Kirk Burrowes

Kirk Burrowes is a former music executive best known for his years alongside Sean Combs at Bad Boy Entertainment. A marketing graduate of Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, he worked as a marketing manager at Orion Pictures before entering the record business.

Background

Burrowes joined Bad Boy at its launch as general manager and later became president. He describes himself as a co-founding partner and says he held a 25% ownership stake. He was pushed out of the company in 1997.

Burrowes alleges that in 1996 Combs, accompanied by attorney Kenneth Meiselas, confronted him with a baseball bat and forced him to sign away that stake. He first sued in 2003. A federal court dismissed his claims in 2004, and a New York appellate court dismissed a related state case in 2006. In February 2025 he filed two new suits. One, in Manhattan federal court, accuses Combs's mother, Janice Smalls -- publicly known as Janice Combs -- of secretly taking control of his stake. The other accuses Combs of sexual harassment and assault under New York City's Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law. Combs and his mother deny the allegations. Full case history: Burrowes v. Combs.

By his own account, Burrowes managed and produced Mary J. Blige beginning in late 1997. He says he helped secure "Family Affair" for her 2001 album No More Drama through a deal with Dr. Dre. He alleges Combs had him blacklisted across the industry from 2001 on. His filings name Clive Davis, Roy Lott, Sylvia Rhone and Lyor Cohen among the executives he says shut him out. He has said the years that followed included time in shelters and homelessness.

Burrowes is the founder and CEO of Pop Life Entertainment, an independent film and television production company. He appears in Netflix's Sean Combs: The Reckoning (2025), which showed his handwritten Bad Boy-era journals publicly for the first time.