Sean Combs found guilty on two counts, but acquitted on most serious charges
This report includes descriptions of physical and sexual violence.
A federal jury in Manhattan has found Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul also known as Diddy or Puff Daddy, guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was found not guilty of one count of racketeering conspiracy and two counts of sex trafficking.
The jurors deliberated for more than 13 hours before announcing their split decision. When the first “not guilty” verdict was announced for the racketeering charge, gasps and cheers were heard in both the main courtroom and in an overflow room packed with fans, tourists, social media influencers and reporters. Members of both Combs’ family and his defense team began to cry. Combs collapsed to the ground and knelt in gratitude.
Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were not able to successfully argue to the jury that their two prime witnesses, Combs’ ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and another former girlfriend who testified under the pseudonym “Jane,” had not participated consensually in the sex and drug marathons that Combs variously referred to as “freak offs,” “hotel nights” or “wild king nights.”
Combs did not take the stand in his own defense, nor did his team of lawyers present any witnesses. Instead, they pointed to text messages in which Ventura and Jane often expressed enthusiasm for those sessions, despite the women later saying on the stand that they felt pressed and manipulated into planning and participating in them. These relationships, the defense team argued, were toxic and perhaps abusive, but failed to meet the government’s standards of federal criminality.
The defense team also worked steadily through six weeks of the prosecutors’ presentations to erode the credibility of many of the government’s witnesses.
Among the pieces of video evidence the jury saw was a hotel surveillance tape of Combs beating Ventura. Defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo, in his closing argument, said: “We own the domestic violence.” Combs’ acts of physical abuse, one instance of which the jury saw on the hotel surveillance video, and to which Ventura and others testified, were not themselves the subject of a standalone charge by the prosecution, but were included as a factor within the sex trafficking accusation.
