Sean “Diddy” Combs and Russel Simmons during 50 Cent Hosts Private Screening of “Get Rich or Die Tryin” – October 29, 2005 at Tribeca Screening Room in New York City, New York, United States. (Photo by Shareif Ziyadat/FilmMagic)

He also names Uptown’s Andre Harrell.

Diddy does not have a lot of people in his corner right now. It seems everybody who dealt with the Bad Boy mogul is either happy or unsurprised to see him go down. Diddy’s former bodyguard, Gene Deal, is no exception. Deal recently sat down for an interview with The Art of Dialogue. He not only claimed that Diddy belonged behind bars, but went on to allege that the mogul learned his excessive behavior from the moguls that came before. Namely, Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons and Uptown Records CEO Andre Harrell.

Gene Deal started his tirade off by laying the blame squarely at Diddy’s feet. He doesn’t hold anybody else accountable for Diddy’s bad behavior other than the man himself. He did, however, point to the men who mentored Diddy during the early period of his career. Deal cited three luminaries within the industry in particular. “You gotta realize, he learned from Andre Harrell,” the ex-bodyguard alleged. “He learned from Russell Simmons. He learned from Clive Davis.” Diddy worked under Harrell when he was an intern at Uptown Records in the early 1990s. It was Russell Simmons, however, who Deal alleged was the most notable influence.

The Bodyguard Feels Diddy Succumbed To His Influences

“When those people are telling you that they were heavy into the drugs,” Deal explained. “They was heavy into beating women, and doing things at that crazy stage. That’s gonna make him think that he can get away with the same thing.” The ex-bodyguard claimed that he saw similarly behavioral traits whenever he was at Simmons’ home. “I’m not gonna say alleged cuse I saw that for my own self,” he asserted. “It can make [a] man into a monster and that’s what it did.”

Russell Simmons, like Diddy, has experienced a fall from grace in recent years. The hip hop legend was accused of sexual assault by multiple women in 2017. Simmons vehemently denied these allegations in a 2018 statement issued to Rolling Stone. “They have shocked me to my core as I have never been abusive or violent in any way in my relations with women,” he wrote. Despite his denial, more women accused him of assault and/or rape. Simmons stepped down from his duties at Def Jam. Interestingly enough, Russell Simmons was one of the few people who defended Diddy when the mogul’s dark past was coming to light.