The Reckoning’ Editing Team Breaks Down the Making of the Hit Netflix Documentary Series

Pictured (Left to Right): Charles Divak, Benji Kast, Jack Gravina, Evan Wise

When it debuted in December 2025, the four-part docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning became a smash hit on Netflix, examining the allegations and legal battles surrounding Sean “Diddy” Combs through unprecedented access to shocking, visceral footage. Tracing his story from his early life and rise as a rapper to the vast media empire he built, the documentary also explores his personal life and the serious crimes he was convicted of. In October 2025, Combs was sentenced to four years and two months in prison, fined $500,000, and ordered to serve five years of supervised release.

Netflix’s documentary is the most in-depth exploration of the case yet. How did it come together? We recently sat down with editors Jack Gravina, ACE, Evan Wise, ACE, Charles Divak, ACE, and Benji Kast, ACE, to discuss the entire process, from start to finish. 

What’s on Netflix: First of all, congratulations on the series. It has been out for a couple of months now, and it’s one of the most successful documentaries in Netflix history. How do you all feel about this reception to it?

Evan Wise: I think it’s really gratifying because we put so much time and so much effort into this, and you can do that and nobody notices. That’s not the only metric of success, but when many people notice, it feels really, really good and validating.

WoN: The Eddie Awards take place next week. I saw in nominations that the series, specifically Episode 3, ‘Official Girl,’ has been nominated for Best Edited Documentary. What were your reactions to the nomination? 

Charles Divak: Yeah, I mean, definitely to be nominated by your peers, it means something more, right? Because a lot of these people in the American Cinema Editors are all people that we looked up to for years. They’re people who cut some amazing, amazing stuff. And to have them vote for you, it’s really rewarding. 

Jack Gravina: It’s incredible to be recognised for any project that you do. I’m grateful that a project like this gets recognised because it feels like this is the type of project that needs to be out there in the world. And especially with the climate of everything right now, it’s important that projects like this get recognised.

Benji Kast: Another cool thing about being nominated as a group is recognising that this was a collaborative effort, and that we all figured out a really good symbiosis to put it together. That’s also a cool thing to be part of and to be recognised for. Through ACE [American Cinema Editors].

Charles Divak: Editing is not always a team sport, but when it is, you build a lot of camaraderie with your coworkers.

Picture Credit: Netflix

WoN: This is quite a big editing team, relatively speaking. How did each of you collaborate and divide responsibilities?

Jack Gravina: We started off with four editors; there were four episodes, and there was one editor per episode.

You get one per episode. And then, as it got closer to a time when Netflix was squeezing and pressuring us to meet the deadline to get this thing out, to maximise potential viewership. We added three more editors, and an editor had dropped off; it was one of those things where it was a rolling edit. That was how it started.

I started on episode four, I worked on stuff that ended up in three, and worked on pieces for one. I know Chuck and Evan, as supervising editors, did a good job of making sure everything fit together across the whole series. And they were this really important glue that helped make this thing shine and sparkle as much as it did. I love being a glue.

Evan Wise: As always happens, scenes move back and forth across the series. So Jack will cut something before it ends up in three; Chuck is working on something on two, and it ends up in one. Schedules get built in a vacuum when the world is still a perfect place.

And then you start editing, and the chaos of the story ensues, and everything just kind of mixes up altogether. And that’s that, then you get your whole workforce, divided across an entire series.

Charles Divak: One of the key things for this show was really trying to tell the whole story —  the 360 view of Sean Combs.

A lot of the things that we were planting in episode one, you really want to bear fruit in the later episodes, and you don’t want these episodes to be cut in a vacuum where one isn’t speaking to two, and two is not speaking to three and four; there has to be a coherent thread of building this psychological profile Sean Combs and what led him to be the person that we see today and all the all the actions that led to that.

It’s important to have that kind of collaborative, communicative atmosphere. I think, really important to the success of the show, because it gave it kind of a consistent layer.

Benji Kast: All of us as editors like to own things too, so there’s a trade offs where you own something and someone else might inherit it and do their thing to it. But there’s a cool part to that process, too, that you feed off of each other.

