• The Sean "Diddy" Combs trial began this week and featured testimony from Cassie Ventura.
• She testified about the graphic moments in her 11-year relationship with Combs.
• In the courthouse, the atmosphere was grim as Ventura shared shocking details.

From the start of Sean "Diddy" Combs' sex-trafficking trial, everyone was waiting for Cassie Ventura to appear. She was the star witness.

I expected Ventura's testimony to be explosive. But it turned out to be more graphic than I ever imagined.

In the courtroom, I noticed the distress on the face of Ventura's husband. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, was telling her alleged abuser and a room full of strangers about some of the worst moments in her life.

In September, federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused Combs of racketeering and sex trafficking. They say he used the vast power and resources of his record label and other businesses to arrange drug-fueled and baby oil-lubricated sexual encounters called "freak offs" with Ventura, other victims, and male escorts.

Combs pleaded not guilty and denies the sex-trafficking allegations, but he hasn't quite denied all wrongdoing. His legal team said he participated in "mutual abuse" with Ventura, and that the two frequently fought physically. This was a domestic violence case, they argued — ugly, but not criminal sex trafficking.

In her testimony, Ventura talked about a messy, 11-year relationship during which she fought for scraps of Combs' attention. He was often busy with other women and his various businesses, she said. Ventura participated in the freak offs out of love for Combs, she said, but they were never something she wanted.

The hip-hop mogul introduced her to the idea of freak offs about six months into their relationship, when she was 22 and owed him another nine albums as part of a record label deal, Ventura said. Combs would watch as Ventura would have sex with other men, who were paid thousands of dollars in cash, according to court testimony.

In text messages and emails shown as trial evidence, Ventura talked about arranging the freak offs, which required dropping by a Duane Reade to pick up baby oil, lubricant, candles, and condoms.

The freak offs could last up to four days, requiring drugs to maintain stamina, she said. They typically required up to 10 large bottles of baby oil, she testified. Everyone "had to be glistening," as she described it. At one point, the judge stepped in to ask prosecutors to pull back from the deluge of baby oil questions.

The disturbing nature of the testimony was only heightened by Ventura's appearance. She is due to have a baby in June and was visibly pregnant. One courtroom marshal said he was prepared to deliver her baby if the stress of testifying induced labor. I wasn't sure if he was joking. One of the prosecutors urged the judge to require Combs' lawyers to wrap up cross-examination. "We are afraid she could have the baby over the weekend," she said.

Cassie Ventura's testimony transfixed the courtroom

Over the years, I've reported on about a dozen trials and countless more court hearings. There were the uncomfortable benches of Donald Trump's criminal trial. The rowdy fans at the R. Kelly Trial. The cold December mornings when I lined up for the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. The ultracompetitive Sam Bankman-Fried trial, where getting in line at 4 a.m. still wasn't early enough to get inside the courtroom.

But nothing in my experience has compared to the Combs trial, which began Monday morning after a week of jury selection and is supposed to last two months.

Ever since Ventura accused Combs of sexual abuse in November 2023, Combs' legal quagmire has been one of the biggest stories in the country. Combs paid Ventura $20 million to settle her case, but a flood of other accusers filed additional civil lawsuits against him. When prosecutors brought the criminal case against Combs, it was put on the fast track.

No longer the image of a pop star, Combs dresses for court like an office drone, wearing thin crewneck sweaters over white button-down shirts. He rarely betrays any emotion, occasionally nodding during his lawyers' arguments or huddling with the attorneys beside him.

His large family, including his mother and seven children, has been in the courtroom to show their support. Every day, Combs flashes them heart symbols with his hands. Their expressions, during trial proceedings, have remained neutral. The gravity of the situation — Combs could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted of all charges — is obvious.

On the other side of the courtroom aisle are Ventura's support group, which includes her husband, Alex Fine, and several relatives. At some of the more raw moments of Ventura's testimony, Fine's face looked visibly pained. When her texts with Combs about the freak offs were shown to the jury, he broke his gaze and looked at his lap.

As Ventura testified in graphic detail, the courtroom was rapt. She spoke in a faint, dispassionate voice.

The grim atmosphere made the otherwise unbelievable details of the trial feel upsetting rather than dramatic. On social media, these details fly by as jokes. For Ventura, they left scars. In February of 2023, years after she left Combs, Ventura couldn't sleep, she testified.

"I couldn't take the pain that I was in anymore, and so I just tried to walk out the front door into traffic," she told the jury. "And my husband would not let me."

'I've been to a Diddy party'

On Monday, for opening statements, the line outside the lower Manhattan courthouse began the previous afternoon. Same Old Line Dudes, the standard-bearer line-sitting company for New York trials, declined to disclose the precise time their clients booked because "it's very competitive," a receptionist told me.

During lunch breaks, live-streamers went outside and updated their followers on what unfolded indoors. Christine Cornell, a courtroom sketch artist, took photos of her illustrations in natural sunlight to share them with the media. Vicky Perez, who had come to New York City from Connecticut to watch the trial's opening day, said she's a fan of Ventura, having purchased her first album when she was in the fifth grade. Perez wanted her to "get justice," she said.

"I want to see his downfall," she said of Combs.

The scene overwhelmed even Dennis Byron, the editor in chief of the Hip-Hop Enquirer, who said he's reported on the hip-hop scene for 35 years. He covered Comb's career since he was an up-and-coming artist.

"I've been to a Diddy party," he said.

"Not one of those parties," he quickly clarified.

Byron — who wore a tweed vest and trousers in the May afternoon heat — said he's attended and photographed Combs' extravagant "White Parties," where he took photos of the likes of Combs, Ventura, Kim Porter, and Jay-Z.

These parties took on a new meaning following the indictment against Combs, where they've been widely re-interpreted as sex parties (virtually every single celebrity who has been asked about this denies they were sex parties). But celebrities have been having orgies forever, Byron said. He remembers hearing about them in the 1980s. Flying in escorts — as prosecutors said Combs did for freak offs — wasn't anything new either, Byron said.

"Well, I never stayed for those," Byron said. "I never stayed for those orgies. But I'm sure they happen. But I never seen them."

Combs' White Parties were meant to show off his power as "a tastemaker," Byron said. Combs accrued cultural capital — something prosecutors later said he used to coerce his victims.

"Remember, that party was a regular party," he said as I wrapped up our conversation. "Ain't no party like a regular Diddy party."

Combs' lawyers acknowledge his flaws — but say he's not a sex trafficker

Combs' trial was taking place in the same 26th-floor courtroom that saw the trials of Sam Bankman-Fried and two of E. Jean Carroll's lawsuits against Trump. (Bankman-Fried and Combs share a jail unit together; Trump is in the White House.) As with all federal court cases, there's no broadcast or livestream.

Karen Agnifilo-Friedman, Luigi Mangione's lead defense lawyer and the husband of Combs' lead lawyer Mark Agnifilo, often showed up to watch. The court staff had also set up three overflow rooms for journalists and members of the public to watch the trial on a closed-circuit camera feed, plus two rooms for members of the in-house press like me.

Several people I spoke to said they were willing to keep an open mind, but believed it would be hard to shake the memory of watching the video of Combs beating Ventura and dragging her through a hotel hallway.

"I'm going to try to give him a fair shake, said Oota Ongo, a YouTuber who livestreamed himself walking around the courthouse after watching opening statements. "We all saw the Cassie tape. That Cassie tape is just something that I can't get out of my head."

Depending on the day, I alternated between the courtroom itself and a press room. When I checked out an overflow room one day, I spotted a prominent federal prosecutor who had put Bankman-Fried behind bars. He was paying close attention to Combs' lawyer, Teny Gregagaros, giving Combs' side of the story in an opening statement.

While Combs may have been an unpleasant, angry, jealous, and violent man — especially when drunk or high — he was not guilty of sex trafficking, Gregagos insisted. At most, he was responsible for domestic violence, she conceded.

"He is not charged with being mean," Gregaros told the jurors. "He is not charged with being a jerk."

The first witness was a security guard at the Intercontinental Hotel, who testified about the infamous video where Combs assaulted Ventura (Combs just wanted to get his phone back from her, his defense lawyers said).

Next, before Ventura, was a male dancer who said he acted as an escort. He testified about being asked to carefully urinate during sex.

"Apparently, I was doing it wrong because they both stopped me and told me that I was supposed to let a little out at a time and not go full, like, take a leak on her," he said, in a quote that perhaps best encapsulated both the graphic nature of the trial testimony and how prosecutors say Combs intimately choreographed people around him to satisfy his own desires.

During Ventura's cross-examination, Combs' lawyers pulled up texts in which Ventura indicated she enjoyed the freak offs.

