Combs, Sean

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    Seeking Release on Bail, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Downplays Risk of Witness Tampering

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    In an appeal, lawyers for Mr. Combs wrote that a judge’s decision to withhold bail was not based on evidence that he had sought to interfere with the sex trafficking investigation.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul fighting racketeering and sex trafficking charges, filed an appeal on Tuesday of a judge’s decision to deny him bail, arguing that concerns he would intimidate witnesses if released from jail were unfounded.Mr. Combs has been incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for three weeks, since the federal case against him was revealed to the public. Judge Andrew L. Carter of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered that Mr. Combs be detained ahead of his trial, ruling that he posed a danger of witness tampering and a safety risk to others.In their appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, lawyers for Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, wrote that the government’s argument that their client posed a risk of obstructing justice was based on speculation, not evidence that he had sought to interfere with the criminal investigation into his conduct.The lawyers, Alexandra A.E. Shapiro and Jason A. Driscoll, argued in the court filing that Mr. Combs’s decision to travel to New York to face the charges, coupled with an intricate proposal for monitoring outside the government’s custody, helped support his release from jail ahead of his trial.“Mr. Combs is presumed innocent,” they wrote in the filing. “He traveled to New York to surrender because he knew he was going to be indicted. He took extraordinary steps to demonstrate that he intended to face and contest the charges, not flee. He presented a bail package that would plainly stop him from posing a danger to anyone or contacting any witnesses.”Prosecutors have accused Mr. Combs of running a “criminal enterprise” that helped him carry out a decades-long pattern of physical and sexual violence, alleging that he coerced women into “highly orchestrated” sexual encounters with prostitutes through the use of drugs, physical and emotional abuse, and financial pressure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean Combs and the Limits of the ‘Family Man’ Defense

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      On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”Combs has pleaded not guilty to these charges. Last year, after being accused of sexual assault in four separate lawsuits, Combs defended himself in part by invoking his family: “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”The latest charges are vile, describing years of sexual and physical abuse, enabled by Combs’s vast fortune and the pull of his celebrity. The government outlines the way Combs and his staff allegedly used their power to “intimidate, threaten and lure female victims into Combs’s orbit, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Combs then used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers.”Combs was denied bail on Tuesday. His lawyers tried to appeal the decision with a letter to the judge. In this missive, Combs’s lawyers paint “victim 1” as simply a jilted, lonely lover. “That one person was an adult woman who lived alone, who never lived with Sean Combs. She had her own friends, she had her own life, as adults tend to do. Mr. Combs and this person were very much in love for a long time,” the letter states. “This one person often expressed anger and jealousy because Mr. Combs had another girlfriend, as will be testified to by many witnesses and as the written communications show.”Despite the fact that the world has seen video evidence of Combs assaulting his ex-girlfriend, his lawyers seem to believe that pitting Combs, a “loving family man,” against an “adult woman who lived alone” would be an effective defense.They’re trying it because, to some extent, we still assign a positive moral value to getting married and having children. It’s why Republicans keep using Kamala Harris’s lack of biological children to attack her character. Combs’s lawyers are also likely playing on built in prejudices against Black women in particular, who have always had a harder time being seen as respectable, aspirational or worthy of protection in the public eye.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean Combs Arrested in Manhattan After Grand Jury Indictment

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      The music mogul has been under mounting scrutiny since a 2023 lawsuit by his former girlfriend, Cassie, accused him of sex trafficking and years of abuse.Sean Combs, the music mogul whose career has been upended by sexual assault lawsuits and a federal investigation, was arrested at a Manhattan hotel on Monday evening after a grand jury indicted him.The indictment is sealed and the charges were not announced but Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said he believed he was being charged with racketeering and sex trafficking.A statement from Mr. Combs’s legal team said they were disappointed with the decision to prosecute him and noted that he had been cooperative with the investigation and had “voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges.”“Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man, and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children, and working to uplift the Black community,” the statement said. “He is an imperfect person but he is not a criminal.”Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement posted on social media late Monday that “we expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”Mr. Agnifilo said Mr. Combs had been arrested by officers with Homeland Security Investigations at about 8:30 p.m. at the hotel where he was staying, the Park Hyatt New York on 57th Street. It is expected he will be held overnight and then arraigned on Tuesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Is Sean Combs the Subject of a Homeland Security Investigation?

