Drugs, Sex, Baby Oil: The ‘Freak Offs’ at the Core of Sean Combs’s Troubles

Prosecutors say the sexual encounters in hotel rooms were coercive and abusive and are the heart of their sex trafficking case. The music mogul’s lawyers call them consensual.

A woman and a male prostitute gather for sex in a luxury hotel suite that, in the government’s telling, has been lit for filming and stocked with baby oil and drugs. Another man watches and sometimes captures the events on video. These sexual marathons, complete with a cleanup staff, sometimes went on for days.

To the people involved, they were known as “freak offs.”

The 14-page federal criminal indictment of Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, accuses him of participating in many crimes including arson, bribery, kidnapping and obstruction of justice. But the heart of the government’s case is the premise that the criminal “enterprise” he ran as an alleged racketeer was responsible for coordinating these “freak offs,” and then covering up any damage to hotel rooms, or people, when they were over.

In the government’s portrayal, they were horror shows — “elaborate and produced sex performances,” according to the indictment — that involved copious drug use and coerced sex, leaving participants so exhausted and drained that they were given fluids intravenously to recover. Then, the government said, Mr. Combs weaponized the videos he had shot to keep any participants from complaining.

“Freak-off activity is the core of this case, and freak offs are inherently dangerous,” Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at a hearing last week.

The government’s depiction closely mirrors allegations made by the singer Cassie in a bombshell civil suit she filed last fall against Mr. Combs, her former boyfriend. The indictment attaches no name to its account of the freak offs, instead referring only anonymously to a “Victim-1.”