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"What Sean Combs is being accused of is not rare. He's not an anomaly." For a year in the early noughties, Elisabeth Ovesen was a hip-hop video star dancing alongside some of the biggest names in the business.
It was an era of big-budget music videos filled with, in rap especially, money, cars, and women. She kept diaries. In 2005, she published Confessions Of A Video Vixen, recounting her difficult upbringing and relationships before finding a seemingly glamorous lifeline to financial security.
Under the name Karrine Steffans, she detailed her experiences on video sets as a 22-year-old woman, her relationships and sexual encounters with rappers, other music stars and executives. Most of her own experiences involving famous stars were consensual, she says; the book is a cautionary tale about a feted industry, her stories highlighting misogyny and power imbalances in terms of age and status, how women were used and discarded, rather than criminal behaviour. But Ovesen says she was also aware of a much darker side to the music industry, and Hollywood in general.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement - and most recently the charges filed in the US against rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs, which he has strenuously denied - she says she wants people to know there are others "getting away" with similar behaviour and crimes. Her words echo those of lawyer Tony Buzbee, who has filed several lawsuits against Combs. He has also claimed A-listers are paying off victims to avoid being publicly named.
Image: Pic: AP 'Everything that's coming out wasn't a secret' Speaking to Sky News on Zoom, Ovesen recounts the night she first met Combs, saying she was "kind of ordered" to his house. Despite this, in hindsight, being a "weird" experience, she says he treated her well and with respect. "We're at a club, I was with people he knew, our cars were leaving at the same time," she says.
Combs leaned out of a window to talk to the men in her car, "talking about me like I'm...
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