Aubrey O'Day Learned Diddy Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Her. She 'Felt Horrible' that She Never Reported It (Exclusive)
- - Aubrey O'Day Learned Diddy Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Her. She 'Felt Horrible' that She Never Reported It (Exclusive)
Danielle BacherJanuary 30, 2026 at 4:37 AM
0
Aubrey O' Day (left) and Sean "Diddy" Combs (right).
Netflix; Paras Griffin/Getty
Singer and reality TV star Aubrey O’Day opens up to PEOPLE about learning she was allegedly sexually assaulted by former mentor Sean “Diddy” Combs, which she has no memory of
O'Day first met Diddy in 2005 when she was a contestant on Making the Band, the MTV reality series which led to the formation of her girl group Danity Kane
O'Day never reported the alleged assault to authorities — a decision she says she "felt horrible" about after the statute of limitations expired
O’Day also believes she may have been drugged
In the Netflix docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning, reality star and singer Aubrey O’Day, 41, describes her own alleged sexual assault at the hands of Sean "Diddy” Combs.
But O’Day is not recounting the alleged assault from memory. Instead, she reads aloud from an affidavit — a sworn statement filed two years earlier by another woman in a civil case against Combs — describing an incident O’Day says she does not remember experiencing. She says learning about the affidavit has since reshaped her understanding of her past.
In the statement, a witness alleged that in 2005, during the height of Combs’ power, O’Day was found naked from the waist down and inebriated in a studio room in New York City — a scene the witness described as being horrifying. According to the account, Combs, who was also known by the moniker Puff Daddy, “was penetrating in her vagina, and there was another stocky light-skinned man with his penis in her mouth.” The implication that she may have been drugged landed with particular force.
“I don’t drink or anything like that,” O’Day says exclusively to PEOPLE via Zoom from Los Angeles during a recent interview. “There was no ‘Oh, I could have been,’ or ‘Oh, I was doing...’ There was none of that for me."
Sean 'Diddy' Combs at Invest Fest in 2023.
Paras Griffin/Getty
The allegation was one of many covered in the explosive documentary released last December, which explores and examines decades of accusations against Combs, who has denied wrongdoing and is still facing nearly a hundred civil lawsuits after being convicted in a federal criminal case in October.
When asked directly whether she believes she was sexually assaulted by Combs, O'Day stops short of certainty. “I just don’t feel it would be responsible to say that,” explains the San Francisco, Calif., native, who began performing as a child. “I take it very seriously that this is a man’s life on the line.”
When reached for comment, Combs’ spokesperson Juda Engelmayer told PEOPLE, “We will not be addressing individual allegations made in this Netflix hit piece.”
Aubrey O' Day (left) and Sean Combs (right).
John Lamparski/Getty; Steve Granitz/WireImage
O’Day hadn’t planned to watch the documentary. “It was hard for me, the day that it came out,” she says. That day, she was meant to be at rehearsal, preparing to return to the stage with Danity Kane, the band Combs himself formed in 2005 on the reality series Making the Band. But the film dominated headlines and online chats, making it impossible to avoid.
Director Alex Stapleton urged her to wait. “Don’t watch it yet,” she recalls him telling her. “Wait until the tour is over, or at least rehearsal.” O’Day didn’t listen. By noon, her body reacted before her mind could catch up. “I was hyperventilating and in tears and sobbing,” she says.
The documentary forced her to ask questions she had never fully asked: “What other people are responsible in all of this besides him? What could really possibly make a change and so these things don't continue to occur?”
At the same time, O’Day claims Homeland Security contacted her, placing limits on what she could say both in the 50 Cent-produced docuseries and publicly. She verified what she could without crossing legal lines, while also searching for reasons not to believe what she was learning about her own alleged abuse at the hands of Diddy.
“I don't even know if I was raped, and I don't want to know,” she said in the film. Still, she searched for answers anyway, reaching out to other women. “I saw things and I reached out to girls… wondering,” she says. “Because I saw things and I was like, ‘Oh, that must be a thing.’”
