Sean Combs, Neil Gaiman, and the Terrible Power of Secrets – Rolling Stone
By
Mikal Gilmore
Sean Combs changed the world for me.In 1997, Rolling Stone flew me to New York to do a feature interview with Puff Daddy, or Puffy, as Diddy was called then. This was not long after the Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in Los Angeles in March of that year, which in turn wasn’t long after Tupac Shakur was murdered in Las Vegas in September 1996. Tupac had previously been shot in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio in late 1994, ostensibly during a jewelry robbery. There are some who believe Combs was involved in engineering that assault. There are also some — including some investigating officers — who believe Combs was involved in Shakur’s eventual murder.In 1997, nothing was known about Puffy’s now infamous private behavior. Those secrets weren’t even rumors that I encountered. If that news had been known, I doubt Rolling Stone would’ve wanted to talk to him in the same way we did, if indeed they would have wanted to talk to him at all.As it turned out, talking to Puffy proved a problem. I spent hours with him in his Midtown Manhattan recording studio, but our exchanges were brief and cursory. We spent a half-hour in Central Park talking, and I also visited with him on the set of the video for “Mo Money Mo Problems.” Puff had a lot to say when he was willing to say it, but perhaps he didn’t trust me much, or felt the process crowded him.After a few days, I told the magazine I wanted to abandon the story and return to Los Angeles. Puffy just wasn’t that open to the sort of conversation required for a feature article.That afternoon, I went to his studio to say goodbye to his manager. Puffy was there and was a bit pissed with me. He wanted to know why I was disrespecting him. I replied that he hadn’t made himself available enough to substantiate or justify a story. He took me into a side office, where we spoke for a long time. He was forthcoming. When the conversation came around to the night Biggie Smalls had been shot to death in Los Angeles, I asked Combs how security-minded he was about these L.A. appearances. “Oh, there was definitely extra security for L.A.,” he said. “That was based on the vibe — that whole vibe that had been in the media.”
I started to ask if there had been any threats prior to these events, but he shook his head and looked down at his hands, folded in his lap.
“I’ll tell you about the whole night,” he said softly. “Biggie was supposed to go to London that day. He didn’t go to London. Then he was supposed to go to the studio. He didn’t want to go to the studio. He was like, ‘I finished my album. I just want to celebrate with you. I just want to have a good time. Let’s go to this Vibe joint. I want to go there. Hopefully I can meet some people, let them know I want to do some acting.’ That made me proud. He was thinking like a businessman. He wanted to pursue his acting stuff. So, we at the party. He had a broken leg, so he couldn’t walk or dance, so we sitting down. I’m real hyper, so I usually get up and walk around the party. He’s like, ‘Yo, Puff, tonight could you just sit here with me all night?’ And I thought, ‘Cool. We just gonna sit here and kick it.’ I sat there. We kicked it. We had a good time. Everybody’s asking us for autographs, taking pictures. And we was drinking, and listening to records, sitting at the table the whole night. And he was just being nice. He was nice naturally, but he was being extra nice. He was… chipper. You know what I’m saying? He’s proud of himself, talking about how stuff’s going to be when the album comes out, and how it’s going to be better. He’s like, ‘I’m gonna make them love me.’ He was talking about the West Coast. And he was like, ‘I can’t wait ’til they hear that track, “Going Back to Cali,” so they know I ain’t got nothing but love for them.’ He was feeling good, because the power of hit records helped to alleviate a lot of hard times, the shit that you’re going through. He had like a sense of relief that night. He was going to step back into the scene, and be rapping, and be having fun again.
