Following a federal criminal trial in New York, music mogul Sean Diddy Combs was found guilty by a jury of transportation for prostitution, but not convicted of the most serious allegations of sex trafficking and racketeering.
The celebrity could spend up to ten years behind bars as a result of the split ruling. Combs’ lawyers had claimed that prosecutors overcharged him and failed to provide sufficient evidence, so the verdict is at least a partial win for Combs.
The Manhattan jury’s decision brings an end to a court drama that attracted international interest and provided a detailed and frequently violent look into the life of one of the most influential musicians in the country and his nearly billion-dollar business. Three women, including two ex-girlfriends and a personal assistant, testified before jurors about the empire’s culture, which prosecutors compared to a mob-style racketeering operation. The women described coercion, kidnapping, threats, and beatings carried out to conceal a decades-long pattern of sexual assaults, sex trafficking, and prostitution.
Judge Arun Subramanian instructed prosecutors and defense lawyers to send letters outlining their stances about the prospect of Combs’ release pending sentencing after the verdict was announced. Since his indictment last year, Combs has been detained.
“This jury has given Mr. Combs his life,” defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo informed the judge.
Combs could be imprisoned for up to 10 years on each of the two prostitution charges.
Prosecutors presented Combs and his colleagues as seductive female victims during the trial, frequently posing as love partners. Prosecutors claimed that when he had captured their attention, Combs used drugs, compulsion, threats of force, and force to induce them to have sex with male prostitutes while he periodically observed during events he called “freak-offs.”
Witnesses stated on the stand that Combs used GHB, ecstasy, and ketamine to keep the women submissive and cooperative throughout the performances.
The government accused Combs of racketeering, claiming that his Bad Boy Entertainment operated as a criminal organization and mob family that threatened and mistreated women and used its members to commit a long list of crimes over the years, such as forced labor, kidnapping, sex trafficking, bribery, arson, and obstruction of justice.
Music
Former members of Combs’ inner circle told The Times that his alleged mistreatment of women dates back decades, following several lawsuits brought against him.
Three significant witnesses were crucial to the government’s case: Combs’s former lover, Casandra Cassie Ventura, whose 2023 lawsuit started the dissolution of his business; his most recent ex-girlfriend, Jane, who was only named in court; and his former aide, Mia.
Mia claimed during the trial that Combs had sexually molested her, and Jane testified that the freak-offs persisted long after Ventura had filed her lawsuit and Homeland Security officials had raided Combs’ houses.
R&B singer Ventura, however, who dated Combs for 11 years, gave some of the most unsettling testimony during the trial.
Combs was accused by prosecutors under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which stipulates that a defendant must be a member of an organization that has engaged in at least two overt criminal acts out of 35 counts that the government has specified. These crimes include extortion, bribery, and murder.
According to former federal prosecutor Neama Rahami, any loose organization of two or more people is sufficient, even though RICO cases are more frequently linked to the mafia, street gangs, or drug cartels. According to Rahami, establishing that the organization had a pattern of criminal activity, or predicate offenses like bribery, kidnapping, or prostitution, over a ten-year period, was a necessary component of presenting that case in the Combs trial.
California
Prosecutors gave weeks of gruesome, breathtaking testimony in order to get Combs’ case to the jury. Was it sufficient?
Ventura said throughout the trial that she felt caught in a vicious cycle of sexual and physical abuse at Combs, which included rape, years of beatings, and sexual blackmail.
She said Combs watched and planned the freak-offs and threatened to release films of her having sex with multiple male sex workers while high on drugs and drenched in baby oil.
A notorious hotel beating that was caught on hotel security cameras resulted from one of those freak-offs. Video from that night in March 2016 shows Combs kicking and striking Ventura as she tries to defend herself and cowers in front of a bank of elevators at a hotel in Los Angeles. Then he pulls her toward their hotel room down the hallway while holding her hooded hoodie.
Combs is seen tossing a vase at her from a second camera point. Two days later, when she wore sunglasses and a lot of makeup on the red carpet for a movie premiere, prosecutors revealed that she still had noticeable bruises on her eye, lip, and other areas.
Prosecutors said during the trial that Combs and his crew conspired to conceal the occurrence. According to Ventura’s testimony, the police came to her flat. Despite answering some of their inquiries, she informed the jury that, at the moment, she still wished to keep Combs safe.
In his testimony, Eddie Garcia, a former security guard at the InterContinental Hotel, claimed that Combs gave him a brown paper bag filled with $100,000 in cash in exchange for the incident’s film.
According to the Associated Press, Assistant U.S. Atty. Christy Slavik told jurors during closing arguments that Combs utilized a tiny army of subordinates to damage women and cover it up, and that he relied on shame and quiet to allow and extend his abuse.
“Combs doesn’t take no for an answer,” he stated.
Nation & World
Sean Diddy Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment was a show business juggernaut at its peak, combining fashion, style, music, video, and liquor to create a company that made Combs a billionaire. Was it a criminal operation, indeed?
The defense team for Combs chose not to call a witness and instead went directly to closing arguments when it came time to make their case. According to Rahami, the former federal prosecutor, the defense anticipated that jurors would wonder why the defendants on the stand opted to remain in Combs’ sphere in certain circumstances and failed to report the behavior to authorities at the time it was happening.
One of Combs’s closing attorneys, Marc Agnifilo, told jurors that federal prosecutors overstated their case and attempted to use the hip-hop mogul’s swinger lifestyle as justification for the most serious federal offenses, sex trafficking and racketeering, without providing any supporting evidence. According to Agnifilo, Combs actually has a drug issue, and his relationship with Ventura was a contemporary love tale in which the mogul is responsible for the domestic abuse that came to light during the trial.
There is no proof that Combs set Kid Cudi’s Porsche on fire, and there was no kidnapping of his former aide, Capricorn Clark, who claimed to have been detained for days and made to take a lie detector test because of lost jewelry, according to Combs’ defense. In order to avoid negative publicity and a police inquiry, he only paid off the security guard for the InterContinental Hotel security footage that depicts him beating Ventura.
The lawyer claimed that Mia, Jane, and Ventura—who reached a $20 million settlement in her lawsuit against Combs—were all driven by financial gain. Agnifilo noted that none of Combs’ inner circle was ever called to testify or any other co-conspirators were ever indicted by the authorities.
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