As Sean “Diddy” Combs prepares to face trial on serious charges including sex trafficking, racketeering, and coercion, a series of Eminem’s decades-old lyrical jabs at the hip-hop mogul have taken on new, unsettling resonance. What once were sharp, playful disses from “Slim Shady” now read like grim foreshadowing amid Combs’s mounting legal troubles.

Early Shots Fired During the Bad Boy Era (1996–2000)
Eminem’s earliest disses targeted Combs during his reign as Puff Daddy, king of the East Coast rap scene. In a 1996 freestyle titled “Fking Crazy,” Eminem rapped, “Original Bad Boy on the case, cover your face… sprayed Puffy with Mase,” taking aim at the Bad Boy Records roster. Later, on The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), Eminem snarled, “You little groupie b****, get off me, go fk Puffy,” a line doubled down upon in The Slim Shady LP follow-up, I’m Back: “I’m sorry, Puff, but I don’t give a fk.”

Tactical Taunts Amid Feuds (2018)
During his high-profile beef with Machine Gun Kelly, Eminem dropped a bar with a veiled jab at Diddy on “Killshot”: “Kells, the day you put out a hit is the day Diddy admits that he put the hit out that got Pac killed.” Though capped with “I’m just playing, Diddy, you know I love you,” the lyric stoked lingering East-West tensions from the 1990s rap wars.

Mockery and Metaphors (2020)
On his 2020 album Music to Be Murdered By, Eminem poked fun at Combs’s reality TV past: “They call me Diddy because I make bands, and I call getting cheese a cakewalk.” The line references the infamous “cheesecake” challenge on Making the Band, portraying Combs as a harsh taskmaster.

Barbs of Imminent Judgment (2024)
With Combs now facing the most serious accusations of his career, Eminem’s 2024 tracks seem eerily prophetic. On “Fuel,” Shady raps, “Notorious B.I.G.’s death was the domino effect…Fuck it—Puff’s?” hinting at a fallout from Combs’s past. The same album’s “Antichrist” references leaked footage allegedly showing Combs in violent situations: “Next idiot ask me is getting his ass beat worse than Diddy did—…she probably ran out the room with his f**king dildo.”

A Legacy of Diss and Dishonor
As Combs faces trial that could change the course of his legacy, Eminem’s long history of references—both playful and scathing—take on a sharper edge. The lyric that now hits hardest is the ominous “Puff’s day is coming,” a line that once sounded like typical rap bravado but now feels like a chilling premonition.

In the harsh reality of today’s courtroom, it’s not just a rap battle on stage—it’s a reckoning unfolding in real life, proving that sometimes, the sharpest lyrics carry truths that time eventually reveals.