If you’re working on your own, which we’ve all done, you do your own style, but when you see how other people are doing, it has its own craft to it in a way. And in addition, we were working with a really great director, Alex Stapleton, and so being in constant meetings, particularly at the end, with her talking through the story altogether, and how things were fitting, restructuring on the fly sometimes. From one day to the next, it also gave us that kind of adrenaline we were all feeding off.

WoN: When you began work on the project, what was the core editorial mission? What responsibility did you feel in shaping the narrative for a global audience on Netflix? 

Evan Wise: I think when you work on a story like this, where you have people coming forward who are basically telling you about the worst thing that ever happened to them, you have a real responsibility to those people to tell their story truthfully, to not be salacious, but to also make sure that the full story gets known.

There are a lot of dirty details in this story that you don’t want people to get consumed with and forget that there’s a deeper human element besides just the baby oil, the drugs, and whatever. But you also need to mention those things, because it’s a key part of the story.

So there’s a responsibility to find the balance between the solemnity of what’s happening and not letting the spicy details overshadow everything; it’d be the only thing the audience talks about.

Charles Divak: I think another big aspect was that we were trying to show Sean as a person, full and fleshed out — not like a wooden profile. This is a monster, this is what he does. He did some horrific, awful things.

We were trying to figure out what led him to do those things; what led him to be the person that he was. And so that meant showing both the positive and the overwhelming negative things about him. And it meant showing him in his childhood, showing that he learned these things, and then applied them in life over and over and over again.

Early on, I had a conversation with Evan, where I said, ‘I feel like this guy is taking the principle of a mixtape over and over and over again,’ basically, he’s taking pieces that he learned in the 70s. And this great music that he listened to in the 70s and the 80s, and he’s incorporating that into hip hop in the 90s and making it really marketable. But he’s also doing that with his life. He’s taking bits and pieces from people that he’s met and methods. And he’s taking those pieces and creating this new thing and then marketing it as his own. He takes that same process and does it over and over and over again.

Jack Gravina: It was the ‘six days’ footage — there was this footage from the six days before his arrest. I remember coming on the project and seeing this footage and kind of being blown away and just seeing Sean in a light that you never see him.

He’s always kind of shiny and curated, and this mundane footage on legal calls, just in his car, kind of having these private moments with his people. I think that was part of this glue, where when you see that in the context of his whole life, you can know what he’s like as a person, and you can apply that to how he’s going through history.

We knew we were going to tell the whole story from his birth, his childhood, all the way through to his arrest, the trial, the verdict, and the sentencing. That was kind of the original plan. So using that footage became the glue. And it is amazing, amazing footage that we had the opportunity to play with.

What’s On Netflix: The ‘six days’ footage is incredible. Speaking about this footage, it’s so personal and extremely chilling. What were each of your emotional reactions when you saw it for the first time?

Jack Gravina: Confusion, why would he be doing that? That was the initial reaction. Like, what is he? What’s happening here? Why are we doing that? Why is he doing this? You know, why is he filming?

It seemed like he’s actually documented his whole life. When you dig a little deeper, you’ve seen that every facet of his entire life has some sort of coverage, whether it’s blogs, podcasts, or interviews. He’s always been doing that.

He knows the media is the most powerful tool in the world. And he’s trying to constantly use that to his advantage. It’s just confusion and shock and kind of curiosity, I guess.

Charles Divak: I had watched it a couple of times. The first time I watched it, it was the same thing. I was like, how does this exist? Like, what on earth is going on here? I don’t know why he would allow this to happen. And it was just kind of amazing, just watching him do mundane things like putting on lip balm in a mirror has so much more context and personality in it.

And then I had to talk with Alex, and we all did. She said that one of the keys is the mask of Sean Combs. As Jack said, he had a heavily curated personality. Whatever we saw from the outside, he was very polished. It was exactly what he wanted us to see. He was like the master of marketing. He marketed himself.

And this footage was a look underneath that mask because it wasn’t curated by him. And there were moments where you could see him turn on and know he was on a camera, and he was presenting himself in a certain way. And then there are moments where he would have edited them out. He would have cut them out. But they were actually showing who he was, and the raw emotion of him and the part underneath the mask.

Evan Wise: I mean, I had the same reactions as everybody else. How is this possible? What is going on? But a fun aside related to this footage is that Chuck started on the project a week before I did. And I remember after his first day, he called me, and he said, ‘I can’t tell you what it is until you start, but we have something really special, and it’s going to completely blow your mind.’

