A New Film Further Incriminates Sean Combs. It Also Paints A Complicated Portrait Of Shyne.

Among the conspiracy theories and actual allegations against disgraced media mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, the details that have maybe been on people’s minds the longest concern the night he and then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were arrested after a 1999 nightclub shooting in New York.

That’s in part because while Combs also went on trial for the shooting, it was Jamal Barrow aka Shyne, a 19-year-old promising rap star under Combs’ Bad Boy Records, claiming his innocence, who was sentenced to jail for 10 years in 2001. He was charged with two counts of assault, reckless endangerment, and criminal possession of an illegal weapon.

Fans who were around then never forgot about this morsel of pop culture history. And a new generation has been itching to relitigate what happened now that they’re discussing Combs in a more damning light. Folks grew even more eager after statements Barrow made in April reflecting on that night in ’99, amid mounting allegations against Combs that culminated in his arrest on sex trafficking and racketeering charges in September.

“Everyone knew all along that I was the fall guy,” Barrow said. “But my political enemies and detractors try to make me into this criminal. But everyone knew that I was a young kid that took the fall. That was the story. I’m just saying that I maintained my innocence all this time.”

The empathy audiences have for Barrow and the disgust they feel toward Combs will likely be what drives them to watch “The Honorable Shyne,” Disney-ESPN’S Andscape’s new documentary following the rapper’s rise, fall, and rise again that premieres on Hulu on Nov. 18.

That’s particularly true given its timing. It’s being released during an ongoing investigation of Combs while he sits in jail without bail, awaiting trial in May, and as multiple documentaries and docuseries on the mogul and the allegations against him are announced seemingly every day. There’s clearly a cultural appetite for the downfall of Combs. That’s understandable.

Viewers coming into the film, directed by Marcus A. Clarke, might expect Barrow to finally and more explicitly bad mouth Combs and spill all the tea about what really happened that night in ’99, despite never having done so before, even during his own trial.

Years after serving almost nine years in prison, Jamal Barrow aka Shyne became a politician in his native Belize.

Courtesy of Hulu

For context, the rapper was deported back to his native Belize in 2009 after serving almost nine years in prison. In the decade and a half since his release, Barrow seemed to have moved on. He had converted to Judaism, changed his name to Moses and became the opposition leader of the House of Representatives in Belize.

So, audiences looking for something more sensationalized and anti-Combs could be disappointed with “The Honorable Shyne.”

Because the movie paints a far more complicated portrait of vindication, redemption and even forgiveness. It also makes you consider an uncomfortable question many recent tabloid-forward celebrity documentaries avoid: Is it us or is it Barrow that should be doing the forgiving?

For all intents and purposes, few things about “The Honorable Shyne” are what you might expect or even want from it at times. Clarke ― who’s also helmed documentaries on rappers Future and Nas ― and his team tell a story that generally doesn’t cater to conjecture from the peanut gallery or a need to appease an audience chomping at the bit for salacious details.

But what we get is something more interesting — though, yes, including some WTF moments as you might have come to expect from any stories attached to Combs at this point.

“The Honorable Shyne” isn’t really about Combs (also known then as Puffy and now as Diddy), though. Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, the media did a pretty good job of referring to Barrow as “Combs’ protégé” in reductive headlines for articles that were mostly about Combs’ legal troubles, when ultimately, it was Barrow’s life on the line. A documentary in 2024 doesn’t need to repeat those same errors. And Clarke seems to understand that.

The director instead meets Barrow where he’s at — literally in Belize fighting the good fight, and figuratively in a place of personal peace from his past — and tells the trajectory of his film’s flawed and fascinating eponymous figure.

"The Honorable Shyne" meets the rapper-turned-politician in a space of personal peace.

Courtesy of Hulu

“The Honorable Shyne” features interviews with Barrow’s parents, musicians, music execs, friends from his time growing up in Flatbush, political peers in Belize, and people within Combs’ camp in the ’90s and early ’00s.

Many of these interviews awkwardly take place on the sidewalks of Brooklyn, though perhaps to illustrate Barrow’s longtime connection to where he came from that, like him, has strikingly evolved. Other conversations, like ones with Faith Evans and N.O.R.E., are set in what appear to be studios.

The movie presents both allegations of the media mogul’s unsavory behavior and a complex look at a political rising star that appears to be in some ways just as much struggling with how he’s perceived versus who he wants to be as he ever was.

It’s around the 25-minute mark when it begins to build context around Combs’ relationship with Barrow, sparing no details about who Combs allegedly was during that period of his life and career (the “Michael Jackson” of hip-hop, Barrow’s manager Manny Halley says). As the film explores, the mogul eagerly pursued Barrow and his music, engaging in a bidding war during a golden era of hip-hop that turned (mostly male) lyricists like Shyne into superstar millionaires.

