John Legend’s Manager Details 'Terrifying' Experience At Diddy New Year’s Eve Yacht Party

John Legend’s longtime manager has come forward with a shocking story about a “terrifying” experience she had at a party hosted by Diddy.

Many of the accounts we’ve heard so far are anonymous for legal reasons, but not this one. In a new op-ed for The New York Times on Thursday, entertainment manager Ty Stiklorius recalled her Diddy experience — WAY back. She was a recent college grad on a family vacation in the Caribbean 27 years ago when she and her brother managed to get into a New Year’s Eve bash on a yacht docked in St. Barts. Puff hosted that party. Whoa.

Celebrating with a well-known rapper and other famous people on a luxury boat, who wouldn’t want that? It sounds like a great time, right? Especially in the ’90s, decades before anyone knows anything about “Freak Offs.” However, it was anything but a good time for Ty. The Friends at Work founder said:

“I was a recent college graduate and it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the slew of boldface names onboard. But the sheen of the situation wore off quickly. I thought I was being shown to the disco room when I was directed into a bedroom by a man who seemed to be an associate of the party’s host, Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs.”

The man then locked Ty in the bedroom! OMG! Everyone thought he was joking when he told Conan he locked women up! Fortunately, she got away before the worst happened:

“To this day, I can’t remember how I managed to talk my way out of that terrifying situation. Perhaps my nervous babbling — ‘My brother’s on this boat, and he’s probably looking for me!’ — convinced him to unlock the bedroom door and let me go.”

She got super lucky in the end. From the accounts we’ve heard, this could have been horrific. We’re so glad she didn’t get hurt.

Ty thought her “experience was an anomaly” at the time, believing it was “just one guy behaving badly at a drunken party.” But now, nearly three decades later, news broke that Diddy was arrested on charges of sex trafficking, and the CEO could not help but think back to that night on his yacht. Although Ty still has no clue if the guy who dragged and locked her in a bedroom had any connection to Diddy, seems a pretty decent chance the Bad Boy Records founder was involved in her harrowing situation, given all we know now.

And Ty knows all too well events like the ones she experienced have happened many times to other women, in her industry and beyond:

“But I do now know, after 20 years as a music industry executive, that what happened that night was no aberration — it was an indicator of a pervasive culture in the music industry that actively fostered sexual misconduct and exploited the lives and bodies of those hoping to make it in the business. This toxic situation has been allowed to fester because power has been concentrated in the hands of kingmakers: wealthy, entitled, nearly always male gatekeepers who control nearly every door that leads to success and who can, without consequence, use their power to abuse young women and young men.”

And we’ve all heard the horrifying stories of how Diddy tried to use his “power” in the industry to assault men and women — even minors. Awful. She continued:

“How many other women had early experiences similar to mine and abandoned their ambition to be artists — let alone recording engineers, producers or executives? How many women were coerced, abused, assaulted and silenced on their way to their dreams — trapped by men who controlled access and who made us believe that the key to the kingdom was a key card to their hotel room?”

It breaks our hearts to think about all the people who have experienced this. As she pointed out, following all the disturbing claims about Diddy, it’s about damn time to “turn the page on a culture of exploitation and abuse” and “remake the business into something worthy of the art they create.” And Ty is right. It needs to happen now.

You can read Ty’s entire powerful piece HERE. Reactions, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence and would like to learn more about resources, consider checking out https://www.rainn.org/resources.

[Image via Judy Eddy/FayesVision/WENN, Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube]