Few public figures have been as successful at reshaping their own narrative — or seem to have had as much fun doing it — as Sean Combs. It’s not that we thought his hands were clean — the club shooting that sent Shyne to prison, the assault on executive Steve Stoute, the alleged Sean John sweatshops are all public knowledge. It’s that we chose to buy into Combs’s shiny-suited mythmaking when something far darker was lurking under the hood. In this sobering essay, Craig Jenkins surveys the aftermath of the mogul’s domestic-violence and sexual-assault allegations, and the surface-level solutions we must avoid to prevent it from happening again. “We can ditch our attachment to the all-knowing, unflappable business impresario as a concept, while its stock continues to plummet, or we can party and bullshit our way through this time pretending we rooted out a batch of bad apples, only to come together in another five years surprised it happens again.”

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