“So the party’s over and he’s still talking, saying, ‘Yo, Puff. It’s gonna be so big this time. I just can’t wait. We gonna really do it.’ And I’m like, ‘All right, we need to get up out of here.’ So we going out to the parking lot, and my car’s in front of his car. I make a right — he’s right behind us. But not right right behind us. We get to a light, and we waiting there for him. And then the car pulls up. Then we cross the light. As we crossing the light, I hear shots ring out. I ducked down. I’m thinking somebody’s shooting — and I’ve been at parties before where people do that, shoot into the air. I’m thinking nobody’s shooting at me, but, naturally, I’m ducking down. And then somebody in my car looked back, said Biggie’s car had been hit. I jump out the car while the car’s moving. I know if his car was hit, he’s still in the car. Because he can’t walk. So I run towards the car. And it’s just him and his best friend. Everybody else had jumped out the car and ran. And his best friend, Damion, is there. And I’m there, and Biggie’s slouched over the seat. And I’m trying to push him, ’cause he’s real big, and he’s caught underneath the steering wheel. So me and Damion are trying to push him off, and I’m yelling to have somebody call an ambulance. Asked, ‘Where the hospital?’ They say it’s a couple blocks away. So me and Damion, we kind of push him off, and we driving then. I’m talking to him, touching him. I’m not feeling nothing. And due to the fact that I’ve seen people actually die, seen that happen, I could kind of feel like he was dead. It’s like a feeling that you get that I can’t really describe to you. It’s not a gift that I’m proud of having. I was like, ‘Damn, I think he’s dead.’ I’m saying it inside myself. So we get to the hospital, running lights, everything, and we carry him inside. And we there for maybe like half an hour. Then doctors come and tell us the news. I was on my knees praying the whole time. I was just stuck. I couldn’t understand. It was moving so fast. It was just not real. I just could not believe it was real. It gets worse, though. I had Damion call Biggie’s mother. Then in the middle of telling her, Damion breaks down. So I had to tell her. I had to calm her down, try to get somebody over to the house.
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“That’s when it was starting to hit me, but I’m still in shock. Everything’s over. They take me back to the hotel and I pass out. I just wanted to go to sleep so bad. And then I woke up and everybody was panicking, telling me get out of L.A. And I just could not move. I was stuck. I just did not want to leave him. I still didn’t really cry yet. ’Cause I didn’t really want to accept it. So then I’m about to get on a plane. And as I’m seeing the plane pull up, that’s when I just break down. I’m about to leave L.A. without my man, you know what I’m saying? He’s getting left here — he’s at the morgue, just laying there. That shit was just so fucked up to me. I’m getting on a plane. My man is in a morgue, all fucked up. That shit is fucked up. I just wanted him to be with me, sitting right there with me, going back to New York. I would just sleep a lot. I just wanted to wake up. I just knew it was a dream.
“That’s what happened that night. We didn’t have no arguments with nobody. Wasn’t nobody with dirty looks. We didn’t bump into nobody. We didn’t have a crew of people that was starting trouble, or anything like that. He didn’t have no threats. He wasn’t around nobody to get no threats, ’cause he wasn’t hanging out like that. None of that shit.”
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As Sean Combs narrated the events, I was immediately aware that I’d never experienced an interview like this before. His low-voice tale was spellbinding, horrific, and heartbreaking. I convinced the magazine to run the relevant parts of that conversation without any commentary from me and without inserting any attributions. “Readers will know who’s talking, who’s telling the story,” I said.The article worked out after all. I was grateful to have done both that story and one about Tupac after he was murdered.Some time later, my agent called me to say that Puffy wanted me to ghostwrite his autobiography for him. I said I wasn’t interested. After all, I’d just finally wrangled a contract about the one subject I’d most wanted to write about after my memoir Shot in the Heart: a travelogue biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saints. “But Puffy will pay more.” I said I didn’t care. It would take me away from the Mormon book for at least two years. My agent called my editor and persuaded her to hold off on the Smith book until after I’d finished one for Puffy. I was now in a position of Puffy or nothing. My friend Elaine Schock, who worked as a vice president at RCA Records, called from New York to advise me — with some passion — that I should not be taking on this enterprise. “Not a writer of your caliber,” she said. We had this conversation more than once, and I have always been thankful for it. (Elaine and I would marry in 2009.) I felt, though, I had to ignore her heartfelt counsel. So, I went to New York in January 1999 to spend a year conducting interviews for the book. That was a mistake.I lived that year in Manhattan on a high floor of an apartment building on 33rd St. and 1st Avenue. I could see the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers from my living room. I spent hours around Puffy at his studio nearly every day, but he never had the time to talk. Jennifer Lopez was often there and was friendly. But Puffy was elusive. During the year I was there, we talked for a total of two hours — a couple of days after he had been arrested for assaulting Steve Stoute, a rival record executive, allegedly beating him with a telephone and a chair, as well as kicking and punching him. Puffy wanted to tell his side of the event. But that was it. We never did another interview.