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      The department has a division that often directs inquiries into sex trafficking allegations, like those cited in recent lawsuits against Mr. Combs.The raids of Sean Combs’s homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area this week raised a barrage of questions about the nature of the inquiry, which a federal official said was at least in part a human trafficking investigation.The government has said little about the basis for the search warrants, but the raids came after five civil lawsuits were filed against Mr. Combs in recent months that accused him of violating sex trafficking laws. In four of the suits women accused him of rape, and in one a man accused him of unwanted sexual contact. Mr. Combs, a hip-hop impresario known as Puff Daddy and Diddy who has been a high-profile figure in the music industry since the 1990s, has vehemently denied all of the allegations, calling them “sickening.” Officials have not publicly named him as a target of any prosecution.As the civil suits against Mr. Combs illustrate, the term human or sex trafficking has a broader meaning in the law than perhaps the more popularly understood image of organized crime and forced prostitution rings.“Traditionally you think of trafficking as a pimp who has a stable of victims and then is trafficking them in the traditional sense of the word, for money,” said Jim Cole, a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who oversaw human trafficking cases, “but there are lots of forms of trafficking.”The breadth of trafficking investigations has grown with the recent uptick in sexual abuse claims and the use of the internet by traffickers. Homeland Security Investigations often leads such criminal investigations, although the department is most commonly associated with immigration and transnational issues.In the current inquiry, federal investigators in New York have been interviewing potential witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Combs for several months, according to a person familiar with the interviews. Some of the questions involved the solicitation and transportation of prostitutes, as well as any payments or promises associated with sex acts, the person said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean Combs Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Music Producer

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      Rodney Jones Jr. filed a federal lawsuit on Monday that says the hip-hop mogul made unwanted sexual contact while they worked on an album. A lawyer for Mr. Combs denied the allegations.Sean Combs was sued on Monday by a music producer who accused the hip-hop mogul of making unwanted sexual contact and of forcing him to hire prostitutes and participate in sex acts with them.The latest misconduct allegation against Mr. Combs was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan by Rodney Jones Jr., also known as Lil Rod. In 2022 and 2023, Mr. Jones says in his suit, he worked on what became “The Love Album: Off the Grid,” the latest album by Mr. Combs, the hip-hop and R&B impresario who has variously been known as Puff Daddy and P. Diddy. Mr. Jones says he served as a producer on nine of the album’s tracks and lived with Mr. Combs for months at a time.While working on “The Love Album,” Mr. Jones says in his complaint that Mr. Combs grabbed his genitals without consent, and that he also tried to “groom” Mr. Jones into having sex with another man, telling him it was “a normal practice in the music industry.”In a statement, Shawn Holley, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said: “Lil Rod is nothing more than a liar who filed a $30 million lawsuit shamelessly looking for an undeserved payday. His reckless name-dropping about events that are pure fiction and simply did not happen is nothing more than a transparent attempt to garner headlines. We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies.”When the suit was filed, the court’s system originally said that Mr. Jones’s demand was for $30 billion. His lawyer, Tyrone A. Blackburn, said that was an error, and that it would be corrected to reflect a demand of $30 million. Ms. Holley’s statement originally reflected a response to $30 billion.According to Mr. Jones’s complaint, at a listening party in July 2023 at Mr. Combs’s home in California, he was forced to drink shots of tequila laced with drugs, though the legal papers do not specify who offered him the shots or how he was forced. In the suit, Mr. Jones says that after he had the drink, he passed out and awoke “at 4 a.m. the following morning naked with a sex worker sleeping next to him.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israeli Army Escorts Journalists to Gaza Hospital, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — it’s available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes.A view of Al-Shifa Hospital in a darkened Gaza. Israel says Hamas maintains a command center beneath the hospital, a claim rejected by Hamas and hospital officials.Mohammed Saber/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Today’s Episode:The Israeli Army Escorted Times Journalists to Al-Shifa, a Focus of Its Invasion, by Philip P. Pan and Patrick KingsleySantos Won’t Seek Re-election After House Panel Finds Evidence of Crimes, by Grace AshfordSean Combs Is Accused by Cassie of Rape and Years of Abuse in Lawsuit, with Ben SisarioEmily Lang More