50 Cent Clowns Diddy On National TV Over Disputed Doc Footage
Originally published by AllHipHop Read the original
50 Cent joked that an unpaid cameraman handed Diddy’s footage to Netflix, reviving a claim the mogul’s longtime filmmaker had already disputed.
He shared the claim on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” while discussing “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” the four-part series he helped make for Netflix as an executive producer.
“When you get a RICO charge, you forget to pay the guy who had the camera,” 50 Cent said, per Billboard.
He said he knew the footage would make a strong film as soon as he saw it. But his payment claim clashed with the account Michael Oberlies gave after the series arrived in December 2025.
Oberlies, who had spent more than two years working on a film about Diddy, told Rolling Stone he hadn’t released the material. He blamed a freelancer who covered for him for three days while he was out of state.
“This incident had nothing to do with any fee dispute or contract issue,” Oberlies said in that earlier statement. He argued that the footage was taken from his team’s project to tell a different story without permission.
Director Alexandria Stapleton gave a different account of the production’s rights to use it. She said the material came to the filmmakers and that they protected the identity of the person who supplied it.
“It came to us, we obtained the footage legally and have the necessary rights,” Stapleton told Netflix’s Tudum when the series launched.
The footage showed Diddy meeting with his legal team in a New York hotel just days before his September 2024 arrest. It also captured his efforts to manage his public image as he faced lawsuits and a federal investigation.
Diddy’s lawyers sought to stop Netflix from airing the footage. They sent a cease-and-desist letter before release and warned that he could sue over what they said would be a copyright violation.
He blasted Lil Rod in their ongoing civil suit for selling the footage to 50 Cent and his team.
“Mr. Jones exploited Mr. Combs’s trust by stealing computer drives that contained footage owned by Mr. Combs and intended for use by Mr. Combs in a documentary about his life. Mr. Jones accessed those drives without authorization, copied the footage contained on them without authorization, and sold the stolen footage to Netflix, Inc,” Diddy’s lawyers fumed.
Diddy faced racketeering charges, but jurors acquitted him of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking in July 2025. He received a 50-month sentence after convictions on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
The series went on to win an Emmy for outstanding picture editing for a nonfiction program. The Television Academy credited the episode’s editing team for “Blink Again.”
