Sean “Diddy” Combs has returned the ceremonial “Key to the City of New York” following a request by Mayor Eric Adams amid allegations of sexual assault against Combs as well as the leaked surveillance video of him assaulting Cassie.
Combs was given the key in September 2023 at a Times Square ceremony where Mayor Adams quipped at the time, “The bad boy of entertainment is getting the Key to the City from the bad boy of politics.”
However, just two months later, Cassie filed a lawsuit against Combs alleging he raped and physically abused her over the course of a decade. The Cassie lawsuit, which was quickly settled, was the first of now-seven legal actions against the Bad Boy exec, who is also reportedly the focus of a federal sex trafficking investigation.
While the lawsuits and allegations mounted, Combs was not asked to return the Key to the City of New York until earlier this month in the aftermath of the leaked surveillance footage of Combs assaulting Cassie in a hotel, a video that Adams called “deeply disturbing.”
“The Key to the City of New York is presented to individuals whose service to the public and the common good rises to the highest level of achievement, and who act as a model for fellow and future New Yorkers,” Adams wrote in a June 4 letter to Combs’ offices. “After internal deliberations, the Key to the City of New York committee recommended nullifying and rescinding Mr. Combs’ key. I have accepted their recommendation.”
Less than a week after the request was made, the mayor’s office said Friday that Combs returned the ceremonial key on June 10, CBS New York reports.
Days after New York City asked for their Key back, Howard University similarly announced it was revoking the honorary doctorate it awarded Combs in 2014 and returning his $1 million donation, saying its board of trustees made the unanimous decision Friday following the Cassie surveillance video.
“Mr. Combs’ behavior as captured in a recently released video is so fundamentally incompatible with Howard University’s core values and beliefs that he is deemed no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor,” a Howard spokesperson said in a statement.
The move also comes after Rolling Stone published a six-month investigation that included new allegations Combs physically assaulted a woman outside her Howard dorm when he was a student there in the late Eighties. (Combs left the school after his sophomore year.)