Diddy‘s reputation has taken one hit after another over the past few months, and one of his former associates has recalled the alleged horrors of her working relationship with the mogul.
In an article published by The New York Times on Friday (July 12), former editor-in-chief of Vibe Danyel Smith went into detail about her dealings with the Bad Boy Records boss, which she previously wrote about in her memoir Shine Bright. Following a photoshoot for a cover story back in 1997, she claims he asked to see the shots before they went to press.
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When his request was denied per the publication’s rules, Puff apparently called her office and told her that she would be “dead in the trunk of a car” for not complying.
When she demanded that he take back the threat, Smith says he added: “I know where you are right now.”
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“Soon after those menacing encounters, I walked into work one morning to find my staff members tamping down panic,” she wrote. “A couple of servers, which back then were as big as end tables and twice as heavy, had been stolen, and the scuttlebutt was that the theft was an inside job. That someone on Vibe’s publishing side had let in movers from Bad Boy.
“It was almost time to send pages to the printer, and the whole issue was saved on those servers. All the editorial changes. All the pages, with the advertising adjacencies that had been paid for by clients. Gone.”
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Just last week, Diddy was accused of commissioning a hit on one of his most outspoken critics.
Natania Reuben survived a gunshot wound to the face during a 1999 nightclub altercation involving the businessman, who in turn settled an ensuing civil lawsuit by paying her an estimated $1.8 million. Even though his label signee Shyne was sent to prison for the ordeal, she still maintains that the Puff was the one who fired the bullet that struck her.
In a new interview clip published by The Art Of Dialogue in early July, she alleged that the businessman even put a bounty on her head after the incident. This, she claims, forced her to relocate.
“I was born in Brooklyn [and] I was raised in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had no intentions of leaving, and probably had this [not] happened, I probably would have never left, but when the District Attorney’s office gets information from one of their confidential informant sources saying that there’s a bag on my head, and I’m calling the District Attorney’s office and I’m calling everybody because I look out my window where I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn and there’s four, stretched, blacked-out SUVs — I lived on the corner — there’s one on that corner, that corner, one in front of my house, one on the next corner.
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“What should I do? Sit there and wait for them to come get me or submit to the will of people who have my best interest and want to move me and my family to preserve my safety? […] I had businesses. Why would I pick up and just leave everything I knew but for the fact that my life depended on it?”
