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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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      Harrods Will Be Sued by Mohamed al-Fayed’s Alleged Victims, Lawyers Say

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      Attorneys for 37 women said they would sue Harrods, the luxury department store, over the rape and sexual assault they say its former owner committed.Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday, saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”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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      Bucks County Man Charged With Drugging and Raping Women He Met Online

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      The man, Andrew J. Gallo, 40, of Bristol Township, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb, is accused of raping or sexually assaulting six women he met on dating sites.A Pennsylvania man accused of drugging at least six women he met online and raping or sexually assaulting them while they were impaired was arrested on Wednesday, the authorities said.Over a year, the man, Andrew J. Gallo, 40, of Bristol Township, Pa., met the women and a minor through a dating website called Sugardaddymeet.com and invited them to his home, giving them drinks laced with drugs in order to violently assault them, according to the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office. They ranged in age from 17 to 30, the prosecutor’s office said.Sugardaddymeet.com describes itself as a place for “successful men and attractive women looking for mutually fulfilling relationships.”Mr. Gallo is being held under $500,000 bail at the Bucks County Correctional Facility. It was unclear on Wednesday whether Mr. Gallo had legal representation or how he intended to plea.“He methodically carried out what was clearly preplanned crimes with the sole purpose of satisfying his deviant sexual desire,” Jennifer Schorn, the district attorney in Bucks County, in suburban Philadelphia, said during a news conference on Wednesday.Mr. Gallo was arraigned on Wednesday on five counts of rape by causing impairment, six counts of drug possession, four counts of strangulation, two counts of providing alcohol to minors and one count of corruption of minors, the authorities 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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      Peter Nygard Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison for Sexual Assault

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      Mr. Nygard was convicted in Toronto of sexually assaulting four women in his company’s headquarters. He also faces trials in Montreal, Winnipeg and New York.The hearing was meant to decide a prison sentence for a convicted rapist, Peter Nygard, the former Canadian fashion mogul. But for a woman who had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Nygard, being one of his victims had long made her life a prison.The trauma caused by the attack in the late 1980s, when she was 21, irreparably stunted her life, the woman told a Toronto courtroom during Mr. Nygard’s two-day sentencing hearing that began in July and was postponed until Monday.It shattered her career as a clothing designer and television presenter, caused debilitating health problems and left lasting psychological wounds, she said. “I live now still in a veil of sadness,” said the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban. “It breaks my heart to reflect upon the derailment of my entire life.”After listening to statements from victims and from Mr. Nygard’s defense, a judge sentenced Mr. Nygard to 11 years in prison for sexually assaulting four women, one of whom was a teenager at the time of the attack. Because of the time he has spent in custody since his arrest, Mr. Nygard has about seven years remaining in his sentence and will be eligible for parole in about two years.“Peter Nygard is a sexual predator,” said Justice Robert Goldstein of the Superior Court of Ontario, delivering his sentence before a full courtroom. “He is also a Canadian success story gone wrong.”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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      Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Defends App in First Comments Since Arrest

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      Pavel Durov, held in France since last month, blamed “growing pains” for the company’s problems and pledged to make improvements.Pavel Durov, the founder of the online communications tool Telegram, said on Thursday that it was a “misguided approach” to hold him personally responsible for the spread of illicit content on the platform.Mr. Durov’s comments, made on his Telegram account, were his first public remarks since he was arrested at an airport outside Paris and charged last month by the French authorities for failing to prevent illegal activity on the app. The crimes on Telegram included the spread of child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug sales, French prosecutors have said.“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” Mr. Durov wrote. He said “growing pains” on Telegram, which has 950 million users, had made it easy for criminals to abuse the platform.“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he said.Mr. Durov’s case has become a point of contention in the politically charged debate over the limits of free speech on the internet. Telegram is committed to light supervision of what people say or do on the platform. The app has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate and organize. But it has also become a hothouse for disinformation, extremism and other harmful content.Telegram has long been in the cross hairs of global law enforcement agencies because it has refused to cooperate with the authorities. French prosecutors said Mr. Durov had been arrested in part because of Telegram’s “almost total lack of response” to requests related to criminal investigations.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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      Harvey Weinstein Indecent Assault Case Dropped by U.K. Prosecutors

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      The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had “decided that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”British prosecutors have dropped a case against Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, just two years after authorizing indecent assault charges against him.In a statement on Thursday, the Crown Prosecution Service said that, “following a review of the evidence,” it had decided to halt the proceedings against Mr. Weinstein.Frank Ferguson, head of the service’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said in the statement that there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”“We have explained our decision to all parties,” he added.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Crown Prosecution Service said in an email that the service would not be giving any further details of the reasoning behind the decision.The case dates to 2022, when British prosecutors authorized two charges against Mr. Weinstein of indecent assault of a woman in London in 1996. Under British law, it is illegal to identify potential victims of sexual assault, even after prosecutors drop a case.At the height of his powers, Mr. Weinstein, now 72, was one of the world’s most important movie producers, widely seen as able to make or break an actor’s career.In 2017, his career went into free fall after The New York Times reported that he had, over the course of nearly three decades, paid off women who had accused him of sexual assault. In the story’s aftermath, prosecutors mounted cases against him in both Britain and the United States.Last year, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault in California.In April, New York’s highest court overturned Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 felony sex crimes conviction, ruling that the original judge had deprived him of a fair trial. The court said that the original judge should not have let prosecutors call witnesses who said that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them when their accusations did not form part of the case.In May, Manhattan prosecutors announced they would retry Mr. Weinstein on sex crimes charges and he is currently in the Rikers Island jail complex awaiting that case. More

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      Backpage Founder Gets Five Years in Case That Shut Down Website

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      Michael Lacey, 76, co-founded the website that became known for its ads for prostitution. He was convicted on a money laundering charge in a case that included accusations of sex trafficking.A founder of the shuttered classified advertising website Backpage was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in federal prison in connection with a sweeping case that led to the closing of the website and accusations against its executives that they promoted sex trafficking, prosecutors said.Michael Lacey, 76, of Arizona, was convicted on a single count of international concealment money laundering in November after being charged in a 100-count indictment in 2018 with several other defendants who, prosecutors said, conspired to promote prostitution ads and launder earnings of more than $500 million made from the scheme between 2010 and 2018. The case was tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.In addition to the five-year prison sentence, Mr. Lacey was ordered Wednesday to pay a $3 million fine, prosecutors said.The jury that convicted Mr. Lacey last year was deadlocked on 84 other charges against him, including several charges that he helped advertise prostitution on Backpage. The deadlock led U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a mistrial on those counts. It was the second mistrial in the case. Mr. Lacey would later be acquitted of several of the counts, but could still face 30 of them, according to The Associated Press.Two other executives, Scott Spear and John “Jed” Brunst, were convicted alongside Mr. Lacey on both money laundering and prostitution facilitation counts.They were acquitted on some of those charges in April, but each received 10-year sentences Wednesday, according to a spokesman for the Justice Department, Joshua Stueve.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