While I was in Manhattan, I got a call from an editor at George, the magazine that John Kennedy Jr. had founded and was editing. The editor asked me if I would be interested in speaking with Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch for a feature. There was word that Hatch would seek his party’s next presidential nomination. Since I was a Mormon, George wondered if I might find a rapport with Hatch that could make for an interesting interview. I ran the idea past Puffy. He was fine if I took a couple of days to visit D.C. As it turned out, my first meeting with Hatch would take place during the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Hatch arranged so that, after our first conversation, I could watch the trial that day from the Senate gallery. During the trial’s afternoon session, I noticed a call had come in on my cell phone. I had to wait for a break in the sessions before I could return the call. Puffy wanted to know where I was. He needed me for something important. I reminded him that I was in D.C. to meet Hatch. He didn’t care. He wanted me back in his Manhattan studio. I returned to my D.C. hotel, packed, made it to the plane, and was in the studio by evening.
There was a woman there, it turned out, that Combs wanted me to speak with. She had been a close friend to his father, Melvin. When Puffy was three, and his mother was pregnant with another child, Melvin died. For years, Combs heard that his father had been killed in a car wreck. “I didn’t know how my father really died until I was like around 14,” he told me. “But as I got older, I knew about street life, so I knew who was hustlers and what a hustler looked like. I would hear my mother say that my father died in a car accident, but also at the same time, I would constantly hear how good everybody was living back in those days — furs, and we was the only people in Harlem to have a Mercedes-Benz, and all that. And I also started hearing other stuff from other people. When I started putting two and two together, I was like, ‘Come on, man, my pops was hustling or something?’ And then I went to the library and researched and found out that he was the biggest of his time when he was here. There was big stories in the paper when he died. He was shot. He was on Central Park West, uptown, and he was shot in his head.
“It was just a transition. He was the ruler; it was time for a new ruler. Time for the next one. That’s the life that he led. All the stories I heard about him, he was a good man and all that, he just was hustling. He was running numbers or selling some drugs or whatever. He wasn’t known as a gangsta.”
The woman waiting for me that night in Puffy’s studio had been a friend to Melvin. She knew Puffy had questions about how and why his father died. She wanted to tell him what she knew, but because of Puffy’s schedule, he wanted her to tell me instead. The woman and I talked for hours that night — longer than I ever did with Puffy during that year. Everything she told me was sketchy, unenlightening. I told Puffy as much. I gave him copies of the tapes. Within a day or two, he never mentioned the matter again. After that trip to D.C., I realized I couldn’t risk being away from New York in case the spirit moved Puffy to talk to me. Sometimes, indeed, the spirit moved him. I’d get a call to meet him someplace, jump in a cab and head over, then before arriving I’d get another call. Something had come up. By autumn, after so many aborted sessions and unproductive hours spent in his recording studio, I told his manager about my worries. He said, “Maybe we should just pay you your back end and send you back to L.A.”
Come Christmas, without the necessary material to complete a book, I sent myself back to Los Angeles to stay. Puffy was unhappy and wanted me back in New York, but I told my agent flatly, “No.” A week later, Puffy was arrested for an incident at Club New York, when, during a gunfire exchange with another man at a party, a bystander, Natania Reuben, was shot in the face. She said it was Puffy who had fired the errant bullet. Combs was arrested for the shooting, and in March 2001, a jury acquitted him of the charges. Belatedly, I realized that none of this surprised me: neither the shooting incident nor the acquittal. Though I’d never seen any guns when I was around Combs, and never heard any hostile or violent sentiments from him, the charges felt credible to me. I was grateful that I had not returned to New York that week. Had I, I likely would’ve been at that party with Puffy.Puffy sued me for not returning to New York (the suit was a front-page item in The New York Times). I eventually settled the suit, but it dragged on for a time, and as result, the Joseph Smith project fell through. I was at a loss as a writer for a long time.When charges of sexual abuse and violence against Diddy started to come out over the last year and a half, I sometimes had reporters or editors ask me what I could divulge to them about my experience of Puffy. But the truth is, I had nothing to divulge. I never saw that side of Combs, never even heard a whisper about his actions, his (as it turns out) not-so-thoroughly-hidden life, until the rest of us did. More than anything else, I found Puffy aloof and, to be frank, boring. I could offer the writers who called me no insights other than that the worst aspects of a person can exist in a private nether world until something pierces the veil that hides them.
