JENNIFER Lopez’s first husband squared up to Sean “Diddy” Combs in a blazing row after the rapper had an affair with his wife, The Sun on Sunday can reveal.
In a world-exclusive interview, Ojani Noa — the original Mr J-Lo — claims he confronted the disgraced star in a terrifying Hollywood bust-up.
A defiant Ojani reveals: “She cheated on me with Diddy.
“I confronted him and told him I wasn’t scared of him.”
Ojani also tells for the first time how Diddy threatened superstar Jennifer — now 57 — and verbally abused the singer at her own home, leaving her “in fear for her life”.
Cuban-born Ojani married J-Lo in 1997, a little over a year after a passionate whirlwind meeting but they split 11 months later as Jennifer’s hunger for global fame took over.
READ MORE ON JENNIFER LOPEZ
Jennifer then started officially dating Diddy, now 56, in 1999 but the toxic couple finished their tumultuous relationship in 2001.
Now her relationship with Diddy has come into the spotlight again after he was accused of running a sex-trafficking ring and convicted last year of engaging in two counts of transportation of prostitution.
Ojani, a 52-year-old personal trainer living in Florida, today discloses for the first time the explosive moment he stepped in to protect his ex-wife from the Bad Boy Records founder.
He recalls: “It was the year she dumped him.
“We were still friends and we had decided to start over again.
“Everyone makes mistakes and deserves to be forgiven once.
“She had tried to dump Diddy before and he had threatened her and her family.
“He turned up to her assistant’s birthday party in Los Angeles — which Jennifer had thrown for her — and everyone was shocked.
“I went over to him and told him to leave and he told me to back off. He asked me who I was, to which I replied, ‘F*** you’. I told him he had slept with my wife.
“Jennifer got in between us. She said he would leave but he didn’t.
“I got upset with her and at the end of the night she got in his car and left.”
The dramatic showdown at the party was only the beginning of a terrifying campaign of intimidation.
Ojani says that a few weeks later Jennifer — who has always remained notoriously tight-lipped in public about her dark history with Diddy — called him, “terrified” after the rapper turned up at her Los Angeles home and began screaming her name.
He reveals: “She said she was scared and afraid so I instantly left work and came over.
“When I got there it was pitch black and I couldn’t see anyone, so he must have been hiding. As I drove in he started shouting and telling her he knew I was inside.
“That’s when I fronted him up. Jennifer was on the balcony and told me not to as she was worried.
“She told me he had guns but I told him that I would f* him up.
“She said she was going to call the cops but a neighbour must have called them as they turned up and Diddy ran away.
“She had said to me before that he could do bad things. But I told him to his face that he was a coward.
“That’s why he was always with bodyguards with guns because anyone could take him one on one.”
Ojani arrived in the US illegally aged 15, after making the perilous 90-mile trip from his home in Cuba to Florida with six friends on a homemade raft.
Washing dishes at Latin pop singer Gloria Estefan’s Miami restaurant, Larios On The Beach, the ambitious 22-year-old worked his way up to become head waiter.
It was there that he first locked eyes with Jennifer, then 27. The pair hit it off immediately and Ojani packed up his life to move to Los Angeles to be with her.
He famously asked her to marry him with a diamond ring during the crowded wrap party for her breakout film Selena.
Lucrative offers came flooding in from every corner of the entertainment industry, including a multi-million-dollar record deal from Sony music mogul Tommy Mottola.
But that meteoric rise to the top was the moment things started to unravel between the newlyweds.
Ojani says: “Everything was great and we were so in love.
“I was in charge of launching a nightclub in LA called The Conga Room which was part-owned by Jen, while she went off to make her debut album — On The 6 — in New York and Miami. That was when Diddy was drafted in to help produce several tracks.
“They knew each other way before the media reported they did.
“She started hanging out with Diddy more and more, and I started seeing her less and less.
“Then the rumours started. I still had a lot of friends working in Miami hotels who would call to say they had seen them hanging out and leaving together.
“She would tell me it was just work. But then a picture appeared in the US magazines of her sitting on Diddy’s lap at the pool of Miami Beach Hotel. We started to fight really badly as I knew she was cheating on me.”
Desperate for answers, Ojani took a six-hour flight from Los Angeles to Miami to sneak past security into Jennifer’s luxury hotel suite.
He waited for hours to challenge her face-to-face.
“She was on her own,” he said.
“But she was shocked I was there.
“I told her again she was cheating and we got into a massive fight.
“The next morning she went to the studio and I went back to Los Angeles. She rang me and said I couldn’t do that again.”
As the marriage crumbled, Jennifer’s public relations machine was working overtime to present a picture of domestic bliss to the world.
Ojani says an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, where a beaming J-Lo told millions of viewers that she was “happily married”, was the final straw.
“We went to the Oscars and she was using me so she could pretend to everyone that everything was OK. It wasn’t. So we got divorced.”
It was the first of her four divorces. She went on to marry dancer Cris Judd, music icon Marc Anthony, and actor Ben Affleck.
- Tomorrow: Read the truth about her marriage to Ben Affleck.
Additional copy: Graeme Culliford.