This story mentions sexual assault.
As you may know, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Usher go waaaay back.
Usher was introduced to Combs as a teenager in the early ‘90s when he first signed a record deal. Combs — who is nine years older than Usher — mentored the R&B star and produced his self-titled debut album in 1994.
In the past, Usher has spoken about the year he spent living with Combs in New York City when he was just 13, saying on more than one occasion that he witnessed “very curious things taking place” during that time.
“I got a chance to see some things. I went there to see the lifestyle — and I saw it,” he told Howard Stern in 2016. “I don’t know if I could indulge and understand what I was even looking at. It was pretty wild.”
Since then, a lot has come to light about Diddy’s alleged behavior. Starting in late 2023, the mogul was hit with extensive allegations of rape, assault, and abuse spanning over a 20-year period. He has denied the allegations. In September 2024, he was arrested and charged with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution.
Less than a year later, in July 2025, he was found guilty on two federal charges of transportation for purposes of prostitution. He was acquitted of the more serious charges. The former rapper is currently incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey, serving a 50-month sentence.
Now, Usher has talked openly about his decades-spanning relationship with Combs — and explained why he doesn’t have “anything negative to say” about his disgraced former mentor.
In a new interview for The Enterprise Zone, Forbes’ senior writer Jabari Young played a game of word association with Usher, and when he said “Sean Combs,” the R&B singer’s one-word response was: “Legacy.”
This prompted Jabari to bring up an interview Usher did around 2015, when he said he “knew better” than to get distracted by certain things happening in NYC when he was younger, saying: “I could’ve gotten into a lot of stuff, but I had a plan, I had a focus.”
In relation to Combs, Jabari used these quotes to demonstrate that Usher managed to avoid “a lot of the negativity that we obviously know shows up in [Diddy’s] story today,” which prompted Usher to clarify his stance on everything that has unfolded.
“This might be a bit controversial…we can’t ignore the reality of the history,” he began. “In many ways, I think certain people are prosecuted and maybe not recognized for the greatness that they offer.”
“I don’t have anything negative to say about Sean Combs because my experience was not what the world has seen and how he’s been misrepresented,” he said.
Prefacing that not “every man is perfect,” Usher said he can’t, “with any sense of humanity,” disregard Combs’ “legacy” and “valuable contributions” to business and culture, saying: “So many people benefited from what he created. And I acknowledge that. And that’s why I see him as legacy.”
When asked specifically about the “era” he spent with Combs as his “mentor,” Usher continued to praise the rapper’s cultural influence and compared him to “a really, really, hard teacher” who he learned from “in real-time.”
“That’s who I see that man as, and that’s what I choose to remember,” he explained. “I put respect on his name because I realized that what I learned as a businessman, before I even understood what business was, came as a result of seeing the incredible things that he was able to do and the way that he positioned himself as a businessman.”