Diddy’s arrest this week may have brought great relief to his alleged victims, but some people are also feeling a little more triumphant. A woman who claims the 54-year-old artist shot her in the face during the infamous 1999 nightclub shooting involving Jennifer Lopez is now celebrating the fact that he has been taken into custody.
Natania Reuben, the alleged victim of the shooting, said Daily Beast that she learned of the Bad Boy founder’s arrest from her daughter Nirvana. “She says, ‘Mommy, guess who’s in custody?'” she recalls. “I asked her if it was someone from town that we knew. And she said, ‘No, he’s bigger.'”
Reuben said that when she learned of the former REVOLT chairman’s arrest, she “cried out to God, ‘Thank you, merciful Father!'” That catharsis stemmed from a traumatic experience in 1999. She was at the same party as Puff and J. Lo that ended in gunfire after the mogul got into a fight with a drug dealer. Reuben said she saw the Bad Boy co-founder shoot her in the face.
“I watched him,” said Natania Reuben Daily Beast“I saw him with my own eyes.” She was hit in the eye by a 9mm bullet and felt like she had been hit by “Paul Bunyan’s red-hot sledgehammer” when she was shot. “I cried out to God and said, ‘Don’t take me. I’m not finished raising my children, I still have work to do,'” she said of her two sons.
Reuben eventually testified in his trial against Diddy, but surgeons were unable to remove fragments from her face and provide ballistic evidence to support her testimony. Puff was acquitted and settled the civil suit with Reuben, paying her $1.8 million. Shyne, his artist at the time, was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison, although Reuben claimed his label head shot her.
She called his arrest more than 20 years later “one of the best days ever,” but acknowledged that he might not have been able to hurt as many people if he had been convicted in the 1999 shooting trial. He now faces charges of organized crime and sex trafficking, in addition to rape and sexual assault charges filed last year.
Diddy and his legal team maintain his innocence, although raids in March found him in possession of over 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, special sex rooms filled with sex toys and bondage items, and hidden cameras for his “freak offs.”
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