As I look back, I have to wonder if Combs’ endless reticence to talk to me was because his private life afforded him no time, or if he just didn’t want to account for the person he was becoming. He was never rude or unkind to me, nor to anybody else who I saw with him, but plainly, there was a lot I didn’t see. I regarded Puffy as somebody who always looked sad. I wondered what he had lost that haunted him. I had written as much at the end of the 1997 Rolling Stone article, as I recounted our parting: “We shake hands and say goodbye on the sidewalk outside, and before I even turn around to leave he is back on his cellular. There is pressing work to do. I turn to look back at him and I am struck by how heartsick his eyes can look, even as he continues to build his empire. It is the look of somebody who, for whatever he has gained, has lost something and will never have it close to him again.”
Looking back, I have a bitter remembrance — even an ironic one: Several people told me in the year following the Rolling Stone article that they regarded it as one of the best things I’d written for the magazine. One writer, who I knew wasn’t fond of my work, told me, “I have to hand it to you. That was a haunting piece of writing.”
Yeah, I guess it was, but I’m the one haunted by it now. I’ve come to realize that the look Puffy wore that afternoon on the streets of Manhattan was a visage of prophecy, a look into what lay ahead for him. Which is to say, he now has the remainder of his life to feel sad about, but not as sad as the lives of the women and men who say he abused them horribly. I don’t see Diddy walking away from this, but then there are a lot of things I haven’t seen coming.
WHAT I HAVE TO SAY about Neil Gaiman makes me profoundly sadder, and that makes the rest of this piece one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written.I was friends with Neil. I wrote the first feature coverage of him and The Sandman in the U.S., back about 1990. I thought his stories were remarkably inventive, and his range of imagination and intelligence was breathtaking. I said at the time: “DC Comics’ Sandman is one of the more radical books being presented in today’s comics mainstream. Written by Neil Gaiman — the most prolific and poetic writer that British comics have produced since Alan Moore — Sandman is the story of the god of dreams (or, as Gaiman describes him, ‘an anthropomorphic personification of dreams’), as he attempts to bring order to the realm of the nocturnal. By entering the dark places where gods, demons, succubuses, and frail humans dream, Sandman must also wrestle with their most secret hurts and hopes.”
I would see Neil when I went to England and he would see me in the U.S. In 1994, when I was on a book tour of the U.S. for Shot in the Heart — a process I found exhausting and depressing — Neil attended my reading in Minneapolis. He’d moved from England and now lived close to the Twin Cities. That event was maybe the largest of any of my readings — it was in a room with risers, a vocal group of female singers performed right before I read — and when I told the audience I was glad that Neil Gaiman was there as well, I could tell by their response that they knew well who he was, and I was gratified by that. Afterward, Neil and I had a long dinner on a high floor of a hotel. I don’t recall the specifics of the conversation, but I remember that what he said about future story plans was intricate. Later that night, as his assistant drove me back to my hotel, she told us she’d spent the evening watching the pursuit of O.J. Simpson on the freeways of Los Angeles. She said it was one of the most unreal things she’d ever witnessed. “Just as unreal as your stories, Neil.”Neil and I stayed in touch. We went to Disneyland — his first visit there — with his wife at the time and their son. When his son got briefly lost in the crowd at the amusement park, Neil’s fright was palpable, and so was his love and relief when we located the boy.I was pleased when Neil and D.C.