Inside the Sean ’Diddy’ Combs Hotline: The Makings of a Mass Tort

In a room full of cubicles, workers in headsets read from their computer screens, addressing callers who dialed a 1-800 number. They have a script.

“Were you or your loved one sexually abused by Sean ‘Love’ Combs, known as Diddy, Puff Daddy and P. Diddy?”

“If the abuse occurred at a party, please list the name of the party. What kind of party was it?”

Their employer, Reciprocity Industries, is a legal services company located in a low-slung building in Billings, Mont., more than 2,000 miles from the Brooklyn jail where Mr. Combs awaits trial on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

For years, the company has helped seed litigation by fielding complaints from people hurt by natural disasters, weedkillers or abusive clergy.

Now it’s the central collection point for sexual assault allegations against Mr. Combs.

Some complaints come in through the phone, others arrive online in response to ads promoted on Facebook and Instagram. (A news conference where a backdrop displayed the hotline in large red numbers made headlines last October.)

By the company’s count, it has received some 26,000 contacts. It has deemed hundreds of complaints worthy of review. Already, the lead lawyer handling these cases, Tony Buzbee, a high-profile litigator from Houston, has filed nearly 40 lawsuits against Mr. Combs. He says more are coming.

In their court filings, Mr. Combs’ accusers describe harrowing abuse. Fifteen plaintiffs say he raped them. Three say they were minors at the time. The accounts are often similar: a drink at a party, unusual wooziness and a sexual assault. All were initially filed anonymously.

“Plaintiff has experienced a significant impact on her personal life,” lawyers said in a suit that accused Mr. Combs of assaulting a woman at a hotel in 2014.

The cases against Mr. Combs, who denies assaulting anyone, amount to what’s called a mass tort, in which many people, often drawn by advertising, file claims against a common defendant.

This growing area of the law has long been divisive.

Lawyers for plaintiffs say the cases foster justice for those who have suffered at the hands of powerful people or institutions, such as former Boy Scouts who were sexually abused. But critics say mass torts, and the advertising often aligned with them, can draw frivolous claims that are haphazardly vetted, and that the sheer volume of cases can overwhelm both the court system and defense teams.

It will be months, perhaps years, before settlements, dismissals or verdicts resolve whether Mr. Combs was a serial predator. But his lawyers are already challenging the ways in which many of the cases have been collected.

“We have seen a very high volume of very, very dubious cases,” Mark Cuccaro, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, told a judge at a hearing in January.

Mr. Combs denies sexually assaulting anyone and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges. His lawyers say the deluge of suits is not evidence of guilt, only proof that some people will seek to feed off financial settlements from a wealthy celebrity.

One case was withdrawn last month after the plaintiff, who said she had been raped by Mr. Combs and the rapper Jay-Z when she was 13, acknowledged having made mistakes in her account in an interview with NBC News. Her allegations have precipitated a contentious legal battle involving private investigators and courts in multiple states.

In another Combs case, aspects of an anonymous man’s lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape — including the year — were amended after inconsistencies emerged in his interview with CNN.

Mr. Buzbee said those issues should not affect the other cases. “I’ve always said that each case lives or dies on its own merit,” he said in an interview.

The increase in mass torts related to sexual abuse has been driven in part by laws established in the #MeToo era that extended new opportunities for plaintiffs who did not bring claims during the typical statute of limitations.

Reciprocity Industries, however, did not enter the Combs case because it was approached by people who said they had been abused, according to Andrew Van Arsdale, the lawyer in charge of the company. It entered, he said, after he noted that an explosive lawsuit had been filed by a former girlfriend of Mr. Combs and that the music mogul had settled it the next day.

“Predators don’t just do it to one person,” Mr. Van Arsdale said in an interview, “they do it to many, many people.”

Within days, he said, his firm had taken out its first social media ad asking people about their interactions with Mr. Combs.

The Rise of Mass Torts

The legal landscape changed dramatically in 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition against lawyer advertising violated the First Amendment. Soon lawyers’ faces and testimonials were popping up in newspapers and on television.

Rules developed by courts and bar associations restrict lawyers, generally, from calling people injured in, say, a car crash to ask if they can represent them. But advertising a lawyer’s services in a public forum and, in some cases, tailoring the messaging to a particular group of potential plaintiffs is allowed. Rules prohibit false or misleading ads.

Disciplinary action for infractions is uncommon, experts say, but court disciplinary bodies do review ads in response to complaints.

Advocates for mass-tort reform, often lawyers who represent companies facing litigation, have sought more regulations on the content of ads and the role of third-party investors who help finance some claims with huge numbers of plaintiffs.

