Former Vibe editor-in-chief, Danyel Smith claims Diddy threatened her life over a cover dispute

Former Vibe editor-in-chief, Danyel Smith has accused Sean “Diddy” Combs of threatening her life over a 1997 cover dispute in a new first-person essay for the New York Times.

In a personal essay published in The New York Times Magazine on Friday, Smith wrote that in 1997, she selected Combs as the cover star for Vibe magazine’s December/January double issue.

According to Hollywood Reporter, the photos for the shoot were inspired by the poster for the 1978 Warren Beatty film Heaven Can Wait, featuring Combs in white angel wings. With a split run of the cover, each of the two would feature a different motif: “one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones.”

Following the photo shoot, she recalled Combs requesting to see the covers. Given this was against the policy for the magazine, Smith said she denied his request. After she told him no, she heard that Combs “planned to come to our office and force us to show him what we’d chosen and to make us choose something else if he didn’t like what he saw.”

Smith was aware that in 1996, Combs was found guilty of criminal mischief for threatening a photographer for the New York Post with a gun, but she said that she also knew that she “had to have him on the cover.”

Fearing what Combs could do, Smith said that Vibe employees “put together a plan” to keep her safe in case Combs appeared at the office.

Smith alleged that Combs entered the office with two security guards one day and asked the receptionist “Where’s Danyel?” It was then that the employees, who had already been notified by the receptionist of Combs’ arrival, “shuttled” Smith from office to office, allowing her to narrowly escape in a taxi, with the paper proofs of the covers in hand.

The next day, she said that Combs called the office, alleging that he made a threat.

“He wanted to see the covers. I was still on message: It’s not what we do,” recalled Smith. “It was then that Combs told me, as I’ve retold hundreds of times over the years, that he would see me ‘dead in the trunk of a car.’ Not missing a beat, I told him he needed to take that threat back.”

When Smith threatened that she would call her lawyer if he didn’t “take back” his alleged threat, she claimed Combs told her, “I know where you are right now. Right on Lexington.” After Smith contacted her personal lawyer and legal action was threatened, she said Combs faxed over an apology two hours later.

However, shortly after the incident, the magazine’s servers were stolen from the office. The entire issue was saved on one of the servers, which prompted rumors that crew members from Combs’ label Bad Boy Entertainment had been involved in the theft. 

The New York Times Magazine article comes amid Diddy’s mounting legal woes, sex trafficking probe, and sexual assault lawsuits.