Mel B details horrifying encounter with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
In a resurfaced passage from her book, Mel B lashed out at Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs as she recalled a horrifying encounter with the disgraced music mogul. She recalled the shocking moment when during an on-stage altercation, Combs branded her a “bitch.”
Mel B touched upon the subject in her 2018 memoir Brutally Honest. She spoke about how Combs treated her when she was trying to rehearse for her stint presenting the 1998 MOBO awards. The Spice Girls singer was due to practice with her co-host, the US comedian Bill Bellamy, but they could not get on stage as Combs and his entourage refused to leave. The Spice Girl ended up going on stage to confront him about his behaviour.
Combs, at the time, was rehearsing for his own performance at the MOBOs that night and apparently wasn’t happy about being rushed off the stage. Performing under the stage name Puff Daddy, when Mel B asked him to leave, he responded, “Get this bitch off the stage.”
“People think I am so tough, and to some degree I am,” she wrote in her book, “I can stand my ground against the likes of Sean ‘P Diddy’ ‘Puffy’ Combs, who – back in 1998, when I’d been asked to host the MOBO Awards in London – wouldn’t get off the stage to let me start my rehearsals for the show. I had to perform as well as host show.”
Mel B recalled the size of Combs’s team and his reluctance to leave the stage despite the fact that the show was starting soon. “He’d turned up with a massive entourage and then run into my rehearsal time with the clock ticking less than an hour before the doors were due to open,” she said, “I was watching, fuming, as he said he wanted another run-through. I marched out towards him. ‘No, I need to rehearse my song NOW’, I said.”
Allegedly, Combs hardly even acknowledged the Spice Girl and instead just decided to lash out at her. “He didn’t even look at me,” Mel B recalled, “Just raised his mic and said, ‘Get this bitch off the stage’.”
Despite being horrified by the comment and the rude nature of Combs, Mel B eventually managed to get him off the stage so that she could rehearse. “He tried to ignore me,” she said, “So I said, ‘Listen, I’m introducing you tonight, so I’d be nice if I were you. The doors are opening in ten minutes. I need to rehearse. Can you get off the f**king stage!’”