Sean “Diddy” Combs is accused of placing a hit on Natalia Reuben, a victim wounded in the 1999 club shooting involving Jamal “Shyne” Barrow and the embattled rapper.
In an interview clip published by The Art of Dialogue last week, Reuben herself, alleged that Diddy placed a bounty on her head after the incident, forcing her to uproot her life.
“I was born in Brooklyn [and] I was raised in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had no intentions of leaving, and probably had this [not] happened, I probably would have never left, but when the District Attorney’s office gets information from one of their confidential informant sources saying that there’s a bag on my head, and I’m calling the District Attorney’s office and I’m calling everybody because I look out my window where I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn and there’s four, stretched, blacked-out SUVs — I lived on the corner — there’s one on that corner, that corner, one in front of my house, one on the next corner.
“What should I do? Sit there and wait for them to come get me or submit to the will of people who have my best interest and want to move me and my family to preserve my safety? […] I had businesses. Why would I pick up and just leave everything I knew but for the fact that my life depended on it?”
Further, Reuben clarified that her comments about the Bad Boy mogul do not imply she advocates for Shyne’s innocence.
“I said on my TikTok, Shyne did not shoot me because he didn’t, but Shyne is a con artist,” she said. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, we knew Shyne was innocent.’ No, you don’t know a damn thing because he’s far from innocent.”
The rapper and politician, who served a decade in prison from 2001 until his release in 2009, recently addressed claims that his former Combs was the gunman responsible for shooting Reuben in the face.
“It opens wounds when you hear the victim saying it was Diddy that shot her,” he said earlier this year, during a news conference. “I’ve been saying this all along. Everyone knew all along that I was the fall guy, but my political enemies and detractors tried to make me into this criminal, but everyone knew that I was a young kid that took the fall.
“I’m just saying that I maintained my innocence all this time. I said that I was defending myself. I didn’t get into who did what, But the victim is telling you who did what.”
On December 27, 1999, a shooting at Club New York in Manhattan, stemming from an altercation between Puff’s crew and Matthew “Scar” Allen, injured three bystanders. While Diddy and his bodyguard were acquitted of all charges, Shyne was convicted of weapon possession, assault, and reckless endangerment, resulting in a 10-year prison sentence. Following his release in 2009, Shyne was deported to his native Belize.