Sean "P. Diddy" Combs poses for a photo with (L-R) Dawn Richard, Aubrey O'Day, Shannon Bex, Aundrea Fimbres and D. Woods of Danity Kane backstage during MTV's "Making The Band 4" finale at the MTV Times Square Studios August 26, 2007 in New York City.
Scott Gries/Getty
O’Day began to reassess her own history with Combs. Years earlier, during Making the Band, she claims he sent sexually explicit emails and images. “I don’t want to just f--- you, I want to turn you out,” O’Day reads aloud in the documentary.
“I can see you being with some motherf----- that you tell what to do. I make my woman do what I tell her to do, and she loves it. I just want and like to do things different. I’m-a finish watching this porn and finish masturbating. I’ll think of you. If you change your mind and get ready to do what I say, hit me.” The email, dated March 23, 2008, included Combs’ standard signature at the time: “God bless. Diddy. God is the Greatest.”
O’Day says she repeatedly rebuffed Combs’ advances, and she believes the consequences were swift. In 2008, Combs announced her firing from Danity Kane. “I absolutely felt that I was fired for not participating sexually,” O’Day says in the film documentary. She frames her dismissal not as a creative or business decision, but as retaliation, an allegation that reframes what was once packaged as reality-TV drama into something far darker.
Years later, she says she is still grappling with the image of herself that followed — one she believes Combs helped create through comments about her appearance, her attitude and by labeling her “overly raunchy” and “promiscuous.”
“I think still, even with this round, during this Danity Kane tour that we just finished, I was still fighting, even with my own bandmates and in the whole situation, the ideas that Puff just blatantly shot out to the world,” she says. “It was highly irresponsible, because you know that if I was raunchy or promiscuous, [Combs] would’ve loved me. And ‘bad for business’ was never correct, because the band was built around me, according to his words specifically.”
Following Diddy’s trial, O’Day watched the country debate the split verdict, which resulted in a 50-month federal prison sentence for prostitution-related convictions. He is scheduled for release on May 15, 2028.
She regrets not reporting her alleged assault. When New York’s statute window closed in 2023, lawyers urged her to file. She didn’t. “I remember the day that the statute closed,” she says. “Well, this is it. You’re never going to be able to see that type of justice again in your life… It felt horrible.”
On her recent tour, O'Day encountered fans who had their own stories of trauma. Night after night. Fans lined up at meet-and-greets, holding her, crying, sharing their own experiences of assault and survival. They thanked her for being a voice. She absorbed it all.
“I would start off these shows feeling like I was 300 lbs.,” she says, explaining she felt like she was carrying the weight of other people’s trauma alongside her own. When she landed in the ER in December, it was not because she could not do the job. She says she has never missed a show in over two decades. It was because the job had become inseparable from a reckoning she had not finished processing, in environments that did not always feel safe enough to do so.
What O’Day says she is living inside now is not a clean narrative of victimhood or redemption. It is something far more complicated. She holds empathy and anger at the same time, gratitude and grief in the same breath, clarity and confusion in the same sentence. The documentary, she says, did not give her closure. It gave her perspective.
“The past three months for me have been extreme,” O’Day admits. “I’ve been living and breathing and talking about trauma nonstop. I haven’t healed from any of it.”
Aubrey O'Day in Oct. 2019. Presley Ann/Getty Images
For her, healing is not a finish line. It is a daily choice. “Healing looks like waking up every day and choosing not to carry it,” she says. “And when it comes up, recognizing it, taking a few breaths.”
When she moved to Bali in 2020 for a year, O’Day had turned to alternative practices that help ground her today. “I got into breathwork, ice baths, saunas, reiki,” she says. “Whatever brings your body back to a state of peace.”
That, she says, is how she keeps going. “I try to operate from that place and then continue on with my day,” O’Day explains. “I don’t know that it ever goes away. I’ve done all kinds of therapy. It doesn’t disappear. It just finds a place inside you where it becomes manageable again.”
And for now, she says, that is enough to move forward.
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