Daddy’s House was the name of the foundation Combs established in 1994 to help nurture underprivileged youth, interestingly hiring activist Sister Souljah as its executive director, but its repeated reference in “The Honorable Shyne” gives it another connotation.

Early in the Combs segment of the film, Cheryl Fox, a former executive at Bad Boy plainly says, “Puff ran Bad Boy, I mean, like he was the dad, and he was here to take care of everybody.” She added later that, “He wanted to always have the upper hand.”

Later, Gene Deal, Combs’ former bodyguard, alludes to that same paternalistic name. He alleges in the film that as Combs anxiously awaited the verdict in his own trial following the shooting, he often accompanied the mogul to places of worship: “We spent more time in the house of God than we did in Daddy’s House.”

Combs leaves the state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Jan. 29, 2001, after the first day of his trial for possession of a weapon following a shooting at a nightclub in 1999.

Newsday LLC via Getty Images

Deal then alleges that during that time he also went with Combs to Central Park, where the mogul met with someone who advised him to reach into what Deal said appeared to be “a dog cage.” Deal alleged that Combs pulled out of it a bird that he threw into the air only for it to fall directly onto the ground, lifeless. And he claimed that the mogul then walked away.

“Oh shit, there go Damien,” Deal recalled thinking then, referencing the 1976 horror movie, “The Omen.”

That is the single most bizarre story told in the film that gives it an unwanted tabloid vibe that undercuts some of its strengths. Who knows how much of it is true, if any of it, but it certainly succeeds at portraying Combs in an excruciating light. As does this: Deal recounting the mogul’s alleged feelings toward Barrow while awaiting his own verdict on charges of gun possession and bribing a witness (Combs was acquitted).

“He made everybody believe that it was Shyne’s fault,” Deal says in the movie. “Man, this dude looked me in my face and said, ‘Man, I hate this motherfucker. Don’t let nobody take pictures of me and this motherfucker. I hate him.’”

Interwoven in this segment about Combs is a rather temperate Barrow, adding texture to the story with his perspective on his life as a child in Belize and beyond, at times while seated on a wicker chair in a dignified suit. He looks back on his past and his relationship to Combs with interesting clarity.

Barrow acknowledges his own hunger to get into the rap game as a teenager who got caught up in the streets before recognizing his own gift and an opportunity to make particularly his mother and Belize proud. As many of his friends verify, he then pursued that aggressively. But even amid his accumulating success, he couldn’t truly get away from his past reputation.

With sharp context in the film from activists like minister Conrad Tillard, “The Honorable Shyne” also points to the belief some had then that record labels were encouraging young talent like Barrow to get involved in “street tiffs” in order to gain street cred. Barrow cosigns a version of this, more or less saying that he acted the part to get a record deal, including how he presented himself and the clothes he wore.

“Hip-hop was founded on a drug culture,” Barrow says in the movie. “They all dressed like drug dealers.”

Rapper David Banner (born Lavell Crump) wears a T-shirt in support of then-incarcerated rapper Shyne (born Jamal Barrow) on Aug. 9, 2004, in New York City.

Julia Beverly via Getty Images

That’s a particularly jarring quote in the film that, firstly, isn’t true and, secondly, conflates a style that is today rightly heralded and studied as an image of resistance with the wares of the drug epidemic. It also disparages himself and his accomplishments, even while celebrating and taking pride in his short-lived though legacy-establishing music, including songs like the megahit “Bad Boyz” (featuring Barrington Levy, who is also interviewed in the “The Honorable Shyne”).

He bittersweetly looks back on making his first million with Bad Boy, and being able to buy both a Mercedes Benz and a Range Rover by the time he turned 21. “One day he’s in Flatbush,” his childhood friend Derrik Castillo Jr. remembers in the film. “The next day he’s at the Trump hotel.”

Barrow also reflects on ruffling feathers inside the Bad Boy camp with his uncanny similarity to the late Biggie Smalls’ voice, which angered members of the Junior M.A.F.I.A., his labelmates. So much so that shots were allegedly fired at Barrow.

All of this allegedly unsettled Combs, and drew a wedge between him and Barrow, providing some interesting context to something that might have been brewing long before the shooting.

But all of that is evidently an image and time period Barrow now looks back on in a more critical light. Still, he talks at length about the love he still has for his music, the friends and family that were in his corner when he realized others, including Combs, turned their backs on him, and the pain he felt and when his American Dream was cut short.