And he was right.

Benji Kast: I came on a little later into the project. And so my first experience was actually seeing the cold open in episode one, where he’s on the call with his legal team and his other members of his team, and trying to fight the mounting lawsuits and allegations, and having the same reaction as everyone else.

And then I would say for episode four, when we get into the trial, when he gets arrested, goes to trial. It was interesting to call back to that cold open and realise that in episode one — and you may forget it if you watch — that’s the first thing that happens in the series. By the time you get about two-thirds of the way through episode four, there’s a recall to that because you think, “Wow, he’s on the ropes, and everything’s collapsing,” which was partly true. But then, when you see it in the context of how the trial played out, you realise, actually, he was still maintaining this sort of mastery of the media of the narrative that he always had throughout every single time where he was held to account for these actions throughout his career.

And so that was for me, that was a revelatory moment, reaching that point in the trial and saying, “Oh, wow, all of these things that he’s talking about doing, he actually did, you know.” Using social media to try to get into the minds of the jurors, things of that sort.

What’s On Netflix: Was there any footage in particular that you found particularly deeply troubling, or as an editor, difficult to work on? 

Evan Wise: I mean, I think they all carry a real weight. Just as a person who’s going to work to do this, it’s a lot to manage. But at the same time, with that heaviness, there’s a responsibility.  If I think it’s hard to edit the scene, imagine how hard it was to live this. So you kind of just have to say, well, it’s my job to make sure this story comes through, and I’m going to be faithful to the story our participants are telling. 

Benji Kast: I didn’t work on these scenes directly, but I was familiar with them as we restructured a little bit. Some of the Lil Rod stuff, which is also in episode four, if you watch it, you’ll see his story is like the arc of the Sean Combs methodology, the cycle that he went through. Lil Rod sort of experienced every piece of that, including potentially sexual assault, and the gaslighting and manipulations are all in there.

Jack worked on that quite a bit, and as we watched it and were restructuring, refining, seeing it so many times, I mean, it really does start to get to you a little bit deeper as you watch it over and over again.

Jack Gravina: For episode four, Alex said, work on the Cassie story. I didn’t know much about Cassie beyond the ‘Me & U’ song. I’d seen the video of her getting beaten in the Intercontinental Hotel. And I started working on that. And one of the interviews we had was with Clayton, the sex worker. So I’m realising that this is a 19-year-old girl who’s being swept off her feet by a 38-year-old man and kind of thrown into the mix of things so young. She just barely graduated from high school.

I think it was just her story kind of was just it made me gave me this kind of uneasiness. I mean, the whole thing. And next thing you know, she’s only 20, 21 years old and she’s meeting up with a sex worker, is doing things that seem like, yes, she can say it was consensual for her, but, you know, you’re realising that she’s in a situation that it’s maybe very hard to say no to these kind of things, and she doesn’t want to stop this. She gets a taste of this lifestyle and then has to keep doing things, allegedly. There are all sorts of debates about it.

I remember having that feeling in my stomach working on that scene that, like, it was just kind of disgusting, the stuff that he was doing, and then the fact that he’s abusing her, on top of what we see in the footage. That’s where I started.

Charles Divak: I worked on the scene where Biggie was shot, and so listening to the 911 calls and cutting that together with the footage, I remember that was like I was like,’ wow, this is like an amazing opportunity.’ And I was like, excited to tell the story.

But at the same time, I felt like there’s a rare instance where you get kind of a tear in your eye, like while you’re cutting, because you hear, particularly in the 911 call, when they’re talking to Biggie, and they’re like, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ You hear someone dying, and that stuck with me for a while —  just trying to tell that in the right way.

And it’s not like we get desensitised to stuff because we’re constantly cutting awful things. But when something hits you like that, it’s rare.

Picture Credit: Netflix

Tell me more about being desensitised to scenes — how do you work around that? 

Evan Wise: It’s a real thing that happens. And I think one of the things that editors try to do is remember that while you may be so familiar with this, an audience sees it, it’s going to be brand new to them.

