Turns out we had it all wrong.

Remember back in 1995 at the Source Awards, when Death Row records CEO Suge Knight walked up on stage and asked if artists wanted a different kind of management that didn’t include the executive producer “all in the videos, all on the records… dancing,” something that they should get with his record label.

Well, it appears that Knight wasn’t talking about Sean “Diddy” Combs.

All this time, we thought Diddy — the dancing executive producer who was in damn near every video he executive produced — was who Suge Knight, the 6-foot-2, 265-pound ex-football player often accused of extorting rappers, was talking about.

During a 2017 “Drink Champs” podcast interview with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN, Diddy noted that he and Suge were friends who used to hang out whenever he was in Cali. So even he was shocked that the notorious enforcer, who is serving a 28-year prison sentence for a fatal hit-and-run (he crashed his pickup into two men, killing one) called him out.

With the 1995 Source Awards being in New York, Diddy’s hometown, the head of Bad Boy Entertainment said he wasn’t intimidated, that had wolves with him who were ready to go whenever he gave the word. Diddy claims that later that night he stepped to Suge to ask what executive producer he was talking about, and Suge punked out. It wasn’t Diddy, Suge said. It was Jermaine Dupri, the Atlanta producer.

What would happen over the next few years would be a full-on war between the West and East coasts in which Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. would lose their lives. And for years we believed the aggressor was Knight. But what if the real villain was standing right in front of us the whole time? What if the real thug was the one who promoted peace that night at the Source Awards? What if the real dangerous one was the one “all in the videos, all on the records…dancing,” and we never noticed?

Until Cassie’s lawsuit.

For thirty-five pages, Cassie’s lawyers mapped out an alleged history of rape, violence, sex trafficking, human trafficking, sexual battery and sexual assault. The lawsuit was so damaging that it came with a trigger warning. The outline of Diddy we all thought we knew was now filled in with colors so dark that the man long accused of not paying his artists settled the lawsuit out of court the very next day.

Was Diddy’s public persona very different from his private one? In public he presented as the flamboyant music exec who acted as a fun-loving, often-smiling purveyor of peace. He was the hard-driving boss who once made aspiring artists walk to get him a Junior’s cheesecake during his hit reality show, “Making the Band,” because he was once an upstart who was willing to do anything to make it. We were all sold the image of the motivated intern turned mogul who literally pulled himself up by his Jodeci-style boot straps.

Could we have had it all wrong?

But even more deafening than our bewilderment is the silence of the industry. Why haven’t his friends in the music industry,........

© HuffPost