Music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was found guilty Wednesday of transportation for prostitution but cleared of the most serious charges — racketeering and sex trafficking — following a weeks-long federal criminal trial in New York.
Before his fate was announced, Combs sat surrounded by his legal team reading a printout of Psalm 11, a Bible passage that emphasizes relying on God for protection, even amid adversity.
As the jury of eight men and four women delivered its verdict, Combs, who had appeared morose a day earlier facing the possibility of a life sentence, was exultant. He pumped his fist in the air and mouthed “thank you” to the jurors. He fell to his knees and placed his head on his chair as if in prayer. “Mr. Combs has been given his life by this jury,” defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told Judge Arun Subramanian.
The verdict is at least a partial victory for the celebrity, with legal experts arguing that prosecutors made critical errors in overcharging him and failing to prove their case.
“Today’s verdict is nothing less than a complete and total failure by the prosecution in what will go down as the most expensive prostitution trial in American history,” said Neama Rahami, a former federal prosecutor.
The jury’s split decision leaves Combs facing up to 10 years in prison for each of the two counts of prostitution. But it’s not clear how severe Combs’ punishment will be. In a letter seeking to keep him behind bars, prosecutors listed sentencing guidelines ranging from 51 to 63 months, or just over five years, and the judge has significant leeway in deciding his sentence.
In a late afternoon hearing, Subramanian decided that Combs will remain jailed until his sentencing hearing, citing past violent incidents that his attorneys acknowledged during the trial.
The scene inside the Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday capped a legal drama that generated global attention and offered a graphic and often violent glimpse into the life of one of the nation’s most powerful music figures and his near billion-dollar enterprise.
During the trial, jurors heard from three women, two former girlfriends and a personal assistant, who described a culture within the empire that prosecutors likened to a mob-style racketeering operation. In charging Combs with racketeering, the government alleged his company, Bad Boy Entertainment, functioned as a criminal enterprise that threatened and abused women and used members to engage in a litany of crimes including kidnapping, sex trafficking, bribery, arson, forced labor and obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors portrayed Combs and his associates as luring female victims, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Once he had gained their interest, prosecutors said Combs used force, threats of force, coercion and drugs to get them to engage in sex acts with male prostitutes while he occasionally watched in gatherings that Combs referred to as “freak-offs.”
On the stand, witnesses testified that Combs gave the women ketamine, ecstasy and GHB to “keep them obedient and compliant” during the performances.
“Sex crimes deeply scar victims, and the disturbing reality is that sex crimes are all too present in many aspects of our society. Victims endure gut-wrenching physical and mental abuse, leading to lasting trauma. New Yorkers and all Americans want this scourge stopped and perpetrators brought to justice,” Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement after the verdict.
The verdict was a bitter disappointment for victim advocates, said Lauren Hersh, the former chief of the sex trafficking unit at the Kings County district attorney’s office in Brooklyn and now the national director of the activist group World Without Exploitation.
After successful prosecutions of figures like R. Kelly and cult leader Keith Raniere, some experts saw progress in broadening the popular understanding of how sex trafficking operated and how victims might respond to it. After this verdict, though, “this will 100% cast a chilling effect on prosecutors, who will be reluctant to bring similar charges even when the evidence is overwhelming,” Hersh said.
“It’s a huge setback, especially in this moment when the powerful have continuously operated with impunity,” Hersh said.
The government’s case relied heavily on three key witnesses: Combs’ onetime lover, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, whose 2023 civil lawsuit began the unraveling of Combs’ empire; his most recent ex-girfriend, who was identified only as Jane; and his former assistant, identified in court only as Mia.
During the trial, Mia testified that Combs sexually assaulted her, and Jane testified that the freak-offs continued well after Ventura had filed her suit and Combs’ properties had been raided by Homeland Security investigators.
But it was R&B singer Ventura, who had an 11-year relationship with Combs, who provided some of the trial’s most disturbing testimony.
Douglas Wigdor, Ventura’s attorney, said his client “displayed unquestionable strength and brought attention to the realities of powerful men in our orbit and the misconduct that has persisted for decades without repercussion.”
“We are pleased he has finally been held responsible for two federal crimes, something he has never faced in his life,” Wigdor said.
In a letter to the judge on Wednesday, Wigdor wrote that Ventura believes Combs is “likely to pose a danger to the victims who testified” in the case, and asked that he remain jailed until his sentencing hearing.
