The Combs case isn’t about celebrity. It’s about parenting.
Sean “Diddy” Combs with his mom as his plus one
There’s widespread anger that Sean Combs was only convicted of prostitution charges, not the more serious trafficking counts. But our outrage is misdirected. Yes, the law fails domestic violence victims, but before that, the law fails to protect children from the conditions that produce both predators and victims. And if we don’t hold parents accountable for violating ethical obligations, we can’t protect children at all.
Cassie didn’t just stay because Diddy was powerful. She stayed because no one taught her that power isn’t love. And Diddy didn’t abuse women because fame corrupted him. He became a predator because no one taught him that control isn’t care.
The story doesn’t begin in the penthouse but in middle-class childhood homes. And it took two broken family systems to build this tragedy: one that raised a man who thought domination was affection, and one that raised a woman who didn’t know the difference.
Sean Combs grew up in a home where sex and power were entertainment. His mother hosted sex parties while he was a child. His father was murdered when he was two. Combs learned that women exist to be controlled and absorbed. He learned that domination is masculinity, that manipulation expresses love. Combs mother failed to protect, failed to teach, and failed to show that love has limits.
Cassie’s mother didn’t protect her either. At age 16 Cassie was on New York City catwalks. – an arena known for diminishing girls’ feeling of self-efficacy. By 18 Cassie was in NYC with no financial support beyond modeling which is a notoriously dangerous situation. This isn’t empowerment but neglect wrapped in family ambition.
But in America, we call it hustle. We take a girl who was never taught to say no and throw her into a world built on hearing yes. So she was particularly vulnerable when her early career performances went poorly. Cassie’s mom didn’t intervene when her daughter became involved with a powerful, controlling man twice her age. Cassie’s mother had already established a pattern that people with money can take what they want, and mothers should look away.
Then Cassie’s mom gave Diddy $20,000. This wasn’t the act of a confused woman trying to help. That was allegiance. Approval. A mother signaling to her daughter that the abuser was more important.
Diddy’s relationship with money reveals everything. For his mother’s 80th birthday, he handed her a $1 million check—on camera, with crowds watching, staged like a music video. It wasn’t about care. It was about reminding everyone who holds power now.
He used the same template with Cassie and Jane: paid their rent, bought their clothes, funded their travel. But those weren’t gifts — they were leashes. According to Cassie’s lawsuit, the cycle was clear: abuse, then a designer bag. A beating, then a lavish vacation. Rape, then flowers.
The pattern was identical: a woman depends on him, he provides extravagantly, she stays quiet, he stays untouchable. This is the economics of abuse — money used to erase guilt, silence protest, and reframe violence as generosity.
Victims who leave abusive relationships typically have one thing Cassie didn’t: a foundation of secure attachment that taught them their worth isn’t negotiable. They have an internal compass that says “this isn’t love” when someone hits them. They have voices in their heads — often their parents’ voices — that say “you deserve better” instead of “don’t make trouble.”
It’s easy to be angry at the jury, to say the law failed Cassie, to scream that domestic violence still isn’t taken seriously. But the law didn’t fail—attachment did.
In Michigan, we held parents criminally accountable for a school shooter. Their son killed four classmates because they failed as parents. We were brave enough to say it: parental negligence gets us kids who shoot up schools.
The Diddy case is the same: parents who failed. But our parental liability laws don’t protect grown women from Diddy’s behavior. Attachment parenting does. It protects women from not understanding their own value to the point that they’re being groomed for predators. And secure attachment is a protective shield for men to prevent them from growing up like Diddy.
We will never protect the next generation if we keep pretending abuse begins with men. It begins when children are taught that being chosen is the same as being safe, that obedience is the price of love, that silence keeps the peace. It begins when parents either don’t know how to protect—or choose not to.
Diddy was not born a predator. He was raised in one world and permitted to create another. Cassie was not born a victim. She was handed over quietly, in exchange for a lottery ticket in the entertainment industry.
This isn’t just one man’s crime. It’s a cultural failure. But it took two mothers to make it possible. One gave a boy permission to control. The other gave a girl no defense against it.
We need to stop asking why victims stay and start asking why children were left undefended. Because in this country, children have no legal right to secure attachment. No right to emotional safety. No right to protection from the people who brought them into the world.
Their mothers didn’t break the law. They broke their children. Until we’re ready to say that, we’ll keep pretending we’re powerless to stop it. And we’ll keep calling it love.
So is Diddy enmeshed with his Mother? And was Cassie trained ( like most AFAB people) to please especially if there was monetary success?
It’s so disturbing that his Mom publicly supported him . I think I would still love my son and visit him in prison but there would be alot of soul searching.
I have u found theories that stuff like this started when we became farmers ,started claiming land then people as property to hold on it
Enmeshment for both Diddy and Cassie, I think. It makes the parents blind to the kids’ needs because the parents are so focused on taking care of their own needs and using the kids as a way to do that.
I actually learned about enmeshment from a commenter on my blog. It was shocking to see how well it described me and I had to really focus to stop it.
I do find it hard to accept her mother paid to appease Diddy not protect Cassie. And weird the way she said we wanted to memorialise her bruises. It feels like they took the photos without her consent as something to bargain with not report. If she was used to being uncomfortable as a model and having to be photographed maybe it felt normal?
Having children- a son and daughter ( if they came out as anything else’s I would be accepting but have to work on others) it frightens me.
It looks to me like Cassie’s mom is protecting her daughter’s career instead of her daughter. I understand that Cassie was so abused at that point that she lost perspective and could not see her own agency. But it looks to me like her mom lost perspective as well — long before the payment. And that is really wierd. The mom has no distance from the situation.
Maybe. She may have had the idea Cassie had ‘made it’ so why ruin it with this?
I have no knowledge about her background whether it was poor or Christian or it’s just playing into Puritan America .
It’s awful. It makes me question myself too. Would I help my daughter would I tell her to walk away from lucrative but toxic deals? How would I treat my son if he behaved like Diddy but on the outside made me look great?
So many questions.
I hope she lives as happily as she can with her money and her hopefully lovely husband. I hope she enjoys her baby
Hi Penelope, this lack of secure attachment you are talking about is no longer just an American cultural issue but quite global – and it is creating a whole disconnected generation – who would tend to harm. Families are not supported in creating attachment – to do so, there needs to be support for parents to be with their kids. There needs to be support for people who come from detached parents to do therapy… before they become parents because very often this is intergenerational behaviour.
I am so glad you are pointing this out. I hope think sinks in for your readers.
Parenting is one of the most important things there is to determine a child’s future outcome. Sure we all have our own personalities and make our own choices but even those options become very limited when a child’s focus is survival. Both moms are at fault as you point out and so are the fathers whose absence for any reason is devastating to a child. And of course, for the moms to mess up that bad, they probably had it worse. It is a hard cycle to break.
As for the breaking of generational chains, back in the nineteen sixties, I recall syndicated columnist Ann Landers (like Dear Abby) only suggesting marriage counsellors, and “if your spouse won’t go, then go alone.” In my day, only folks in L. A. went to a psychoanalyst, as they were too expensive for real people. My parents, who served in WWII, thought only crazy people needed therapy.
But things have changed. Today, for those scared of the word “analyst” or “therapist,” we have all sorts of garden variety “counsellors,” including free ones from the government.
In recent years, getting help is part of pop culture, shown on sitcoms and dramas. I don’t think Billy Joel meant someone literally from the Viennese school of psychiatry, not at all, when he sang, “When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?”