But Ventura, in her testimony earlier, said she just wanted to make Combs happy. She loved him. But she never wanted the freak offs, she said.

"It made me feel worthless," Ventura testified. "Like I didn't have anything else to offer him."

IPOs are making headlines again, which could mean Pat Healy's hopes for "hot and heavy" activity this year may not be completely quashed after all.

Healy is the founder and CEO of Issuer Network, which helps C-suite executives leading IPOs get multimillion-dollar marketing packages from prospective stock exchanges through "bake-off" bidding competitions. For the last 30 years, he's worked behind the scenes on some of the biggest IPOs and corporate spin-offs, including Facebook, Zillow, KraftHeinz, and 3M.

He's won praise from clients such as Jason Child, the CFO of the semiconductor company Arm (and the former CFO of Splunk), and Dick Grasso, a former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, who sat on opposite the deal table from Healy when he first started Issuer Network in 1995.

He's helped clients get everything from free advertising at Davos to NFL players attending their closing bell ceremonies.

Never heard of him? There's a reason for that. Healy, who appears to be a forefather of this type of bake-off, or contest between companies, runs his business largely by word of mouth. He also refuses to spend a dime on marketing. Just take a look at the company's website — the very picture of a mid-2000s web interface.

"I could make a big deal about some of these things, but that's not who I am," Healy, 74, told Business Insider in an interview. "I believe I do a really good job for people, and I shouldn't go around bragging about it. I just let my customers do the talking."

With IPOs back in the spotlight, thanks to the fintechs Chime and eToro, BI sat down with Healy and spoke to people who have worked with him. We wanted to understand the business and the man behind it, including how he got his start, how an exchange bake-off works, and what he's been occupied with since public offerings took a nosedive in 2022.

IPO activity has whipsawed this year with Trump's tariffs, and Healy saw several of the offerings in his docket pulled due to market volatility. Where things go next is anyone's guess, but Healy is bracing for a potential torrent of demand.

"Who knows when the sun's going to come out?" Healy said. "When it does, I expect all these guys to put their foot on the gas and come to market right away."

In the early '90s, after having held multiple CFO roles at DC-area banks, Healy started doing consulting work for Nasdaq. His job, he explained, was to disincentivize companies from leaving for the NYSE at a time when Nasdaq was a lesser-known exchange for new companies.

"I designed and helped build products that were useful to CFOs so that if they decided to leave Nasdaq, they'd have to give something up," he said. "They'd be less inclined to do so. And it created a stickiness."

That opened Healy's eyes to what he called an unfilled gap. Investment bankers advising on IPOs don't want to get caught in the crossfire between the exchanges, he said (and many banks are themselves listed in the NYSE). There are other professionals who help companies get listed on an exchange, including business consultants, but Healy's appears to have been the first to specialize in this competitive process for marketing perks.

"I discovered that CFOs really didn't have anybody to talk to when they had to make a decision about where they're going to list their stock," he said.

"There was no one else doing it. And there's still no one else doing it," he added.

Issuer Network's first client was AOL, the now (mostly) defunct internet and instant messaging service. Healy said he managed to get a meeting with the CFO and convinced him to let Healy negotiate a "co-branding package" on the company's behalf.

"I just hopped in my car and went over to Tyson's Corner," a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, where AOL was headquartered at the time. "I visited with the CFO. I said, 'Look, you're on the wrong exchange here.'"

In August 1996, AOL switched from the Nasdaq to the NYSE.

AOL was an example of a service Healy refers to as "switches." Today, most of his business involves advising companies about to go public on which exchange they should be listed. Beyond the trading style and fit of a given exchange, there are hidden levers that companies ccan pull, said Healy.

"Issuers are always focused on the listing fee," he said. "What they don't see is what the exchange is going to make off the listing."

Exchanges cannot technically buy a company's listing, but they can pick up the tab for co-branded advertisements or other marketing perks. That's where Healy comes in. He essentially creates a competition between the exchanges to see which one can offer clients the best package with their listing.

"We create pretty substantial co-branding packages and we literally bake it off," he said.

Typically, a company would contact the exchanges to say it's decided to make its listing decision "a competitive process." Then, Healy said, the company would lay out how it wants to reach customers, and the exchanges would come back with "a co-branding package commensurate with those defined outcomes." From there, it's a back-and-forth of negotiations and adjustments until the company (not Healy, as he emphasized) names a winner. The whole process typically takes about six weeks.

