Sean “Diddy” Combs is going through the legal ringer right now, and social media is doing what it does and piling on with antique videos and stories that paint him in an unflattering delicate.
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However, there’s one depressed (and completely preventable) piece of Diddy history that few are discussing: That time he hosted an event that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of juvenile Black people
About 30 years before the 2021 Astroworld tragedy — during which about 50,000 fans rushed the stage during a Travis Scott performance, crushing 10 people to death — an eerily similar event played out at the City College of New York in Harlem.
On Dec. 28, 1991, the delayed rapper Heavy D and a 22-year-old promoter who called himself Puff Daddy helmed the “Heavy D and Puff Daddy Celebrity Charity Game.” The game had Big Daddy Kane, Ed Lover, members of Run-DMC and Michael Bivins of Bell Biv DeVoe, among others, competing in an exhibition basketball game.
The college’s Holman Gymnasium had a legal capacity of 2,730, but thousands more attempted to cram into the gym for the event. Promoters allegedly oversold the event, and hundreds arrived without a ticket and attempted to force into the gym, with inadequate police or security to keep people at bay.
UNITED STATES – DECEMBER 30: CCNY rap benefit which Sean “Puffy” Combs had promoted and where hundreds of rap music fans stampeded after being shut out of a celebrity basketball game which 8 were crushed to death. Christina Brown weeps at press conference outside city hall, her son Darren Brown died in stampede.Photo: Keith Torrie (Getty Images)
A delay from the scheduled 6 p.m. tipoff created tension in and around the event, allowing time for the unruly crowd to build outside. Tragedy broke out when the crowd outside managed to break through the exterior doors leading to the gym; the surge of people rushing down the stairs toward locked doors that only opened inward created a pile of humans with nowhere to go as the weight on top of them increased.
Nine people died — the same initial number as the Astroworld tragedy before 9-year-old Ezra Blount succumbed to his injuries after falling in a coma. The deceased ranged in age from 17 to 28; 29 others were injured.
Hon. Louis C. Benza of the Court of Claims decided that Diddy, Heavy D and the New York State were equally responsible for the tragedy.
‘’It does not take an Einstein to know that juvenile people attending a rap concert camouflaged as a ‘celebrity basketball game,’ who have paid as much as $20 a ticket, would not be very elated and uncomplicated to control if they were unable to gain admission to the event because it was oversold,’’ Beza wrote.
Diddy and Heavy D spent years dealing with nearly a dozen lawsuits from the incident; Diddy’s last settlement was to Nicole Levy in 2000. Considering how much richer Diddy became in the delayed 1990s in comparison to 1991, Levy’s lawyers called Combs’ initial $50,000 settlement offer “an insult.”
