Sean Combs is found guilty of prostitution-related charges but avoids life sentence

Sean “Diddy” Combs has been found guilty of two of the five crimes he was charged with. At the close of the hip-hop mogul’s trial, which started on May 5, the jury found him guilty of two counts of transporting people for the purpose of engaging in prostitution. However, they found the musician did not lead a criminal organization to abuse women (racketeering conspiracy), and also acquitted him of sex trafficking.

The jury had announced on Tuesday, July 1, that it had reached a verdict on four of the five counts levied against the rapper, formerly known as Puff Daddy or P. Diddy. When they returned to the courtroom, Judge Arun Subramanian asked them to keep talking.

On Tuesday, Subramanian even called the jurors back into the courtroom to argue against a partial verdict, and urged them to continue deliberating. He also reminded them that their decision must be unanimous, and that “you should not hesitate to change an opinion when convinced, weigh your opinion dispassionately and follow my instructions on the law.”

The final charge, racketeering conspiracy, has always been the most complex in the entire case. It could also carry a life sentence. Hence the hesitations of the jurors, who requested a re-examination of the testimony of Casandra Ventura, Combs’s ex-partner, and specifically the incident that occurred in 2016 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles, California, where the rapper dragged the singer down the hallway back to her room as she tried to flee. The racketeering charge required many things to be proven: that Combs led a criminal enterprise, that the musician agreed—verbally or in writing, expressly or implicitly—with at least one other person in that network, either his partner or employee, to commit at least two crimes from a list of 35 offenses, including kidnapping, arson, human trafficking, possession and distribution of substances, forced labor, extortion... And all this would have to have occurred within a decade; additionally, the illicit activities had to affect interstate commerce.

The trial was based on two cases, both of which proved the sex trafficking and transportation for prostitution charges he faced after his arrest in September. Of the two cases, the first was the most high-profile and stemmed from the first complaint lodged against Combs, in November 2023: it was filed by Casandra Ventura, a singer and actress known as Cassie, with whom he had a relationship from the mid-2000s until approximately 2018. She has since recounted the humiliation, physical and verbal assault, forced sex, and threats that Combs inflicted on her for years. The second testimony was by an anonymous woman who went by the pseudonym Jane, and who recounted similar horrors, up until the end of their relationship in 2024. She also spoke of the famous freak-offs: orgies with male prostitutes that lasted days and which Combs made her go through.

The nature of the relationship between Combs and his partners has been central to the trial. Agnofilo and the rest of his lawyers—although some decided to quit before it all began— tried to make it seem consensual, claiming that Combs was a liberal person with a few minor problems: from substance abuse to the domestic violence he practiced against his girlfriends. But in no way, they maintained, did participating in orgies or partner swapping make him a criminal.

But the prosecution knew from the beginning where the shots would go, and they got ahead of themselves: “This case is not about the private sexual preferences of a celebrity,” they stated on the first day of the hearing. Both Combs and his girlfriends were “unfaithful, jealous,” they asserted, but “only one had the power”: “He had the power to ruin her life.” The image of a prestigious, wealthy, yet humane musician, surrounded by his mother and children, as the defense tried to portray Combs, was not enough to stem the barrage of accusations that have been raining down relentlessly on Combs.

Ventura, nine months pregnant, delivered a devastating testimony that dragged on for the first week and shocked everyone inside the courtroom who heard it, especially the jury; so much so that the rapper’s teenage daughters decided to leave. From the moment she took the stand and for four long days, she recounted how Combs forced her into orgies, manipulating and threatening to release sex videos of her; she recounted the beatings and rapes she suffered, to which she was unable to respond because she knew the violence would escalate and she would pay an even higher price. “I feared for my career. I feared for my family. It’s just embarrassing. It’s horrible and disgusting. No one should do that to anyone,” she stated. She decided to take drugs to dull the experience, to numb herself, as a form of “escape,” she stated. If she showed interest in other people, whether romantically or not, he would threaten her, hit her, insult her. He even assured her he would blow up the car of Cassie’s then-boyfriend. The boyfriend’s Porsche ended up in flames. She has even admitted that she considered taking her own life: “I didn’t want to be alive any more at that point. I couldn’t take the pain that I was in anymore and so I just tried to walk out the front door into traffic and my husband would not let me.” With her words, she managed to turn the case upside down and steer it toward a final verdict.

There are still loose ends to be tied up in Combs’ case, or rather, in his many cases. The sentence the judge will impose remains to be determined, and he could spend many years behind bars. But he also has unfinished business. There are hundreds of complaints from men and women, most of whom accuse him of having been raped under the influence of drugs supplied by him and his colleagues without their knowledge. Therefore, there’s still a long road of trials ahead for the three-time Grammy winner and wealthy entrepreneur worth nearly a billion dollars. He’ll have to prepare his fortune for the next lawyers.

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