Healy wouldn't reveal how much these deals are worth — except for one, which is public. The package he got for Arm, a semiconductor company that went public in 2023, was worth $50 million.

"He understands exactly what the terms and conditions are for the market," Child, Arm's CFO, said. "So he can help you understand, as the issuing company, what is the benefit to the exchange? What is the value they can provide? What are the pros and cons?"

Child first hired Healy when he was Groupon's CFO for the tech company's 2011 IPO. He tapped Healy again in 2023 when Arm went public.

Arm's package with Nasdaq, for example, included several years of advertising at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland. As part of its deal, another Healy client, PNC, got NFL Hall of Famers, including Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith, to ring the closing bell at the NYSE with company employees in 2010.

There are moments when both sides are unhappy, said Healy, but it's all business — nothing personal.

"I maintain very good relationships with both exchanges," he said. "We have no agenda here other than the best deal for our client. And we don't favor anybody. The minute we do, we lose all credibility and we're out of business."

Of the IPOs that happened during the early days of Healy's business, only a small percentage of his clients were large enough to be eligible for the NYSE. Those that were crossed Grasso's desk, the former NYSE chief told BI.

"Some of my marketing people, in the early days of Pat's business, were highly skeptical," said Grasso, who headed the exchange from 1995 to 2003. "But after a couple of sit-downs with me, I was very comfortable that Pat was going to be fair."

Healy also advises clients on what he refers to as "spins," when a company spins off a part of its business into its own company. Issuer Network has worked on more of these during the recent IPO downturn.

"You've got Comcast spinning, Honeywell spinning, FedEx spinning. You've got quite a lineup of spins out there," he said. "We've done a lot of spins in our day, and we expect to be active in the spin market here for the foreseeable future — through the summer, at least. A lot of these deals will bleed into '26, but their exchange selection decision I expect will be made in '25."

Healy said he couldn't disclose current clients, but noted he worked on a spin with 3M last year. He advised the company as it spun off its healthcare business, now called Solventum, and led a bake-off between exchanges for both the parent and spin company at the same time.

"The winner takes all," Healy said. "So instead of getting a $5 or $10 million co-branding package for 'Spinco,' you get many times that amount for the whole enchilada."

(3M stayed with the NYSE, and Solventum joined its listings.)

Healy declined to discuss his fees, but said he follows a "satisfaction guarantee" policy: He tells clients they can "tear up our invoice" if they aren't happy — something of an anomaly on Wall Street.

Child called Healy "an old soul."

"He basically just tells you, 'Pay me what you think it's worth' when it's over," Child said. "It's like the opposite of dealing with an enterprise software person."

Healy's humble upbringing might explain his aversion to the spotlight. Growing up, he was one of nine children. His father was a mailman in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park. The town was home to a Ford manufacturing plant, what Healy described as "an ugly scene" — not necessarily the kind of place you might expect someone who brokers deals on Wall Street for some of the largest corporations in the world to get their start.

"I'm just a hick from Ohio," Healy said. "People like talking to me. And I have something good to offer them. You build a momentum over time by just keeping your nose to the grindstone, delivering good results, and just shooting straight with people."

• Three teenagers in New York designed a cardboard, called Kiriboard, to replace plastic packaging.
• They got the idea when a box of motors for their robotics hobby arrived damaged.
• Their invention won the $12,500 Earth Prize. Now they plan to buy a machine to make more Kiriboards.

Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.

Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it's inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.

"Something like this is the wave of the future," Jerry Citron, the teenagers' environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.

Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.

Plastic-free shipping could change the world

Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.

Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals' and humans' body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They're associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.

"I didn't realize it was as big of an issue as it was," Yao told BI. "I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven't really fully replaced plastic packaging."

Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what's inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.

Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.

Broken motors and crumple zones

Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.

The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.

"We're like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn't good enough," Mueller said.

Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.

Similarly, he said, "you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms," sparing the package's contents.

With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.

The matrix

It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.

After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.

To test their prototypes' durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — "which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would," Clare said.

They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.

"Basically, we want to see what's the most amount of force it can take before it snaps," Yao said.

The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.

In the design pictured above, four triangular "legs" hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.

"This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible," Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix "is supposed to form to the product."

Once they've purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.

"Right now, we want to perfect our product," Yao said.

When it's ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.

"No shade to them," Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.

"We're on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it's just up to us to put in that final effort," Mueller said. Clare chimed in: "All from a broken package."