Mark Geragos, a former lawyer for Combs whose daughter Teny Geragos played a key role in his defense team, told The Times that “in any sane person’s view [the verdict] was a resounding victory and a complete prosecutorial rebuke.”
Prosecutors charged Combs under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO, which requires that a defendant be part of an enterprise involved in at least two overt criminal acts out of 35 offenses listed by the government. Those offenses include murder, bribery and extortion.
Though RICO cases are more typically associated with the mafia, street gangs or drug cartels, any loose association of two or more people is enough, legal experts say. Part of making that case in the Combs trial required proving the organization showed a pattern of criminal behavior, or predicate acts — such as bribery, kidnapping or prostitution — over a 10-year period.
But RICO cases are difficult to prosecute by design, legal experts say.
“RICO is a very rigid and difficult law to satisfy,” said Mitchell Epner, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who worked on numerous sex trafficking and involuntary servitude cases. “It requires an ongoing criminal structure, a continuity of members of a criminal organization. It is on purpose difficult for prosecutors to prove, and the defense did a very good job of pointing out the shortcomings of a RICO prosecution on a technical level.”
At trial, Ventura testified she felt “trapped” in a cycle of physical and sexual abuse by Combs, and that the relationship involved years of beatings, sexual blackmail and a rape.
She claimed Combs threatened to leak videos of her sexual encounters with numerous male sex workers while drug-intoxicated and covered with baby oil as he watched and orchestrated the freak-offs.
One such freak-off led to an infamous hotel beating that was captured on hotel security cameras. Video footage from that March 2016 night shows Combs punching and kicking Ventura as she cowers and tries to protect herself in front of an L.A. hotel elevator bank. He then drags her down the hall by her hooded sweatshirt toward their hotel room.
A second angle from another camera captures Combs throwing a vase toward her. She suffered bruising to her eye, a swollen lip and a bruise that prosecutors showed was still visible during a movie premiere two days later, where she wore sunglasses and heavy makeup on the red carpet.
In the trial, prosecutors said Combs and members of his group worked to cover up the incident. Eddie Garcia, a former InterContinental Hotel security guard, testified that Combs gave him a brown paper bag containing $100,000 in cash for the video.
Ventura testified that the police visited her apartment. She answered a few of their questions, but told the jury she still wanted to protect Combs at the time.
Combs’ defense team was aggressive in cross-examination, hammering witnesses about why they did not report the celebrity at the time or simply leave him. They presented text messages of support and love after the alleged attacks.
The defense also focused on the money and material items the women got from Combs and pointed out that the government never indicted any other co-conspirators and didn’t call any of Combs’ inner circle to testify.
Rahami, the former prosecutor, said the sex trafficking charges were weak because of the text messages, which were evidence of consent.
“The prosecution’s only real chance of a victory was racketeering and to prove a non-sex-related predicate act like kidnapping, arson, extortion or bribery,” he said. “The fact that the jury even rejected that argument shows the many flaws in the prosecution’s case.”
Still, Rahami said the government should have filed rape and kidnap charges against Combs, calling the decision not to “one of the many mistakes by the prosecution.”
When it came time for Combs’ defense team to present their case, they opted to move straight to closing arguments without presenting a witness.
Marc Agnifilo, one of Combs’ lawyers, in closing told jurors that federal prosecutors “exaggerated” their case and sought to turn the hip-hop mogul’s swinger lifestyle into the most serious of federal offenses — racketeering and sex trafficking — without the evidence to back it up. In reality, Combs has a drug problem and his relationship with Ventura was a “modern love story” in which the mogul “owns the domestic violence” that was revealed in the trial, Agnifilo said.
“This trial was a major gamble and Combs won that bet. Everything is stacked against the defendant going into a federal case, in particular one like this. His attorneys were smart and they owned the bad facts. They fought on the things that mattered and it paid off,” said Anna Cominsky, an associate professor of law and the director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at New York Law School.
David Ring, an attorney who represents sexual abuse victims, said the government overreached in charging the case.
“This is a win for Combs,” Ring said. “He was facing life in prison if convicted of the RICO charges. Instead, he likely serves a couple years in prison and returns to his business empire.”
Still, Combs lost in the court of public opinion, the attorney added.
“The irony of the verdict is that if Combs had simply settled Cassie Ventura’s lawsuit before she filed it, there would be no criminal case and Combs would still be a free man going about his business,” Ring said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.