Fashion designer Bryana “Bonna” Bongolan appeared in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering trial on Wednesday, June 4, and claimed that the disgraced music mogul once called himself “the devil” and, in a different incident, held her over a 17th-floor balcony.
Bongolan testified that Diddy picked her up one early morning in September 2016 and “held” her on the railing of the balcony at Cassie Ventura’s 17th-floor apartment in Los Angeles. She described the incident as lasting approximately 10 or 15 seconds.
“He basically came up from behind me,” she said. “He lifted me up and had me on top of the rail. I was trying not to slip and pushing back… For a split second, I was thinking that I was going to fall.”
“Do you know what the fuck you did?” she remembered Diddy asking her before he “threw” her onto some furniture nearby. She said that even today, she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Following the alleged attack, Bongolan continued, she experienced back and neck pain. She also said the incident caused bruising on her leg, and photos of that bruised leg that she said an ex-girlfriend took were presented to the jury.
Bongolan said that she still has night terrors and paranoia because of the alleged incident.
“I used to scream a lot in my sleep,” she said, but that has gotten better over time.
Bongolan filed a $10 million lawsuit against Diddy over the incident last year. She told the jury that she filed the lawsuit to “seek justice for what happened to me on the balcony.”
The designer also testified about a different encounter with Diddy in early 2016. She said that she, Cassie, and a photographer named Bad Boi (no relation to Combs’ record label) were on the beach in Los Angeles, and Combs was at a house nearby.
At one point during that day, Bongolan said, Combs “came up really close to my face and said something along the lines of, ‘I’m the devil, and I could kill you.’ I was terrified, but because of the cocaine [that she had taken earlier that day] I had a little confidence.”
Bongolan told the courtroom that she and Ventura went on a shopping trip around that same time, but Diddy didn’t join them. The Bad Boy Records founder did, however, leave Cassie upset after he texted asking about her location, and then sent the singer a list of places she and Bongolan had visited that day, even though he wasn’t there.
In 2015, Bongolan became friends with Cassie while they were working on a fashion line with Diamond Supply Co. She said she saw the abusive nature of Cassie’s relationship with Diddy when he “threw a knife in Cassie’s direction” from “pretty close,” and that Cassie “threw the knife back.”
Under cross-examination from Diddy’s attorney Nicole Westmoreland, Bongolan acknowledged that she and Cassie had used drugs together regularly — though she is now sober — and that she used to sell her friend drugs “on at least a weekly basis.” She explained that both of them enjoyed what she called “coco puffs” — marijuana blunts sprinkled with cocaine.
She also said under Westmoreland’s questioning that she and Cassie had discussed the alleged balcony incident both before Cassie filed her November 2023 lawsuit against Combs, and again afterward. She denied talking about the possibility of filing her own suit against the mogul during those conversations.
Bongolan’s cross-examination continues on Thursday, and an anonymous alleged victim of sexual assault by Combs is scheduled to take the stand after her.
