Ty Stiklorius, the longtime manager of liberal musician John Legend, has recalled a “terrifying situation” she experienced while attending a party of disgraced rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Stiklorius revealed that the experience almost caused her to quit her career because of the “toxic” music industry.
She blasted the music industry in an op-ed for the New York Times.
The article, published on October 31, is titled, “The Music Industry Is Toxic. After P. Diddy, We Can Clean It Up.”
In the opinion piece, Stiklorius addressed her perspective on the industry.
She also an incident she called “an indicator of a pervasive culture in the music industry that actively fostered sexual misconduct and exploited the lives and bodies of those hoping to make it in the business.”
Stiklorius said she attended one of Combs’ New Year’s Eve yacht parties in St. Barts years ago with her brother.
During the party, Stiklorius said she ended up in a “terrifying situation” when a strange man locked her in a bedroom.
She wrote that she was “directed into a bedroom by a man.”
When he locked the door of the room and blocked her from leaving, Stiklorius said she felt panicked by the situation.
However, she said she has since realized that this is part of the norm in this industry.
In her NY Times article, Stiklorius writes that she hopes will change with the developments of the Diddy case.
“To this day, I can’t remember how I managed to talk my way out of that terrifying situation,” she wrote.
“Perhaps my nervous babbling — ‘My brother’s on this boat, and he’s probably looking for me!’ — convinced him to unlock the bedroom door and let me go,” Stiklorius claimed.
She noted that she assumed at the time that her “experience was an anomaly.”
Stiklorius said she thought it must have been “just one guy behaving badly at a drunken party.”
However, she has since come to believe this was a prevalent, predatory behavior in the industry.
“After 20 years as a music industry executive … [I now know] what happened that night was no aberration,” she wrote.
Stiklorius added that her “early experiences with predators, and those that enabled them, nearly led me to give up on the music business.”
She shared a similar story to demonstrate the prevalence of the issue.
“A few years after the boat incident, while pursuing my M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, I attended a dinner where a senior music executive slipped his key card to me under the table, an unsubtle invitation to his hotel room. I declined,” she recalled.
Stiklorius questioned, “How many women were coerced, abused, assaulted, and silenced on their way to their dreams — trapped by men who controlled access and who made us believe that the key to the kingdom was a key card to their hotel room?”
She went on to say she hoped the industry could move forward and “turn the page on a culture of exploitation and abuse.”
The news comes as Hollywood celebrities and powerful elites are “praying” that Diddy will “keep his mouth shut,” an insider has revealed.
As THAIMBC News reported earlier, a source told In Touch Weekly that the hip-hop mogul’s powerful friends are keeping their distance from the rapper.
The insider revealed that Diddy’s VIP accomplices are hoping that the rapper doesn’t name them.
The embattled producer “kept meticulous records” of his exclusive A-list parties.
At those parties, celebrities allegedly witnessed and participated in sexual abuse of adults and children.
“The word is he’s got enough dirt to hang half of Hollywood,” the source added.
“All the rumors that he’s kept meticulous records, and even video recordings, of all the crazy* stuff that went on at his big parties over the years is only adding to everyone’s panic,” the insider said.
Diddy is currently in jail in Brooklyn as he awaits trial in May on sex trafficking charges.
