As P Diddy’s trial rumbles on, his past relationships and conduct are being called into question – both inside and outside of the courtroom. Now, one particularly conversation between his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and interviewer Diane Sawyer back in 2002 has resurfaced, with the singer asked if she was ‘afraid’ of Diddy in a now viral clip.

She was asked: ‘And what about Sean Combs, Puffy, P Diddy, the man who courted controversy if not outright danger? He always seemed to be the one in control. We wondered, looking at the girl on the red carpet, who was she?’

Diane Sawyer then asked the singer if her younger self was afraid, to which J-Lo responded: ‘Um, no, I don’t think she was afraid, I just think that I, at that time was uh, cared very deeply for Sean, and you know we just… didn’t have the same kind of ideals about life and family and stuff like that,’ she said. ‘It just wasn’t a good relationship for me. It didn’t have so much to do with him as it had to do with me at the time.

‘I had to learn to care about myself a little bit more and put up certain boundaries of what I would accept and wouldn’t accept because really he was just being himself.
‘He wasn’t doing anything wrong, and he felt like he loved me very much and I know he did and I felt like the same way. So if I was unhappy in some way, then I was the one who had to do something. Not him. He was doing everything he wanted to do.’

First of all, kudos for such a diplomatic response for what was seemingly quite a rollercoaster of a relationship. The pair were arrested back in 1999 after a shooting at a night club. Diddy was accused of firing a gun in a shootout that injured three people. J-Lo wasn’t charged and Diddy was later acquitted.

The resurfacing of the interview has led to commentary around the ways in which, back in 2002 at least, J-Lo’s impulse was seemingly to both blame herself and her apparent lack of boundaries for any relationship issues they might have had.

Should he have been empowered to “do everything he wanted to do” and is it solely her that had the duty to do something about her unhappiness? It feels sad that this recount of their relationship is shaded in self-blame and almost completely liberates him from any self-reflection or improvement. It feels like the way a lot of women have been encouraged to operate in heterosexual relationships, especially when they are linked with potentially problematic men.

Though we have to bear the importance of J-Lo’s private life in mind, and that maybe she didn’t want to discuss her relationship issues on screen, the narrative she used to explain the dynamic of her relationship feels like one that only puts the onus on her, because of her own lack of boundaries or self-awareness. But the truth of the matter is this: women shouldn’t need to feel that they are self-aware and/or boundaried to deserve and demand respect in a relationship.

It stinks of patriarchal norms, really, that a woman of J-Lo’s power and celebrity saw the failing of her relationship as a failure of her own – or publicly said so anyway.

Diane’s framing of the couple’s dynamic in her question is arguably somewhat problematic, too, as the broadcast journalist describes Diddy as a powerful ‘man’ while J-Lo is framed as a ‘girl on the red carpet’ which goes a certain distance in minimising her own career and agency, as well as infantilising her.

We’d surely like to think that conversations around relationships, gender power dynamics and abusive men (Diddy has admitted domestic abuse against Cassandra Ventura in court but denies any allegations of sex trafficking and racketeering) have evolved in the 24 years since this interview aired. But the unearthing of this footage is a keen reminder that while the importance of self-care, self-reflection and applying boundaries for your own peace is paramount, this does not lead to the erasure of your partner’s responsibility to you and his actions.

It’s difficult not to wonder what J-Lo would say today about her relationship with Diddy and other powerful men from her romantic life. But whatever it might be, here’s hoping that in the year 2025 she and other women like her see their own worth, and their partner’s equal role in making them feel safe and happy in a relationship.