The Diddy documentary is required viewing

There are relatively few Netflix documentaries – even in this increasingly sensationalized and prurient age – that have made anything like the splash that the new show about the artist formerly known as P. Diddy has caused. Sean Combs: The Reckoning isn’t just hard to watch, but positively mind-blowing in its account of the imprisoned mogul’s actions and predilections. Although he was acquitted of the most serious charges that he was on trial for this year, Combs will not be released from jail until May 2028. Given the number of allegations and civil suits pending against him, any comeback for the disgraced musician looks impossible – even in an era when Kanye West is, apparently, given second chance after second chance.

The most chilling thing about Sean Combs: The Reckoning – and undoubtedly the cause of much of the controversy surrounding it – is that the show, directed by Alex Stapleton, has a level of access into its depraved subject that even those most opposed to the rapper’s activities might find invasive. When footage of Combs’s conversations with his lawyer and his son is broadcast, it is impossible not to have a sense that we – and the millions of other Netflix viewers – are eavesdropping in on a horribly private moment. Yet the counter argument to all this is that Combs’s behavior was so extreme and so vile that he no longer deserves all the privacy that ordinary, law-abiding citizens merit.

Most viewers will already have an idea of what the documentary will involve, and over its four hideously gripping episodes, the whole sordid shebang is rehearsed all over again: how Diddy went from being one of the music industry’s most successful – if never-quite beloved – figures to sitting in solitary confinement in Fort Dix prison, where he will be residing for the next years; how he organized, choreographed and filmed degrading “freak offs” that led to their participants being traumatized for years afterwards; and how his controlling, sexually aggressive persona – which may, or may not, have tipped over into criminality, as the split verdict at his trial tacitly suggested – caused him to make many enemies, even before he was accused of wrongdoing.

One of these enemies was none other than Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who is a producer on the documentary, and so Combs’s long-suffering and undoubtedly well-paid spokesman has gone on the offensive, saying that Jackson was “a longtime adversary with a personal agenda.” The flak has denounced the show’s very existence, saying that “Netflix is plainly desperate to sensationalize every minute of Mr. Combs’s life, without regard for truth, in order to capitalize on a never-ending media frenzy. If Netflix cared about truth or about Mr. Combs’s legal rights, it would not be ripping private footage out of context – including conversations with his lawyers that were never intended for public viewing. No rights in that material were ever transferred to Netflix or any third party.”

This may well be true, but as Combs said less than a week before his arrest, “We have to find somebody that will work with us, that has dealt in the dirtiest of dirty business of media and propaganda.” The testimony expressed by many interviewees – or victims of – Combs is both graphic and disturbing. The singer Aubrey O’Day recounts receiving an email from him that read “I don’t wanna just fuck you. I wanna turn you out. I can see you being with some motherfucker that you tell what to do. I make my woman do what I tell her to do, and she loves it.”

This is of a piece with what Combs’s ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura recounted in court, in shocking, even distressing testimony that made it clear that she had suffered at his hands, just as many others had. Sean Combs: The Reckoning may be gutter-level journalism, but that is what its subject merits. Many viewers will come to the end of this hard-to-watch but necessary show and wonder whether Combs should ever be released at all, let alone enjoy any kind of career redemption. And that, surely, is the reckoning he merits.