Pleasure, Power, and the Violence of Watching: On the Diddy Trial

J.R. Eyerman, Life Pictures, 1952

With all the media frenzy surrounding the Diddy trial, I have found myself deliberately steering clear of any news coverage, social media posts, or commentary about it. This is not out of disinterest or ignorance, but more like survival—I know what is at stake. Whatever bits of news bypass my unsophisticated filters leave me feeling unsettled. I know more than enough about the extent of Diddy’s abuse, about the “kinky parties” shrouded in coercion and sexual exploitation. To engage with it through trial coverage feels like participating in something just as insidious.

I have seen the salacious stories about “baby oil” and “kinky parties” played for laughs online. Many gossip about the details, debate his guilt (or sometimes his innocence), and resurface old clips reminding us that his alleged abuses did not occur in the shadows. For decades, they were whispered about, rumored, gossiped over—by celebrities, news outlets, even Diddy himself. But behind the punchlines are real acts of violence and manipulation.

On reflection, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) helps me understand this feeling of refusal. Hartman looks deeply at the afterlife of slavery—how the legacies of racial violence persist not only through systems of domination but also through scenes of pleasure, amusement, and display. She traces how Black pain becomes part of the spectacle of white enjoyment—how the line between witnessing and violating can become dangerously blurred.

The spectacle of Black suffering, rendered consumable.

Hartman helps us see that the spectacle of Diddy’s trial is not merely about individual guilt or innocence. It becomes a scene through which racial-sexual violence is both disavowed and reanimated. What is on trial is not just a man, but a system of pleasure, power, and domination structured through the afterlife of slavery—a spectacle of Black celebrity culture in which private violence is transformed into public titillation. As Hartman puts it, suffering becomes a “source of pleasure” for onlookers, for media consumers, for the structures that allow this spectacle to thrive.

I do not recall the Epstein case being treated with such public titillation. There was shock, yes, but also a gravity, a recognition of its systemic impact. By contrast, the Diddy trial seems to reward spectacle. It thrives on power and normalizes coercion. Serious conversations about who enabled Diddy are not being had. Instead, we speculate on which Black celebrities may have participated in his “sexcapades.”

Hartman critiques how domination is often masked as pleasure. In the Combs case, pleasure is weaponized too. The spaces where the alleged abuse occurred—lavish parties, music studios, mansions—are constructed as pleasurescapes, masking domination as consensual hedonism.

Diddy, while undeniably a powerful figure, is not acting in isolation. He operates within a predominantly white music industry that has not only tolerated but arguably emboldened his behavior. Much like how the plantation’s cruelty was sanitized through narratives of joy—minstrelsy, dance, “happy slaves”—this industry crafts pleasurescapes that mask domination and control. This structure rewards spectacle, thrives on power, and normalizes coercion. It packages violence as entertainment, and coercion as charisma.

Within this system, where Black creativity is consumed and commodified, violence is not an aberration; it is embedded in the form itself. The alleged abuse did not occur in spite of these scenes of power, wealth, and desirability, it occurred through them. The music industry, like the plantation, transforms Black pain into public pleasure, disguising domination as freedom. As Hartman teaches us, pleasure has always been a cover for terror. And the spectacle of Black celebrity excess becomes another site where violence is aestheticized, eroticized, and ultimately excused.

We must never forget that what is being described is abuse.

Diddy’s trial risks becoming what Hartman names a scene of subjection: a moment where violence against Black people becomes visible but only as performance, as consumable image, as titillation rather than transformation. The courtroom becomes a stage. The media coverage, with its clickbait headlines, becomes a script. The survivors’ testimonies become soundbites. The constant replaying of their words risks restaging the very violations it claims to condemn. And we—if we are not careful—become an audience clapping for justice while replaying the trauma.

This is especially painful when we think of Cassie Ventura, Diddy’s former partner and victim, who had finally found a measure of closure after years of abuse and a private legal settlement, only to now be subpoenaed, pulled back into public view, and forced to relive that trauma in the courtroom.

One of Hartman’s deepest insights is that exposing violence does not guarantee justice. Sometimes it simply re-performs the spectacle. The voyeuristic fascination—the constant dissection and sharing—it all threatens to re-perform the very violences it claims to condemn. This is not justice. This is exposure.

So for me, the refusal to watch, to read, to feed the social media algorithms, is not an evasion. It is a form of care. It is a political stance. It is a rejection of the spectacle. Because Black suffering should not be a stage.