“Get the truth.”
That was the simple directive director and executive producer Alexandria Stapleton received from Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson when she started working on “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.”
The four-part Netflix documentary traces the allegations of sexual assault, trafficking and legal battles surrounding Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Stapleton and Jackson had begun their work together behind the scenes to get to the truth of the allegations, but they couldn’t tell any of it without the larger story of Combs’ rise to power within the music industry. That became the focal point at the start of the doc.
However, when diving into the many allegations, there had still been no indictment at the beginning.
“The biggest challenge was figuring out how to cut through the noise of social media and to have meaningful conversation,” Stapleton says. “I knew that my roadmap was going to have to be that, and I was going to have to follow the yellow brick road.”
Stapleton’s work as a director includes “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel,” “Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea,” “The Playbook” and “Reggie.” Combined with Jackson on board as an executive producer, she was able to garner trust from those who spoke up against Combs.
She knew she wasn’t going to tell a salacious story. Stapleton didn’t rush through interviews, often spending eight to 12 hours with her subjects. “Victims who are talking about physical assault, sexual assaults, you can’t just speed through that,” she says.
Editors Jack Gravina, Evan Wise, Charles Divak and Benji Kast pieced together the puzzle of Stapleton’s footage, mixing it in with footage from Combs’ days leading up to his 2024 arrest.
Aubrey O’Day, who Combs signed to his girl group Danity Kane as part of the show “Making the Band” in the early aughts, was one interview that was needed to complete the puzzle. In the series, she spoke out about her former boss and the trauma she had endured.
But the question was where to put it. At one point, the scene even moved episodes. “We had it as a cold open at one point. We had it at the end of episode three, we had it earlier in four,” Divak says. “We were moving it all over the place.”
Ultimately, it ended up in the fourth and final episode.
“It felt so much more earned, because you had been on this journey with her in episode three, and you had learned about her experience and grown to like her as a person,” Divak explains. “Now she’s experiencing this thing that she doesn’t even know if it happened or not. It’s this fog of all these suits coming out, and she doesn’t want to detract from the other people that are suing, but at the same time, she doesn’t know if it really happened to her — but she doesn’t doubt that it probably could happen to her, because it’s similar to other stories that have been told.”
When reading one lawsuit for the first time, O’Day stops and speaks to the camera, stumbling a bit. It was a scene that needed to breathe as she grappled with everything she was experiencing.
The documentary took a turn when the verdict came in and Combs was found guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
“It changed how we told the story,” says Divak. People who wanted to speak up were scared, while others decided to come forward. “The verdict put pressure on all of us to tell exactly what happened — because the true story didn’t really come out in the trial.”
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