Puffy's Other Woman

While it was widely reported that girlfriend Jennifer Lopez was not at his side when Sean “Puffy” Combs began his trial on weapons possession and bribery charges in Manhattan earlier this week, the rap entrepreneur did not go for lack of female companionship. His mother was at his side, reports Wednesday’s New York Times, which also notes that during the long pre-trial sessions, Janice Combs sometimes showed up in the courtroom toting a brown-bag lunch of chicken sandwiches and fruit juice for her son. “Do I look worried or upset?” the 50-ish platinum blonde widow (her husband was reportedly fatally shot in some work-related dispute) told the paper from the backseat of her silver Lincoln. “He’s not going to be found guilty, so my mind don’t go in that direction, not at all.” Meanwhile, in court on Wednesday, prosecution witness Leonard Curtis Howard, a former corrections officer who moonlighted as a bodyguard for Sean Combs, testified that he had never once seen the rap impresario carrying a firearm. Furthermore, reports the Associated Press, Howard said that he would never have associated himself with Combs if the defendant had carried a weapon. (Combs, 31, was arrested on Dec. 27, 1999, after he fled a nightclub near Times Square with his actress-singer girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.) Earlier Wednesday, Combs’s attorney Benjamin Brafman had moved unsuccessfully for a mistrial after having expressed his criticism over Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos’s use of Howard’s grand jury testimony to contradict the bodyguard’s trial testimony.