I think the total edit time on this show is probably like 11 months, plus or minus a few weeks. And I remember about halfway through, I was talking to somebody about the six days of footage, the archival footage that our team had acquired before Sean’s arrest. And by then, we’d all seen it 10 times each, and we’d been editing it all day. I just kind of was like, ‘Oh, when the public sees this, they’re going to lose their minds.’

I don’t speak for everybody, but I should say I felt like I had forgotten a little bit about the power of that footage. I kept trying to remind myself that when someone sees this for the first time, it’s going to be completely revelatory. And then I also tried to remember what I felt like when I saw it for the first time, and kind of project that feeling onto an audience.

There were moments where I was like, “Oh, this scene is a little mundane.” And I was like, “Oh, no, this is a whole scene of footage that no one in the world knows exists that no one has ever seen before.” This is going to be the craziest thing anyone has seen.

Charles Divak: It’s like, if I find it’s interesting, then hopefully someone else will. And so I try to tell the story like that. And there are a lot of times that I was attracted to things that were super interesting, but that didn’t serve the story of Sean — they weren’t about Sean Combs.

And so that kind of was a key point in constantly deciding: Is this telling us who Sean is? Is this advancing the story of what happened? Or is this about something else? You kind of keep peeling away these layers to try to get at the heart of it. For me, that kind of cuts out a lot of side things to focus more on Sean.

Picture Credit: Netflix

What’s On Netflix: Because this is an ongoing, developing case, did it change and evolve as you were working on it?

Benji Kast: From my perspective, it changed every day.  I had come in at a time when the trial had happened, and the sentencing was coming up.

Jack Gravina: I was on episode four, and I was like, “Oh, start on Cassie. It’s going to be Cassie’s story.” All of that ended up in episode three, which became an episode about Sean’s relationship with women. That was one of the themes of episode three.

I remember episode four, we were building a narrative. If he gets charged with racketeering, that’s life in prison. And as we were looking through all this footage, we’re seeing and we’re talking to all these people, we’re seeing all the threads that point to all of the places that could be considered racketeering to a jury and all of that material. So there’s like the narrative that way, but when he’s found not guilty of a racketeering charge, that shifts how we are telling our story towards the end.

Obviously, we pivot, and we tell the story that happened. Sean is a master at getting a second chance on these trials. Throughout the series, these patterns kept emerging until the very end. And then this trial, in a way, confirmed these patterns. But yeah, I know that was something that was always a struggle, the end of episode three, going into episode four, where is this going to go?

How is it going to change? And we just kind of flowed. Thank God for Benji coming in, helping at the very end, because we were like running out of time. We had other editors, and Benji was one of them.

I remember how fast Benji kind of just jumped in, flew with the cut, and immediately started helping us shape episode four.

Charles Divak: When the verdict came down in July, we were all pretty surprised, as was the public. It was pretty shocking.

We’re all kind of talking together. And it’s like: What does this mean? What does this mean now? And it was pretty obvious that the show suddenly had a lot more weight, that it was kind of on us now to tell the story as it really happened.

Because, according to what happened in the trial, it was just a slap on the wrist. And so that was definitely the weight. It became far more important to the series. We had to really, really think about what we needed to say. What this will say about Sean and to really push forward the victim’s voices to show the real picture of who this guy is.

Evan Wise: There’s also kind of an excitement when you’re working on something, and you don’t know how it’s going to end, and the story is still evolving. I mean, it might ultimately make your job a little bit harder because things shift around so much. And in our case the verdict kind of put us all on upside down for a little bit.

But I think you can feel real propulsion as a team when you’re driving down the story highway and you don’t know where your final destination is. It also lets you adjust on the fly. When the verdict came out, all of a sudden, interviewing jurors became really, really important.

I mean, that probably would have been important anyway. But because these people came to a decision that most people didn’t see coming, it’s like, okay, well, now we have to get the jurors. And then it completely changes the way the fourth episode functions. I’ve done a lot of projects where the story was still developing. And it’s kind of fun. Albeit, you know, anxiety-filled and challenging sometimes.

We thank Jack Gravina, Charles Divak, Benji Kast, and Evan Wise for their time. And we wish them the best of luck at the Eddie Awards for the nomination for Best Edited Documentary. 

Sean Combs: The Reckoning is now streaming on Netflix.