So much of what Barrow says, though, is coated with a sense of duality that he doesn’t seem to bother to reconcile in the film. That makes for an alluring watch. While none of the questions the interviewees in the film, including Barrow, are responding to are actually heard in the movie, it’s clear that the former rapper was prodded to answer to some of fans’ most lingering curiosities.

Like, his relationship with Combs, which will certainly be at the front of audiences’ minds as they watch “The Honorable Shyne.” That’s with good reason.

Barrow and Combs on stage at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire One Night Only event on Nov. 07, 2023, in London, England.

Samir Hussein via Getty Images

In 2012, not long after Barrow returned to Belize and made a new record that was widely panned, he did an interview with Hot 97 about it and how Combs is “a creep.”

“He pretends to be sorry,” he said in a clip also used in the documentary. “Maybe he even wants to be sorry. But he’s so much of a creep, he just can’t find that part of himself. Like when he say, ‘God is great,’ I think he’s talking about himself. He thinks he’s God. He has no accountability.”

But in 2021, Combs helped Barrow secure a U.S. visa, so that the politician could meet with senators and congressmen to help strengthen relations between Belize and the U.S. And in 2022, Barrow did a surprise performance at the BET Awards in Los Angeles, as part of a segment honoring Combs with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

“The Honorable Shyne” rightly raises a question about that BET performance and presumed reconciliation then between Combs and Barrow.

“It took a lot of years,” Barrow explains in the film. “But part of fixing it was fixing me, wasn’t really about Puff. So, once I fixed myself, once I healed and once I was fully immersed in my purpose, then it’s not about anybody else. That’s a distraction.”

That purpose, he goes on, is his responsibility to transform Belize and not focus on “anybody’s shortcomings.”

While the film does a thoughtful job examining Barrow’s journey in Belizean politics, complete with a scope of the political landscape there and how honored both his family and peers he’s managed to maintain in the hip-hop game are, it creates an intriguingly dichotomous portrait.

That feels honest but still frustrating. That’s partly because some of the people interviewed who criticized Barrow going to jail also praised his reunion with Combs. “That was important to show that you can get past having a situation with somebody,” Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Lil’ Cease says. “If they can get past that, the new generation should be able to get past the little shit that goes on.”

While it is uncertain throughout most of “The Honorable Shyne” when exactly the interviews all took place, that’s crystallized with at least the interviews with Barrow that they occurred prior to Combs’ homes being raided in March.

"Everyone was partying and having a great time with Diddy while I was left to rot in prison,” Jamal Barrow says in "The Honorable Shyne."

KMazur via Getty Images

Almost immediately after showing footage of Barrow celebrating Combs on BET, “The Honorable Shyne” dramatically shifts tones with the politician walking back to the interview chair in slow motion as text materializes onscreen about the raids. It more importantly points out music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones’ lawsuit in March which states that Combs allegedly confessed he was responsible for the ’99 club shooting.

That transition in the film makes it seem like Barrow is going to wildly change his stance on his relationship with Combs. That doesn’t really happen.

Instead, he doubles down on what he said before: “I was absolutely set up to be the fall guy. So, this was shocking not because it’s true. It’s shocking because it’s all finally coming to light and people believe it. Because when I said it, everyone was partying and having a great time with Diddy while I was left to rot in prison.”

And to be clear, not only did Barrow always claim his innocence after the shooting, but the victim also named Combs then, even testifying that at his trial and claiming that still today.

So, none of what Barrow says at this point toward the end of the film is, as he put it, particularly shocking. What is, though, is that Barrow alleges that Combs called him amid Jones’ lawsuit and Barrow consequently speaking out about it in a press conference with Channel 5 Belize.

“He was like, ‘I just wanted to know we’re on the same page,’” Barrow said, recalling his conversation with Combs in “The Honorable Shyne.” “I was like, ‘Listen, you know that we weren’t good. You know that you destroyed my life. If it weren’t for you, I would have beat the case. I would have walked just like you.’”

As Shyne also says, “Those are the facts.” And they’re difficult to reconcile with the other fact that it took seeing Combs in a video that showed him brutalizing ex-girlfriend Cassie in 2016 to, as he puts it the movie, “completely disassociate” from him.

Or another fact that doesn’t make it into the documentary: Following the U.S. election this year, Barrow took to his Instagram to congratulate “the president-elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump, on his victory,” and in another post directly following that congratulated current Vice President Kamala Harris for “her historic and formidable Presidential candidacy.”

While “The Honorable Shyne” dutifully helps illustrate a man who “didn’t portray my friends. I didn’t get on the stand and snitch and get everyone else in trouble,” it also presents someone who has often been of two minds. Choosing to “forgive” and “sacrifice” is, for him, conducive to someone “with integrity, with honor, with character, with humanity.”

It’s just a really imperfect one.

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