If the 9mm hollow-point bullet fired directly into her face a quarter century ago had proved fatal, Natania Reuben would be long dead, and there would have been no teenage daughter to call to her from the top of the stairs on Monday night.
“She says, mommy, guess who’s in custody?” Reuben later told the Daily Beast. “I asked her if it was somebody locally in town that we know. And she’s like, ‘No, he’s bigger.’”
Reuben then saw something akin to bewilderment in the eyes of her daughter, Nirvana. Reuben realized that she was talking about the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, also known as Puffy and Diddy.
“I said, ‘Are you kidding me, really?’ She said, ‘Yes!’ I just screamed out to God, ‘Thank you, merciful father!’”
Back on Dec. 27 of 1999, Reuben had been at Club New York in Manhattan, helping a friend promote an upcoming New Year’s event. Combs had arrived with Jennifer Lopez, his girlfriend at the time. He was also accompanied by his bodyguard, Anthony “Wolf” Jones and a rap protegee, Shyne Barrow.
Combs got into a verbal dispute with a drug dealer. Reuben says she clearly saw Combs with a gun in his hand, and she was in the line of fire when she saw him fire. She recalled the muzzle flash.
“I watched him,” she told The Daily Beast. “I saw him with my own eyes,
She somehow survived being hit directly between the eyes, straight on into the nose.
“It felt like I was hit with Paul Bunyan’s flaming hot sledgehammer,” she recalled.
She thought of her two young sons and was determined to survive.
“I called out to God and said, ‘Don’t take me. I’m not finished raising my kids, I have work to do,’” she recalled.
Lopez joined Combs, Shyne and Jones in fleeing. The police gave chase and they were pulled over a short distance away. A stolen pistol was found in the car.
Surrounded by police officers, rapper Sean “Puffy” Combs leaves State Supreme Court in New York City 15 March, 2001, after a jury failed to reach a verdict for the second straight day. Combs faces weapons and bribery charges stemming from a New York night club shooting in December 1999.
Matt Campbell/AFP via Getty Images
The three men were charged with gun possession and went to trial. Combs arrived in court wearing a light gray overcoat that looked like it had been cut from a cloud. He held out his shirt sleeves and dropped two platinum cufflinks on the defense table. His attorneys, Ben Brafman and Johnnie Cochran (of O.J. Simpson fame) hurried to affix them.
Reuben testified. So did the surgeon who had managed to save her at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He recounted to the jury what Reuben had been screaming.
“Puffy shot me!”
The surgeon had been unable to remove all the fragments without endangering Reuben, and investigators did not have enough to make a ballistics match with the recovered pistol.
Combs was acquitted, as was the bodyguard. Burrows was convicted and did nine years in state prison. He was then deposited to his native Belize, where he is now a politician serving as leader of the opposition.
Reuben continued to suffer the aftereffects of being shot in the head.
“I’ve had a host of problems, not the least of which is a traumatic brain injury, because the bullet scarred my brain,” she reported.
But worse was a sickening feeling that celebrity and wealth had enabled Combs to escape justice. He went on to become a billionaire and he seems to have taken the acquittal as proof that he could do anything he wanted. Reuben continued to speak truth to power even when it seemed nobody was listening.
“Telling everybody in no uncertain terms, there was never any dispute that he shot me in my face,” she said.
Combs seemed even more unassailable two-and-a-half years ago, when Reuben announced that she had received a message from on high that it was all going to catch up with him.
“I said this to some girlfriends of mine and a couple of family members,” she recalled. “I said, ‘God told me that this was going to happen.’ And they were like, ‘That is not going to happen.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, it is.’ And they just were like, ‘Oh, she’s wilding out. She’s bugging out.”
Then, beginning in November of last year, a series of civil lawsuits were filed by women who alleged Combs had sexually abused and attacked them, in some instances subjecting them to drug fueled “freak-offs” with male escorts while Combs watched and videoed and masturbated.
The whole world got to see Combs in May, after CNN released a 2016 hotel surveillance video that shows him battering and dragging his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura.
“When all of this stuff started coming out [friends and family members] came back to me and said, ‘You know, we thought you were kind of losing it when you were saying that a few years ago, but you were right.”
Federal agents began investigating and the result was a 14-page indictment for sex trafficking and racketeering, unsealed Tuesday.
Combs knew it was coming and he flew from Miami to New York to turn himself in. Homeland Security Agents went ahead and arrested him at a Manhattan hotel at 8:25 p.m. on Monday.
Reuben survived to raise her sons—and 17-year-old daughter Nirvana—into fine young people. Reuben was in the living room on Monday night when Nirvana appeared at the top of the banister from the second floor and announced the news about the “big” person in custody.
“One of the best days ever,” Reuben later said.
She counted it as a personal victory that Combs might finally be brought to account, if not in her case then in the new one.
“[Combs] was somebody with power, prestige, fame, money and all of that,”she said. “It was the Biblical David and Goliath story. I know my sling and my stone might be 25 years old, but…”
She could not help but think things might have been different for the many victims in this case if she had prevailed a quarter century ago.
“These people in subsequent cases, all of these people who’ve been abused by him subsequently, would probably not have had to endure any of it,” she said. “And that’s the saddest part of all.”
Rapper Sean Puffy Combs leaves the New York Supreme Court January 17, 2001 in Manhattan, New York. The singer attended the first day of his trial in connection with a shooting at a New York City night club in December 1999. The trial began with jury selection.
Robert Mecea/Newsmakers via Getty Images
Combs was arraigned on the 26th floor of Manhattan’s federal courthouse on Tuesday afternoon. He came before Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants with a black stripe on each leg. He had none of the flash and swagger of years past. Puffy’s face was simply puffy. He looked tired and dissipated.
“Not guilty,” he said when asked how he pleaded.
The prosecution team consisted of five women, all clad in black. The lead, Asst. U.S,. Attorney Emily Johnosn, described Combs as a “serial abuser and a serial obstructor.”
When the qusion of bail arose, defense attorney Marc Afgnifilo argued that Combs had earned the court’s trust by doing everything from assembling his family’s passports and putting his plane up for sale to paying off his mortgage so his home could be part of a $50 million bail package.
Johnson responded by addressing Combs directly.
“I don’t think you can trust yourself,” she said.
Sean “Diddy” Combs stands before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky after prosecutors brought three criminal charges against him in federal court in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., September 17, 2024 in this courtroom sketch.
Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
After a brief recess, the judge reunited and ordered Combs to be remanded. Combs turned toward several family members who sat in the third row and placed his hand over his heart.
To his right was a spectacular view of the late afternoon sun shining on the streets and towers of Manhattan, where it had once seemed he could do whatever he wanted. He had the look of somebody peering up from a deep, lightless hole as he turned to his left and began the journey to the dreaded Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He faces a maximum of life in prison.
Word that he had been remanded quickly reached Reuben.
“That is absolutely great news,” she said.
