Sean Combs, seen right here in Los Angeles in 2019, is on trial in New York, dealing with federal legal fees together with intercourse trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
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Phillip Faraone/Getty Photos
Advisory: This report accommodates descriptions of bodily and sexual violence.
Over its first two weeks, the highest-profile witness to testify within the legal trial of hip-hop tycoon Sean Combs has been his ex-girlfriend, singer and mannequin Cassie Ventura. In often-intense moments on the stand, she informed the jury that he raped and abused her. In consequence, the media consideration and on-line chatter about this trial to this point has continuously been framed as “Diddy vs. Cassie.”
And if individuals know only one factor concerning the relationship between Combs and Ventura, it is most likely a extensively seen video by which he will be seen attacking her in a California resort in 2016. Combs was seen kicking and dragging her, and throwing a vase at her — footage that has been key proof to this point for prosecutors arguing that Combs used drive and concern as a method of management. (After CNN aired that video in Might 2024, Combs revealed a video apology that has since been faraway from social media.)
The federal government’s case is about rather more than simply the video.
As a result of it is a federal trial, with fees of racketeering, intercourse trafficking and transportation to have interaction in prostitution — all of which Combs has pleaded not responsible to — the prosecutors have a really explicit job.
“What they actually need to indicate from a prosecution perspective is that there was a legal group in play right here that dedicated a variety of unlawful acts over time,” says former prosecutor Jennifer Beidel. She now practices in Michigan as a authorities investigations and company compliance lawyer, used to work in the identical federal workplace that’s at the moment prosecuting Combs: the Southern District of New York.
“So merely discovering that Cassie Ventura was the topic of home violence, whereas that is clearly terrible and an important factor from a state courtroom degree, does not fulfill the federal normal,” she says.
What are the fees Combs faces?
Within the intercourse trafficking and transportation to have interaction in prostitution fees, the federal government is accusing Combs of coercing ladies into collaborating in industrial intercourse acts with him and with male intercourse employees. He additionally allegedly organized for ladies and intercourse employees to be flown to him throughout state traces. That is an enormous a part of what Cassie Ventura testified about. She mentioned she felt compelled to take part in Combs’ so-called “freak offs,” and that she couldn’t safely depart. Combs’ protection workforce is arguing that Ventura selected to remain in a poisonous relationship. The federal government’s indictment consists of no less than one different alleged sufferer who will testify in opposition to Combs below a pseudonym.
Racketeering is essentially the most sophisticated cost to grasp. Jennifer Beidel says again within the day, the feds used to make use of racketeering fees — also called RICO — to battle organized crime.
“RICO is historically a statute that was designed to prosecute the mob and different organizations that had been basically hiding their conduct via professional organizations,” Beidel says. “RICO over time has been utilized extra broadly. Mob prosecutions had been fairly efficient, no less than in New York, for instance, and there aren’t as many immediately. So it is expanded into different areas the place you might need an in any other case professional enterprise that can also be engaged in legal misconduct, and perhaps utilizing that professional enterprise to cover that legal misconduct.”
Prosecutors are arguing that whereas Sean Combs had a professional enterprise empire — spanning music, clothes manufacturers, alcohol and media properties — he was utilizing these companies to gasoline and conceal legal actions. Consider this cost as being like cash laundering, however as a substitute of cash, Combs is accused of laundering actions. In keeping with the federal indictment, these included kidnapping, arson, bribery, compelled labor and abusing and coercing ladies. The opposite authorities witnesses who’ve testified about these alleged actions embrace the musician Scott Mescudi — higher referred to as Child Cudi — who mentioned on the stand Thursday that he believes that Combs broke into his home and was concerned in setting fireplace to his automotive after discovering out that Mescudi and Ventura had been relationship.
Cassie Ventura’s story remains to be on the middle of the prosecution’s case
Beidel says the prosecution might need had no alternative however to current Cassie Ventura as a witness very early on — she’s eight and a half months pregnant. However it could have a broader strategic profit as nicely, since Ventura was concerned with Combs for over a decade.
“Ventura covers a reasonably lengthy timeframe and big selection of conduct,” Beidel explains. “Anyone who testifies in that approach is rather more comprehensible to a jury than once you placed on perhaps 10 witnesses for a similar period of time, when every of them has one little nugget, and the jury has to place that collectively. So you’ve got form of a narrator to begin out with the place they’re getting the story of their head to a point.”
The Southern District of New York has a particularly excessive success charge for convictions — nicely above 90%. The jury has seen and heard proof together with the resort video, that’s viscerally affecting. However with fees as broad as those geared toward Combs, an enormous query stays: Will the prosecution have the ability to persuade jurors that he was the top of a legal group? The courtroom estimates that the trial will proceed till late June no less than.
This story consists of reporting by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.
