The Kim Porter “Memoir” Is Only the Tip of the Diddy-Conspiracy Iceberg

Last January, late on a Saturday night, I received an email from someone writing under the name “Investigator LA” who was eager to pass along a revelation. The outreach contained a shocking claim with a familiar ring.

“Jeff Epstein seen on tape abusing Black woman?” the person wrote.

As with so many celebrity-adjacent conspiracies, the information was neither readily verifiable nor strictly unbelievable.

“Would you care if this was true??” he signed off.

For the most part, as in this instance, the investigator’s frazzled approaches go unanswered. Receiving this kind of unsolicited material is common enough for reporters at large media organizations with accessible email addresses. Over the last few years, this particular interlocutor has written to me in much the same manner about O.J. Simpson, the Mafia, and the murder of two newlywed women in Utah; it was only in recent days that I learned that he also calls himself Chris Todd, and that he has had occasional brushes with mainstream legitimacy. Last year, he described the 2017 Delphi killings to a Court TV anchor as “one of the strangest cases I’ve ever been involved in, for sure,” and he once appeared alongside a former FBI agent in a NewsNation segment about the case.

I hadn’t heard from Todd since the Epstein email. But this week, following the federal indictment of another powerful man accused of sex crimes, he has a full-fledged hit. At the beginning of September, he independently published Kim’s Lost Words, a 59-page book billed on Amazon as a memoir by Kim Porter, the deceased ex-girlfriend of Sean “Diddy” Combs, with whom she shared three children as well as a son from a prior marriage whom Combs adopted. When prosecutors announced sex-trafficking and racketeering charges against the hip-hop mogul last week, it set off an understandable wave of intrigue and, given his Epstein-like tentacles surrounding fame and wealth, predictable tinges of conspiracy. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Kim’s Lost Words rose to the top of the Amazon best-seller list during the first days of Combs’s detention at a federal prison in Brooklyn, slotting above new works by Sally Rooney and Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I’m not doing it for the money,” Todd told me this week, though he acknowledged that he had made a fair bit. “I’m the voice of the voiceless.”

According to Todd, the memoir is based on a flash drive that Porter had left behind after her 2018 death, which also contained “tapes of Diddy with celebrities in sexual situations.” He said he received portions of the drive from a “celebrity source” who was “very close inside the Diddy-and-Kim and hip-hop circles,” and who had joined forces with another hip-hop source to bring these materials to Todd’s manager. Todd moved to Los Angeles from Connecticut about 20 years ago, he told me, pursuing work in film and television before shifting his efforts to investigating murders. He declined to say how he makes his living—except that it was from a small business unrelated to this kind of work—and demanded that I not publish his real name, which is fairly similar to Chris Todd.

Kim’s Lost Words is pulpy beyond the point of parody, with a camp appeal diminished by the real-life stakes of an unfolding criminal case. The author recounts a litany of abuse and violence and lays out an elaborate series of partner swaps and sexual experimentation involving an array of celebrities. Porter’s alleged memoir concludes with her appearing to predict her own murder as she falls ill and texts friends, “He got me.”

Versions of this theory have swirled in gossip circles since Porter’s sudden death from pneumonia at 47 years old. In the last year, since Combs was first accused of sexual abuse, they have taken on a renewed urgency online. In an appearance on the hip-hop media personality DJ Akademiks’s podcast in April, Donald Trump Jr. puffed on a cigar as he recounted a conversation with his ex-wife Vanessa Trump—a friend of Porter’s from their New York modeling days—in which Vanessa said that she did not believe that Porter’s death was “just natural.”

Porter’s ex-husband Albert Joseph Brown, the new jack swing singer and 1980s-era Quincy Jones protégé known as Al B. Sure!, has taken a similar tack since the rise of Kim’s Lost Words. He and Porter “talked right up to a few days prior to her demise,” he wrote in a three-part Instagram statement calling for an investigation into what he claims was her murder. (The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner determined in January 2019 that Porter died from lobar pneumonia.)

“In a nutshell, Kimberly was allegedly taken from us,” Brown went on, so that she could not precipitate “the avalanche that has brought [Satan] to their chambers.”

Still, he insisted that the supposed memoir was fake—at least partially—and threatened legal action against its creators. Brown allowed that there was such a thing as “original book notes” from which a “FAKE Unauthorized EDIT” was gleaned. (“I’m willing to have a conversation with Al B. Sure!, absolutely,” Todd said. “If he wants to escalate it, then I have ways that I can escalate it too.”)

Porter’s friends and family, including Combs through his attorney, have rejected the book as wholesale fabrication. One friend whom I spoke to took issue with both Todd and Brown.

“Somebody has written a book full of shit,” Lawanda Lane said, “and it’s all lies.”

She and Porter met in the 1980s when Lane was working at Motown Records. Porter was dating Brown, whom Andre Harrell, Combs’s onetime mentor, then managed, and Lane and some industry colleagues went to have dinner with them. She and Porter lived together for over 20 years and took care of each other’s children throughout their lives. Lane was certain that Porter “couldn’t even work a computer like that.”

Brown is “full of shit” in regard to his claims about Porter’s death and “wasn’t in Quincy’s life like that,” she said, referring to his and Porter’s son. “And you can repeat what I said.”

Most of all, Lane objected to the depictions of Combs abusing Porter. “If he had thrown a chair at her,” she said, as alleged in the book, “she would’ve killed him.” (“I stand by this book 100%,” Todd said, “and we have new stuff that we’re going to start dropping here any minute.”)

In Porter’s final days, according to Lane, Lane’s daughter sat by her side as she grew sicker. Lane said she talked to Porter 12 hours before her death. “So I mean, this guy, whoever he is,” she said, “how do you write a book full of lies?”

Todd initially expressed some hesitation about speaking to a reporter, but ultimately seemed quite pleased about the airtime. After The Breakfast Club radio hosts devoted a segment to his shortcomings on Wednesday, he texted me the link and an idea: “They have to let me on now.”

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