Spending on mass-tort television advertising has averaged about $190 million per year over the past decade, according to X Ante, a data analysis company. But social media has become the new frontier.

“It’s so much easier and faster to reach that many more people,” said Karen Barth Menzies, a lawyer who has been working on mass-tort cases since the 1990s.

Unlike class-action lawsuits, in which a small number of plaintiffs represent a larger group of people, often with largely identical complaints, mass torts are filed as many individual lawsuits that typically feature similar, but factually distinct claims against the same defendant.

Reciprocity, which Mr. Van Arsdale operates with a friend from high school, a software engineer, does not actually file mass-tort lawsuits. It assists them by collecting and assessing complaints and turning them over to client law firms or to his own law firm, which is a separate company, to litigate.

Mr. Van Arsdale has been in the legal advertising business since 2006, viewing his whole career as devoted to getting people access to the justice system. He decided to become a lawyer and passed the bar in 2018. Shortly after, he was asked to join his first sexual abuse case, the mass tort in which the Boy Scouts organization was accused of failing to protect children.

Mr. Van Arsdale and his colleagues took out television spots in search of potential plaintiffs. “It took three weeks of ads to even get the first case,” he said. As the calls and cases rolled in, Mr. Van Arsdale hired more staff. Today, Reciprocity employs roughly 70 employees to answer the phones 24/7 and more than 30 others to further develop potential cases.

In the Combs case, three potential clients signed up after the first advertisement. “It wasn’t as big as we thought it was going to be,” he said.

Then Mr. Combs was indicted, and Mr. Van Arsdale’s law firm took out another round of social media ads.

“The world is watching P. Diddy’s case unfold,” one read, alongside an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Combs in jail. “If you’ve been silenced, now is the time to find your voice.”

The contacts began to flow in much more quickly.

About a week later, Mr. Van Arsdale said, Mr. Buzbee reached out. Years earlier, he said, Reciprocity had helped Mr. Buzbee with advertising on another mass-tort case.

A hard-charging lawyer, Mr. Buzbee built his career filing lawsuits on behalf of oil and gas workers and won some eye-popping verdicts. More recently, he secured settlements for more than two dozen women who accused the football player Deshaun Watson of sexual misconduct in massage appointments.

“We started talking about Diddy,” Mr. Van Arsdale recalled of their conversation in September. “I said, ‘Well, we’ve got some cases — I think this is real.’ He said, ‘Well, let’s go, I’d love to work on those.’”

It takes three elevators to reach Mr. Buzbee’s penthouse office on the 75th floor of the tallest building in Texas. Inside, sharks are the decorative motif: a silver sculpture of one, shark-shaped doorknobs and a shark tattoo on Mr. Buzbee’s right forearm.

In Houston, where he ran for mayor in 2019, Mr. Buzbee is a well-known figure, largely because of his work, but also because of his penchant for spectacle.

A former Marine captain, Mr. Buzbee caused a stir in 2017 by parking a World War II-era tank outside his home in the city. On his ranch in northeast Texas, he keeps hundreds of animals, including zebras and camels that draw the attention of passing drivers. His clients have included former Gov. Rick Perry, who later served as the best man when he married several years ago.

When disaster strikes, Mr. Buzbee often enters the legal fray. He filed suits after Hurricane Harvey, after a deadly crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival and after the fatal implosion of the Titan submersible, in which he represents the family of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a maritime expert who died in the disaster.

“I get a lot of calls from people that have worked their cases up to a point where they need somebody to come try them, like they can’t do that part of it,” he said. “And that’s the part I do the best.”

Colleagues describe Mr. Buzbee as an unrelenting litigator who, as a businessman, can choose to accept only cases he believes in. “Tony gets to say ‘no’ anytime he wants,” said Chad Pinkerton, who once worked at Mr. Buzbee’s firm.

Six days after Mr. Buzbee and Mr. Van Arsdale agreed to work together on the Combs cases, they held a news conference at which Mr. Buzbee announced they had 120 clients who intended to sue the music mogul, speaking in front of the sign featuring Reciprocity’s 1-800 number. “The biggest secret in the entertainment industry that really wasn’t a secret at all has finally been revealed to the world,” Mr. Buzbee told those gathered.

Within 24 hours, the hotline received roughly 12,000 calls. “It broke our systems,” Mr. Van Arsdale said.

Lawyers for Mr. Combs have called the news conference a “publicity stunt” and Mr. Buzbee a “1-800 attorney.”

“Sean Combs has never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone — man or woman, adult or minor,” they said in a statement. “No number of lawsuits, sensationalized allegations, or media theatrics will change that reality.”

Complaints…