Diddy's admitted violence toward women wasn't enough to secure conviction on sex trafficking counts

NEW YORK — Sean “Diddy” Combs’ admitted track record of violently assaulting his girlfriends wasn’t enough to convince a jury that the same women were just as powerless when it came to fulfilling his extreme sexual demands.

Jurors in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday acquitted Combs of two sex trafficking counts that alleged he pressured his ex-girlfriends into debasing sexual performances with male escorts through force, lies, and other manipulative behavior.

The panel similarly found him not guilty of a racketeering conspiracy, rejecting the prosecution’s claims that a kingpin Combs and his high-ranking staff, for decades, committed crimes without consequence and sexually exploited women with ease by intimidating them, plying them with drugs to lower their inhibitions and threatening anyone who got in his way.

Two lesser counts that Combs was convicted of — for the charge of transporting individuals for prostitution — concerned the administrative side of the debauched sex parties he called “freak-offs.” They required the jury to find that Combs was involved in flying people across the country or internationally to have sex at the drug-addled events as he watched, filmed, and masturbated.

The acquittals mean the Bad Boy Records producer formerly known as “Puff Daddy,” whose net worth has neared a billion dollars, no longer faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison and could potentially walk free in around five years.

This means the jury largely disregarded dozens of hours of testimony by Combs’ ex, Casandra Ventura, also known as Cassie, and women who took the stand anonymously as “Jane” and “Mia,” who described Combs’ temper as so formidable, violent and revenge driven that they felt they had no choice but to capitulate to his incessant demands.

Combs’ defense, having failed to bar hard evidence from the trial of him assaulting Ventura, had no choice but to acknowledge his propensity for violence toward women, with defense attorney Marc Agnifilo telling jurors in his summation last week that “we own it.”

“ If he was charged with domestic violence, we wouldn’t all be here having a trial because he would have pled guilty — because he did that,” Agnifilo said. “He did not do the things he’s charged with.”

The rap mogul’s attorneys sought to portray instances of the women trying to appease Combs — whether through sexually explicit texts or recruiting escorts to sleep with, which they said gave them some control — as evidence they always willingly participated in his insatiable fantasies brought to life.

Those arguments appeared to land with the jury over the prosecution’s position that the women consenting to some freak-offs didn’t mean they consented to all of them, in addition to testimony by an expert witness and psychologist about how being mentally and physically mistreated in a relationship can coerce domestic abuse victims into remaining in dangerous dynamics.

“What we’re talking about is being in a dark hotel room, awake for days, covered in oil, wearing 8-inch heels, often with a UTI, having your pelvic area sore, sitting in the same position for hours, performing oral sex for hours, having sex for hours, including with strangers; having unprotected sex with stranger after stranger, a rotation of men for days. The defense wants you to believe that Cassie and Jane wanted that,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey said in her rebuttal.

“That’s ridiculous on its face. Almost as ridiculous is the suggestion that the defendant had absolutely no clue that Cassie, Jane, and Mia did not want all of the sex that you’ve heard about at this trial.”

Arisha Hatch, the interim executive director of the women’s rights organization UltraViolet, reacted to Wednesday’s verdict by calling it a stain on a legal system that has long grappled with the complexities of abuse and failed to hold men in power to account.

“This is a decisive moment for our justice system, one which threatens to undo the sacrifice of courageous survivors who stepped forward to share their stories in this trial, as well as to all those abused by Diddy who weren’t able to,” Hatch said.

“It’s also an indictment of a culture in which not believing women and victims of sexual assault remains endemic.”

Lauren Hersh from World Without Exploitation, which represents a coalition of human rights organizations, in a statement said the outcome reflected a “deep and troubled misunderstanding of power, control and coercion.”

“This verdict is a devastating blow to victims and survivors everywhere. Yet it also underscores, with painful clarity, that our work to create a world without exploitation is urgent now more than ever,” Hersh said.

“In nearly every case of sex trafficking, moments of brutal violence are deliberately intertwined with moments of affection. Calculated manipulation is one of the most insidious tools traffickers use to dominate and terrorize their victims.”

The women who testified against Combs, who were significantly younger than him, said their relationships began with a charm offensive on Combs’ part, convincing them he truly loved them, but that he became controlling and physically and mentally abusive over time. By the time they realized they were in too deep, they said, he had almost total control over their finances.

In Ventura’s case, many of her accounts of Combs’ threatening behavior were illustrated by photos of her injuries and corroborated through testimony by her mother, who jurors heard he extorted, and friends. The jury watched explosive footage of Combs punching, kicking, and dragging her along the floor at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in March 2016, an assault she said happened after she tried to leave a freak-off when Combs punched her.

Ventura said she became romantically involved with Combs after her 21st birthday in 2007, around a year after she signed a contract with Bad Boy Records, and had some of her first sexual experiences with him before the freak-offs began — “hundreds” of which she said she participated in. She said that Combs, 17 years her senior, held her professional prospects over her head as leverage, with only one album out of 10 she was promised ending up being produced during their 11-year relationship. Ventura said Combs hid her from the world in hotel rooms and at his properties when she was healing from his beatings with help from his staff.

Ventura and Jane said Combs presented his desires to see them objectified by other men as innocent “voyeurism” and part of a “swingers lifestyle,” fetishes they initially tried to become comfortable with to please him. But as the sometimes dayslong sessions fueled by drugs devolved to a dehumanizing level — seeing Combs direct escorts to urinate during sex, often bar the use of contraception, and demanding women perform while they were menstruating and healing from chronic health issues — they told him they wanted out. Both said pushing back provoked his ire and that Combs sometimes threatened to release humiliating footage from freak-offs.

Testifying under a subpoena, Jane, a single mom whose rent Combs still pays, said he had threatened to take away the roof over her head when she told him she didn’t want to sleep with other men, including in one message jurors saw where she told him she felt like “an animal.” She described Combs’ rage as out of control, recounting his violently assaulting her a little over a year ago in June 2024, after he learned he was under investigation for sex trafficking. That assault partly factored in Manhattan Federal Judge Arun Subramanian’s decision not to release Combs on a $1 million bond after the verdict came down Wednesday.

Jane said that on the same day, Combs bullied her into taking ecstasy and giving an escort oral sex after he had brutally beaten her. She described Combs as seeing himself as untouchable when he brazenly made light of her worries about allegations that had recently surfaced about him pressuring Ventura into freak-offs.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’” Jane recalled. “He said, ‘Then is this coercion?’ And I just looked at him.”

Mia, who worked as an assistant for Combs from 2009 to 2017, said that he had raped, sexually assaulted, and on occasion hurled objects at her during her employment, forcing her to sleep in a room at his house with no lock. Her allegations were partly tied to the underlying crime of forced labor in the RICO count that Combs was acquitted of.

Despite Combs’ victory in the criminal courts, which saw him fall to his knees in apparent prayer, the mogul still faces a web of dozens of civil lawsuits — almost 70 — from women and men detailing wide ranging allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation dating back as far as 1991. Many involve accusers who weren’t included in the case due to the statute of limitations. Combs denies all allegations.

Lawyers for Combs, jailed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Complex since his September arrest, are due to argue before Subramanian on Tuesday, who will consider expediting the date of his sentencing.

The Daily News reached out to lawyers and representatives for Combs for comment.