Victim of infamous NYC club shooting insists Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs shot her in the face decades ago, willing to have bullet fragments tested
One of the victims of the infamous Club New York shooting involving Sean “Diddy” Combs, Jennifer Lopez and rapper Shyne Barrow is willing to go the distance to prove her claim that the rap mogul shot her in the face and got away with it.
Natania Reuben, of one three people hurt in the 1999 incident, wants the bullet fragments taken out of her face for ballistics evidence because she wants the case re-opened, the 53-year-old told guest host Brian Entin on News Nation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” Friday.
“I’m willing to have a doctor remove a part of the nine-millimeter bullet in my face so that they can use it as evidence if need be for this trial, and it may cost me my life,” Reuben said.
Barrow admitted in court he fired a gun that night, but Reuben has insisted for years he unfairly took the fall for Combs.
She says she still has nine bullet fragments in her face from the shooting, which happened in the early morning hours on Dec. 27, 1999 at the now-defunct Club New York just off Times Square.
The gunfire erupted after a dispute between Diddy, who was then known as “Puffy,” and his entourage, and a Brooklyn drug dealer named Matthew “Scar” Allen.
Barrow, then 21 and part of Diddy’s crew, was nabbed by police as he ran out of the club with a weapon.
Diddy and Lopez also fled the club in a Lincoln Navigator but were stopped by cops on Eighth Avenue and arrested. Lopez was released after 14 hours and was never charged in the case.
After a six-week trial in 2001, Barrow was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Combs and his bodyguard, Anthony Jones, were acquitted on weapons charges.
“I saw Mr. Combs … pull out a black gun with his right hand,” Reuben said in her testimony at the time, adding she felt as though “a flaming hot sledgehammer had hit me in the face.”
Reuben, a mother of three, has stuck with her story since day one.
“I literally watched them pull out the guns, I had a clear point of view. I mean, for God’s sake, I got shot in my nose. I was facing them directly. I watched everything occur and have described it, vehemently to all parties involved,” Reuben said during an earlier appearance on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” Thursday.
She’s not surprised some still deny her accusation:
“I give very little credibility to what they’re saying because, while everyone else is Monday morning quarterbacking, I am the survivor,” she said. “I was physically there.
“Who better to tell you what happened than the person who got shot smack dab in between my eyes.”
Despite her confidence, Reuben said she’s afraid of meeting an “untimely demise.”
“I’m a healthy woman,” she said. “I live a simple, quiet, risk-averse life. So, if I should meet with an untimely demise, it would require, be worthy of deep investigation. I understand the peril of what I’m exposing my life to.”
