This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.
Cassie’s lawsuit. The house raids. The arrest. The trial and the verdict. The increasingly disturbing allegations and revelations regarding Sean “Diddy” Combs have fed pop-culture discourse for the last two years straight, and today the content machine keeps churning, with the release of The Reckoning, a four-episode Netflix docuseries that ambitiously charts Puff Daddy’s 30-plus-year arc from hip-hop paradigm-shifter to convicted felon.
As if that logline wasn’t juicy enough, there’s another wrinkle: One of the doc’s executive producers is 50 Cent, who’s been trolling Puffy mercilessly since Cassie’s initial allegations broke the dam two years ago. 50 announced early on that he intended to make a documentary exposing Diddy’s alleged trail of abuse and death, but no one quite expected him to follow through—let alone debut the doc on the biggest streaming service, barely a month after its subject began serving his sentence at Ft. Dix.
In a statement released through a spokesperson yesterday, Diddy slammed the doc as a “shameless hit piece” by “a longtime adversary with a personal vendetta” against him. But 50 insists the doc isn’t rooted in pettiness or colored by his personal agenda, and that in director Alexandria, he’s found an objective voice to present the story as it is, with new perspectives and footage that ultimately leave the final opinion in the hands of the viewer. I screened most of The Reckoning before its release and then talked to 50 and Alexandria about Puffy’s last week before his arrest, their decision to dedicate a whole episode to the Biggie/Tupac feud, and who they wish would’ve participated as a talking head.
GQ: 50, you expressed your interest in producing this fairly quickly once everything started happening, and you guys turned it around just as quickly. What about this case and this story compelled you to want to make a doc about it as it was all unfolding?
50: To be honest, just the culture itself. If someone’s not saying something, then you would assume that everybody in hip-hop is okay with what’s going on because [other rappers] will say, “I ain’t going to say nothing. I’m going to mind my business,” because of a position that [Diddy] held in culture for so long, you understand? So [that] would leave me. Without me saying that I will do it, there’s nobody there.
So in your mind, this is like you drawing the line in the sand here, making this and putting the right context around it?
50: That’s right, because if it’s one person’s decision, one person’s behavior, it’s not the entire culture’s behavior.
Alex, how’d you come to the project? What made you want to take the story on, especially with all the challenges that it presents—in terms of the complexity and disturbing nature of the case, but also just the scope?
Alex: Well, for me, as a filmmaker, I think the day that Cassie’s lawsuit dropped, I immediately started working on it. 50 was [already] putting something together. I was trying to figure out if there was a way that I could secure an interview with her. But everything just happened so quickly. It was such a wild 24 hours, with her dropping her lawsuit and then settling. I think then it was like, “Okay, now what?” This big giant grenade just went off in the world. And then she retreated, and then I think everyone was left like, “Okay, well, we can’t just stop this story here.”
It wasn’t too much longer after that that 50 and I started talking about this, and I think we started to get really aligned on just, if we were going to put something together, what would that look like? I think for both of us, even though we’re two very different people, we both understand that…it’s not black or white. It’s not just one perspective, it’s messy, it’s complicated, it’s confusing. It’s all of the things that actually make for a great story, and I think that we both knew that we wanted to make something to preserve our culture, preserve hip-hop, while still telling the journey of this man, but while also allowing people that have been silenced for so long, to have a platform to share their truths, and I think that then we were off to the races.
You mentioned Cassie’s story and not wanting people to forget about it. The conversation around her testimony became sensationalized and seemed to drift off topic as a result. Was it important for you to use this opportunity to place things in a more objective light?
Alex: Absolutely. There are documentaries that are made by filmmakers that want to spoon-feed an audience and to try to make them think something. I don’t know if I would even classify that as documentary, more like propaganda. As a documentarian, you have to put on your journalist hat and you have to present facts, right? And you can allow people to share experiences on both sides. I think that we started to get a reputation in the world because people were talking and probably sizing us up as a show.
