Near the peak of the intrigue surrounding Sean “Diddy” Combs last year, a purported memoir by Kim Porter, the late mother of four of his children, rose to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. Kim’s Lost Words recounted a supposed array of startling sexual adventures and violence, and ended with Porter seeming to predict her own murder at her partner’s hands. It was independently published by Chris Todd, a little-known but enthusiastic peddler of celebrity conspiracy; Amazon quickly pulled the book, which a friend of Porter’s described to me at the time as “all lies.”
In the lead-up to his trial this spring on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, Combs was primarily fighting his criminal case, but his lawyers also began combatting the cottage industry of media projects that