Natania Reuben Still Carries Nine Bullet Fragments From Club New York and Says Sean Combs Fired the Shot

The bullet that hit Natania Reuben never finished its trip to an evidence locker. Surgeons left fragments in her face because taking all of them out could have killed her. A quarter of a century later she is still offering to let a doctor go back in, on the chance that a sliver of 9mm metal could do what a six-week trial in 2001 did not.

The shooting was about 2:55 a.m. on December 27, 1999, at Club New York, a Times Square room that no longer exists. Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, had arrived with Jennifer Lopez, bodyguard Anthony “Wolf” Jones, and rapper Jamal “Shyne” Barrow. They were out after a record-deal celebration. A dispute broke out with a Brooklyn man named Matthew “Scar” Allen. Guns came out. Three people who were not part of the argument were hit. Reuben, then a beauty-salon owner and an aspiring singer who had mostly given up clubs for church, took a round in the face.

She has described the impact the same way for decades. It felt, she testified, as if “a flaming hot sledgehammer had hit me in the face.” She told a jury she “saw Mr. Combs… pull out a black gun with his right hand.” On NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” in March 2024, with Brian Entin sitting in as guest host, she said it again for a new audience. “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.” She said nine fragments are still in her face and head. She has attributed seizures and a traumatic brain injury to the wound. She said she would submit to surgery “so that they can use it as evidence if need be for this trial, and it may cost me my life.”

What a jury actually decided

Barrow, then 21, was arrested fleeing with a gun. He later admitted he fired that night. After a six-week trial in 2001 he was convicted of assault and gun possession and sentenced to ten years. Combs and Jones were acquitted of the weapons charges. Lopez was arrested, cooperated, and released without charges. Combs and Lopez left the club in a Lincoln Navigator and were stopped on Eighth Avenue. A gun was recovered from the vehicle. Combs has denied firing. Reuben has spent the years since saying Barrow was convicted for a shot she watched Combs take.

That is an accusation, not a fresh verdict. The criminal case produced one conviction and two acquittals. Investigators at the time did not have a ballistics match that tied the fragments in Reuben’s face to a specific pistol. A surgeon’s decision to leave metal in a living skull is also why the comparison was never completed. The fragments are not in a property room. They are behind bone, scar, and a seizure disorder she says has followed her from Brooklyn to a quieter life in Atlanta.

She also filed a civil case seeking $130 million from Combs and Barrow. In 2011 the New York Post reported that Combs, Barrow, and the club had settled with the three people who were shot. Former club owner Michael Bergos, who was not bound by the confidentiality clause, said Reuben received $1.8 million. The other two wounded clubgoers were paid $500,000 and $50,000, Bergos said, with insurance covering the club and Barrow and Combs paying his share out of pocket after his carrier collapsed. A settlement closes a lawsuit. It does not identify a shooter. Reuben has said that after the district attorney’s office learned of a threat, she was moved out of Brooklyn. She has also said that if people had treated her account as seriously in 1999 as they treated later accusations, “24 years worth of people probably would not have had to suffer.”

A different file, a different courthouse

The 1999 shooting and the federal case that put Combs in prison are not the same prosecution, and pretending they are makes both harder to understand. Homeland Security agents arrested Combs in September 2024. In July 2025 a Manhattan jury acquitted him of racketeering conspiracy and of sex trafficking. It convicted him on two counts under the Mann Act of transporting people across state lines for prostitution, conduct prosecutors tied to former girlfriends Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and a woman who testified as Jane, along with sex workers. On October 3, 2025, Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced him to 50 months, a $500,000 fine, and five years of supervised release. None of those counts re-tried Club New York. No prosecutor has announced a new shooting charge from that night.

Combs reported to FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey at the end of October 2025. His lawyers appealed both the conviction and the sentence. In a March 2026 brief they called the prison term a “perversion of justice” and argued that the judge had used conduct from charges the jury rejected. Oral argument reached a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on April 9, 2026. Judge William Nardini called the sentencing question one of first impression, not only for that court but, as far as the panel could tell, for any federal appeals court. Prosecutors answered that the district judge was entitled to consider how the Mann Act crimes were carried out, including violence, threats, lies, and drugs. As of late summer 2026, no published opinion reversing the conviction or the term had landed.

The Bureau of Prisons release date moved anyway, the way federal dates often do when good-conduct credit and program time are applied. Reporting tied to the inmate locator put an early projection near May 8, 2028, then June 4, 2028, then dates in April 2028, then February 23, 2028. On July 29, 2026, USA Today, Complex, and local television, each citing the locator, reported a new date of January 24, 2028. The Bureau has not publicly explained each revision. Days earlier, on July 24, NBC News, TMZ, and USA Today reported that Combs had fought another inmate at Fort Dix and been placed in special housing. The Bureau declined to discuss discipline. Those reports are not a court finding, and they have nothing to do with who fired inside Club New York.

Reuben has appeared since the 2024 interview in Investigation Discovery’s “Fall of Diddy” and in Netflix’s “Sean Combs: The Reckoning.” A separate civil suit by producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones claimed Combs had described himself as responsible for the 1999 shooting and alleged that Lopez carried a gun into the club. Lopez has long said she did not know Combs had a gun that night. Jones’s claim is an allegation in a complaint. It is not a ballistics report.

Metal that never made it to a lab

That is the unfinished piece. A civil check, even one reported at $1.8 million, bought an end to a damages case. A criminal acquittal ended the weapons counts against Combs. Neither one tested the fragments Reuben says are still seated in her skull. Removing them now would be surgery on a woman in her fifties who has already described seizures and a scarred cerebral cortex, not a routine evidence pickup. She has said she is willing. No public filing shows that a prosecutor has taken her up on it.

Combs, meanwhile, is serving a sentence for a different set of crimes, appealing it, and facing a stack of civil suits that have nothing to do with a Times Square nightclub in the last week of 1999. The Club New York file is older, narrower, and still missing the one comparison that could have been made if the bullet had passed through instead of staying. Readers who want the longer record of how famous men outrun the first accusations against them can start with Hollywood’s open secret and the network that hid in plain sight, then stay with The AEGIS Alliance’s Crime News desk. The 2024 NewsNation interview that restarted this particular argument is summarized by the New York Post account of Reuben’s offer.