A hotline set up for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ victims was reportedly flooded with 12,000 calls in just 24 hours as 120 are already gearing up to sue the rapper.
Earlier this week, Lawyer Tony Buzbee publicized a hotline encouraging those who were victims of the rapper, 54, or those who know about his crimes to come forward.
Combs was arrested last month in Manhattan following a probe into his alleged sex trafficking crimes, where he is accused of drugging and raping victims as young as nine.
‘When I made the announcement that I was going to pursue these cases, the floodgates really opened,’ Buzbee told Law & Crime. ‘The volume of calls has been overwhelming and it’s been kind of shocking.’
Within 10 days of the hotline going live, Buzbee’s team got around 3,200 calls. But after the press conference on Tuesday, they received 12,000 calls in just 24 hours.
‘So, our Herculean task is to try to sift through every one of these calls and make sure that we’re identifying those who are victims and those who are witnesses and collect evidence,’ he told the outlet.
The Texas-based lawyer has around ‘100 people working on this task,’ and they expect to start filing civil cases within 30 days.
His team has already gathered enough evidence to file 120 victims’ lawsuits against the rapper.
Of the 120 victims, 25 were underage at the time of the abuse. The youngest victims were 9, 14, 15 at the time.
‘This individual, who was 9 years old at the time, was taken to an audition in New York City with Bad Boy Records,’ the attorney disclosed at the press conference.
‘This individual was sexually abused allegedly by Sean Combs and several other people at the studio in the promise to both his parents and to him himself of getting a record deal.’
The claims are coming from victims who were seeking TV or music careers and the rapper promised to make them a star, as well as, those who were simply invited to Diddy’s afterparties, Buzbee said.
The attorney hasn’t filed the claims yet as they are looking for ‘every potentially liable party’ to include before doing so.
‘I mean any entities or other individuals that either were involved, participated, facilitated, egged it on, provided the venue, benefited from it, profited from it, that sort of thing,’ he told Law & Crime.
Although his team was initially shocked by the amount of calls, the lawyer said they’re shifting through 25 years of alleged behavior by Diddy that took place at album release parties, his famous White Parties, and Freak Off parties, among other events.
Some of the cases about to be filed include names that would shock viewers, Buzbee said, although he did not release the names of these high-profile individuals.
‘We want to be very careful about who we name,’ he told the outlet. ‘I’m not going to be the person who starts naming names of potential people and smearing people for no reason.’
Buzbee said there was a ‘pattern’ of behavior at Diddy’s parties and it was an open secret among Hollywood’s elite.
‘I have no doubt that there are people right now who know that they were somehow involved in this, who are now scrubbing their social media, who are searching their memories, who are deleting their texts, probably deleting pictures and trying to distance themselves from this, and we know who they are or we will find out who they are,’ the lawyer said.
‘This is this is not something that’s going to happen overnight, but I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg.’
