousin William Lesane appears to question that in the doc, urging viewers to “look at the facts.”
“Puff is there. Pac has been shot in New York under your watch,” Lesane says. “The question would be, ‘Who knew that he was pulling up?’”
In the final episode, another incident eerily mirrors the Quad shooting: Lil Rod recounts a 2022 situation in which he claims he heard gunshots after Diddy, his son Justin, and another man went into a bathroom. Rod says he later saw the man covered in blood on the floor.
Diddy has rejected all of Lil Rod’s accounts as “complete lies.”
The truth is, the story of Sean Combs is far from over. He’s appealing his verdict, and numerous civil cases against him are still moving through the system. Despite its title, Sean Combs: The Reckoning isn’t a definitive reckoning—it’s more like a Cliff’s Notes version.
But, as with much art, its real value isn’t in plot twists but in the themes it reveals.
