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Historian Andrew Lownie has defended his account of Sarah Ferguson having a “friends with benefits” relationship with the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, pointing to comments made by Combs’ former head of security in an interview.
The claim first emerged in May in the paperback edition of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, a biography of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, and Ferguson, his ex-wife.
In the book, Lownie wrote: “A former employee at P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records said the rapper was obsessed with the Royal Family bragged about ‘slamming’ Sarah and once said ‘he could not wait until Fergie’s daughters come of age.’”
Ferguson’s camp denied the account at the time, when a source, offered anonymity so they could speak freely, told Newsweek: “This is absolute fabricated nonsense, blatantly untrue and yet another false allegation from him.”
Diddy’s camp also said at the time that it was “ridiculous gossip.”
However, Lownie has told Newsweek that Roger Bonds, Diddy’s security chief for around a decade, had backed key aspects of the account during a TV interview in Australia.
Bonds told Spotlight, on 7NEWS: “I just heard him say they were friends and then he gave me a smirk and, you know, I kind of know what the smirk means.”
Lownie told Newsweek: “They were so adamant it was all made up and now this guy has talked. Bonds seems to stand up the story.”
Ferguson’s team declined to comment. Newsweek reached out to a legal representative of Diddy.
Why It Matters
Combs has faced criminal charges and civil allegations including sexual assault, sex trafficking, physical abuse and coercive conduct, all of which he has denied. In July 2025, a federal jury acquitted Combs of the most serious charges—racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking—but convicted him on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Mountbatten-Windsor stepped back from public life over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and is under investigation by Thames Valley Police in the U.K. on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has always denied Epstein-related wrongdoing.
What Diddy Security Guard Said About Sarah Ferguson
Bonds was asked about Diddy’s relationship with Ferguson on Spotlight.
“I think it’s a notch under his belt. It was power,” he said. “They were powerful to him. Andrew was powerful to him. Ferg was powerful.
“Anything dealing with royalty he respected and he wanted to be a part of it, any type of way he could, because it was power. There was very few of us who were in his circle so it was common knowledge in those types of people.”
Bonds said Ferguson was interested in Combs because “he’s a bad boy” and suggested she was not the only one: “There’s so many people drawn into that world that you would say ‘why?’ And, you know, I say because he’s something that she never ever had before. Something that she never ever dealt with before.”
Bonds also suggested he expected Ferguson’s connection to Combs to become public knowledge: “It doesn’t surprise me. With so many things going on with Fergie and with Diddy I kind of felt it was going to come to the forefront sooner or later.”
There was one part of Lownie’s account that he did push back on and that was the suggestion Diddy wanted to also have a relationship with Ferguson and Mountbatten-Windsor’s daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.
Bonds said: “Everything you said sound like him until you get to the daughter part—the ‘slamming’ part, everything else, until you got to the part where he can’t wait ’til her daughters came of age.”
Lownie told Newsweek: “Interesting that the line is that, yes, there was something going on but he wasn’t interested in the daughters.”
He acknowledged that sources can sometimes make mistakes but emphasized that Bonds had supported what he viewed as a central claim in the book.
He added that the “friends with benefits” claim was the only aspect of Entitled that Fergie’s team had sought to dispute.
“This was the first time there’s been any fightback and any pushback on what I’ve reported on Sarah,” Lownie said. “She might have taken exception to the other things I wrote but she hasn’t.”
Lownie said he had never interviewed Bonds.
What ‘Entitled’ Said About Sarah Ferguson and Diddy
Lownie’s book gave a detailed account of Ferguson and Mountbatten-Windsor’s lives and relationship spanning decades, and including their divorce as well as the scandal related to Epstein.
The passages about Combs were gathered after publication of the hardback edition, printed in summer 2025, and so were not made public until the paperback was released almost a year later. The historian said he had multiple sources for the alleged relationship between Ferguson and the rapper.
“This is confirmed by another associate of the singer who says Diddy, real name Sean Combs, first met Sarah Ferguson in New York in 2002 at a party thrown by Ghislaine Maxwell and that their ‘secret friends with benefits’ relationship began in 2004 and lasted for years,” Lownie wrote. “In 2006 he launched his own perfume, ‘Unforgivable’, which he claimed was inspired by Sarah and how she liked a man to smell.”
The book quotes a royal staffer who said that “Sean’s parties were wild” and added that Ferguson and Combs would “meet in luxurious hotels.”
“They once stayed at a seven-star hotel that was over fifty thousand pounds a night,” the staff member said. “They spared no expense.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton and Tony Phillips
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