The epic rise and fall of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

There was unbridled delight – and more than a little trepidation – across the face of a man who built his image on swagger as Sean Combs took to the stage at Howard University’s May 2014 commencement. He’d dropped out of the renowned institution decades earlier, taking a gamble on a record label internship that spawned an empire touching the spheres of music, fashion, dining, business and, ultimately, pop culture near-ubiquity.

The world of higher education, however, was one that Combs had never conquered in the same way. He grinned like a child in thrilled disbelief as he accepted his honorary degree, then took off his tasselled cap, wiped the sweat from his brow and composed himself before launching into an uncharacteristically humble speech.

“You cannot achieve success without failure,” said Combs, a master of reinvention who’d already changed his name from Puffy to Puff Daddy to P. Diddy to Diddy. “Some of my biggest successes come from my biggest failures.”

In the audience were a cast of this-is-your-life characters who had figured largely in Combs’ rise: The record label bigwig who’d hired him, fired him, then become an executive at one of Combs’s new companies. The women who’d borne his children. The mother who’d raised him. He looked out at those faces as he described learning, while searching through microfiche headlines in the Howard library during his early days on campus, that his father had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad – as opposed to being killed in a car accident, as his mother had told him. So Combs, then 44, also spoke about breaking patterns.

“I decided to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of my father, but in an honest way … in a legal way,” he told those gathered.

It was a statement that likely sparked raised-eyebrow incredulity among those in the audience who’d opposed the selection of Combs for commencement speaker; not only had he dropped out of Howard, but he’d also courted controversy for almost the entirety of his career – much of it legal.

Now, weeks away from