Howard University revoked an honorary degree given to hip hop mogul Sean (Diddy) Combs after a recently released video showed him physically assaulting his ex-girlfriend at a hotel in 2016.
Combs attended the historically Black university in Washington D.C. from 1987 to 1989, the Associated Press reported.
“The Howard University Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to accept the return by Mr. Sean Combs of the honorary degree conferred upon him in 2014,” a statement from the university said, noting he’d been stripped of “all honors and privileges associated with the degree.”
The statement said Combs’s behavior in the video, released last month by CNN, “is so fundamentally incompatible with Howard University’s core values and beliefs that he is deemed no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor.”
The board also directed administrators to disband the scholarship program in his name, return a $1 million contribution Combs made to the university and discontinue a 2016 gift agreement with him and a 2023 pledge of $1 million made by the Sean Combs Foundation. The statement noted that the foundation made no payments toward the pledge yet.
Combs’s ex-girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassandra (Cassie) Ventura, alleged in a federal lawsuit in November that he had raped and beat her over the course of their relationship, the Associated Press reported. They settled the suit the day after it was filed. Four other lawsuits filed since then have accused Combs of sexual assault and sex trafficking, which led Homeland Security officials to raid his homes in March.
