‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’ Is an Incomplete Portrait of Evil

While the four-part Netflix docuseries gives a thorough accounting of Diddy’s vile history, it doesn't do much to provide healing for his victims.

Screenshot from “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.”

Let me start by saying I have no respect for Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Off the strength of his nasty public character, I have avoided his entire Power series and its many spin-offs. I do not believe, based on the many ways he’s disparaged victims—and the fact that he’s been arrested for domestic violence against women himself—that Jackson actually cares about the victims of Sean “Diddy” Combs enough to make a docuseries for their benefit. He just hates Diddy. And the four-part docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning, which he executive produces, proves it.

Though Netflix denies that Jackson had any creative control over the docuseries, Diddy deserves the hate. He is loathsome.

“I need your energy!” Diddy-Dirty Money band member Kalenna Harper recalls Diddy saying to her in a session, an exclamation that she took as complimentary at the time, when in reality it was instructive. All four episodes show Diddy as a destiny-swapping energy vampire that dimmed the lights of everyone rising around him—emotionally, financially, spiritually, physically—so that his light would burn brighter. It paints a picture of a record executive whose insecurity was deadly; who envied the talent of the artists he had helped to shape; who saw girlfriends as mere props to impress other men and prove his greatness by “taking” women from the higher-profile men they were with before him; a monster who grooms the people around him, from artists and employees to his own sons.

Allegations in the documentary range from drugging and raping unconscious victims and showing videos of the attacks on big screens at his parties to orchestrating the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace. Diddy’s co-founder of Bad Boy Records, Kirk Burrowes, lays out the vileness intrinsic to Combs’ 35-year climb in the music industry, aptly beginning with Combs becoming famous off the trampling deaths of partygoers at Combs’ first big event in New York. Endearing moments in history, like Combs throwing his “best friend” Wallace a lavish funeral in Brooklyn, get revealed as lies since Combs allegedly charged the funeral costs to the Wallace estate to cover, then set up “freak-off” celebrations every March 9 on Wallace’s death anniversary.

As a history of Diddy’s vile character, the docuseries is thorough. As a “reckoning” for the pile of victims, bodies and carnage in his wake, it’s woefully incomplete.