This story mentions sexual assault.
Usher was launched to Combs as an adolescent within the early ‘90s when he first signed a document deal. Combs — who’s 9 years older than Usher — mentored the R&B star and produced his self-titled debut album in 1994.
Prior to now, Usher has spoken in regards to the yr he spent dwelling with Combs in New York Metropolis when he was simply 13, saying on multiple event that he witnessed “very curious issues happening” throughout that point.
“I bought an opportunity to see some issues. I went there to see the approach to life — and I noticed it,” he informed Howard Stern in 2016. “I do not know if I may indulge and perceive what I used to be even . It was fairly wild.”
Since then, so much has come to mild about Diddy’s alleged habits. Beginning in late 2023, the mogul was hit with intensive allegations of rape, assault, and abuse spanning over a 20-year interval. He has denied the allegations. In September 2024, he was arrested and charged with intercourse trafficking, racketeering and transportation to have interaction in prostitution.
Lower than a yr later, in July 2025, he was discovered responsible on two federal prices of transportation for functions of prostitution. He was acquitted of the extra severe prices. The previous rapper is presently incarcerated on the Federal Correctional Establishment in New Jersey, serving a 50-month sentence.
Now, Usher has talked overtly about his decades-spanning relationship with Combs — and defined why he doesn’t have “something unfavorable to say” about his disgraced former mentor.
In a brand new interview for The Enterprise Zone, Forbes’ senior author Jabari Younger performed a sport of phrase affiliation with Usher, and when he mentioned “Sean Combs,” the R&B singer’s one-word response was: “Legacy.”
This prompted Jabari to deliver up an interview Usher did round 2015, when he mentioned he “knew higher” than to get distracted by sure issues taking place in NYC when he was youthful, saying: “I may’ve gotten into quite a lot of stuff, however I had a plan, I had a spotlight.”
In relation to Combs, Jabari used these quotes to exhibit that Usher managed to keep away from “quite a lot of the negativity that we clearly know exhibits up in [Diddy’s] story immediately,” which prompted Usher to make clear his stance on every little thing that has unfolded.
“This may be a bit controversial…we will’t ignore the truth of the historical past,” he started. “In some ways, I feel sure individuals are prosecuted and perhaps not acknowledged for the greatness that they provide.”
“I haven’t got something unfavorable to say about Sean Combs as a result of my expertise was not what the world has seen and the way he is been misrepresented,” he mentioned.
Prefacing that not “each man is ideal,” Usher mentioned he can’t, “with any sense of humanity,” disregard Combs’s “legacy” and “priceless contributions” to enterprise and tradition, saying: “So many individuals benefited from what he created. And I acknowledge that. And that is why I see him as legacy.”
When requested particularly in regards to the “period” he spent with Combs as his “mentor,” Usher continued to reward the rapper’s cultural affect and in contrast him to “a very, actually laborious instructor” who he discovered from “in actual time.”
“That’s who I see that man as, and that’s what I select to recollect,” he defined. “I put respect on his title as a result of I noticed that what I discovered as a businessman, earlier than I even understood what enterprise was, got here because of seeing the unimaginable issues that he was capable of do and the way in which that he positioned himself as a businessman.”