-Vertigo asked me to write an introduction to the concluding volume of the Sandman hardcover reprint series. The last time I saw Neil was in May 2019, at the premiere of Good Omens, at the Hollywood Cemetery. We continued to exchange emails, and at times talked to one another publicly on Facebook, and hoped to meet up again, but that wouldn’t happen. I never met his second wife, Amanda Palmer, though Neil invited me to visit his new home in Woodstock, New York, which had once belonged to Bob Dylan’s manager: “I bought the house where Albert Grossman lived, where the cover photo of Bringing It All Back Home was taken.”Like just about everybody, I was thoroughly unready when accusations about Neil’s sexual misconduct — his alleged abuse of numerous women — began to emerge last year. The stories just didn’t fit with the man I’d known, respected, and liked for years. That Neil Gaiman was gracious, erudite, brilliant, and concerned for others. The Neil Gaiman that appeared in a January New York magazine feature was none of those things, except by way of his now devastated reputation. (In a statement posted to his website following that story, Gaiman said, “I have never engaged in nonconsensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”) The discrepancy between the two Neils is incomprehensibly stark — even shocking. People, of course, have secret selves, and their sexual lives sometimes take place undercover. Not all of those secrets are our business — sex is complex, and part of what might give it frisson is when there’s an impermissible, even debauched, aspect to it. Sometimes, it’s merely the secrecy of infidelity that provides the frisson. Sometimes that is found in sex with multiple partners. Sometimes in the same room at the same time. Learning about these activities on somebody’s part might change how we see that person. Certainly, infidelity can change how many others might regard somebody. Broken faith, lies, ruined marriages, betrayed families… These are hurtful, consequential matters. But what Neil is accused of is something well beyond cunning or perfidy or faithlessness, well beyond questionable morality. Neil stands accused of activity that shocks our conscience, that ruins our previous estimation of his depth and art, because depth and art don’t excuse wrecking the lives of others. Depth and art are not a license to impose behavior on those who are young, confused, vulnerable, trusting yet unwilling. Depth and art don’t matter at all when the artist hurts or corrupts or malforms innocence. If somebody thinks his depths grant him a perspective that allows him these actions, that person no longer possesses a depth we can believe in or trust.
Back in 1990, Neil said to me: “Sandman isn’t always a horror book, though horror is very often the lie that tells the truth about our lives — and in that sense, it’s essentially an optimistic genre. But actually, I’d like the stories to be as varied and unpredictable as dreams themselves — which means that the Sandman should be willing to follow the human subconscious wherever it may go, even into the darker realm of internal mythologies.”
“Horror is very often the lie that tells the truth about our lives.”
I can’t get those words out of my head. Sometimes our lies tell our truths in ways we never anticipated. Sometimes real-life horror might be all we are remembered for. Sometimes our horror reaches out and devastates others, and when that happens, the eloquence of our lies will do nothing to redeem us.
THERE IS A PHRASE that those of us who have, at times, hidden our alcoholism or addiction invariably encounter: You are only as sick as your secrets. In part, the saying means that the burdens we carry — particularly those related to hidden truths — can contribute to our psychological disintegration when they are hidden and held too close. Keeping those secrets will eventually catch up with you. When they do, they might offer you the sort of hard epiphany that, if acted on, leads you to a better place, a better self. That is, if you’re lucky and wise.But some secrets can’t free the secret-keeper. Rather, the opposite. If we have knowingly harmed somebody — if we’ve stolen something that belonged to them but does not belong to ourselves, including their hope and faith; if we have laid waste to their spirit; if we have assaulted their body…Those are secrets that we want to remain secret. If those secrets are learned, the discovery could result in the devastation of our name, our standing, our career, our prospects for the future. The discovery of some secrets could cost the secret-keeper their wealth, their prestige. It could undo their legacy. It could even cost them their freedom.But here’s the thing about secrets: Secrets will always out. When they do, they might destroy the secret holder. Often, they should.This is an odd, terrible, uneven time we live in. P. Diddy and Neil Gaiman will pay the price if they are judged accountable. For that matter, they are already paying the price. Some people don’t get by with their secrets and with evading the effects of those secrets. Some do, of course, but should not.Isn’t that what we still believe?We want to hear it. Send us a tip using our anonymous form.Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2025 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.
