Sean “Diddy” Combs wants 12 New Yorkers to see him as a victim.
Central to the millionaire rap mogul’s defense at his criminal sex-trafficking trial next week will be the claim that R&B singer Cassie Ventura — the star witness in the case against him — abused him, too.
“We are 100% going to raise that,” Combs’ defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told the trial judge in a final pre-trial hearing on Friday.
“We are going to take the position that there was mutual violence on both sides,” he told US District Court Justice Arun Subramanian, as Combs sat at the defense table, nodding his head approvingly.
“There was hitting on both sides,” Agnifilo told the judge. “We’re probably going to refer to it as domestic violence.”
The judge on Friday barred the defense from alleging to jurors that Ventura, Combs’ ex-girlfriend of more than a decade, was violent to someone other than Combs. Agnifilo had argued that jurors needed to see that Ventura was a “strong” person who wouldn’t have been coerced into sex by Combs.
“Strong people can be coerced, just like weak people,” the judge said.
Ventura’s attorney, Douglas Wigdor, declined to comment to Business Insider at court on Friday.
Redefining Combs, 55, as a battered man may be tough work for his defense team.
Prosecutors plan to show jurors the infamous security camera footage where Combs is seen beating and dragging Ventura in a Los Angeles hotel hallway — the “Cassie video,” as prospective jurors called it throughout three days of jury selection this week.
Prosecutor Emily Anne Johnson told the judge on Friday that jurors may see five versions of the footage. These will include versions recorded on a security guard’s cellphone and others first obtained by CNN.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
From Met Gala to MDC
The Combs that jurors will see at the defense table during opening statements in Manhattan federal court Monday will look nothing like the star who graced the red carpet at the 2023 Met Gala, wearing a black Swarovski crystal-studded motorcycle tuxedo with rapper Yung Miami at his side.
These days, Combs — a one-time near billionaire — is gray-haired and somberly dressed, wearing the same apparent dark slacks and sweater each day of jury selection.
If convicted on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, Combs could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The high-profile trial is slated to run for about two months.
Combs was arrested and indicted last September. Since then, he’s been locked up at a federal Brooklyn jail.
Prosecutors allege that, for two decades, Combs led a “criminal enterprise” that involved the sex trafficking of two women, Ventura and an anonymous Jane Doe. Combs is accused of coercing those women, plus two additional women, into sex through a pattern of threats, manipulation, and violence.
Ventura is set to testify during the trial about the abuse she alleges she endured at the hands of Combs. At least two of the other women are also expected to testify, one under her real name and the other using a pseudonym. A fifth woman who’s not in the indictment is also set to testify about alleged past abuse using her real name.
Prosecutors say that Combs and his associates also committed other crimes, including forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, drug offenses, and obstruction of justice.
Violence and ‘freak offs’
Much like Combs’ lavish star-studded “white parties” of the late 1990s and early 2000s, his trial is expected to feature a number of celebrities — at least only in name.
The jury selection process revealed a list of famed individuals who may be mentioned during the trial. They include: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West; rapper Kid Cudi; actor Michael B. Jordan; choreographer Laurieann Gibson; and Yung Miami.
Combs’ criminal case stems from a November 2023 civil lawsuit that Ventura filed against Combs, accusing him of rape and forcing to her to engage in sex sessions that the music magnate called “freak offs.” Combs settled the suit shortly after it was filed.
At the center of the criminal indictment against Combs are accusations that he orchestrated the so-called “freak offs,” described by prosecutors in court papers as elaborate, drug-fueled, and sometimes dayslong sex performances that Combs arranged, directed, and often electronically recorded.
During the trial, jurors will be asked to watch hours of graphic sex videos, including freak off footage, that Combs recorded over the years. Prosecutors say some footage was taken without his accusers’ consent. The videos are so explicit and sensitive that not even the public in the courtroom will be permitted to view them.
Combs has adamantly denied the charges against him, as well as all other allegations of sex abuse. He has been accused of sexual assault, rape, drugging, and other forms of violence in more than 50 civil lawsuits.
His defense attorneys have argued in his criminal case that the sex acts Combs was involved in were fully consensual. The video of Combs beating Ventura, they say, came following a personal dispute about their relationship.
Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images
A high-powered legal team
For the sex-trafficking case, Combs parted with his longtime attorney Ben Brafman, who successfully won an acquittal for the hip-hop artist on gun and bribery charges in 2001.
He’s now represented by a protégé of Brafman, Marc Agnifilo, who previously defended NXIVM cult founder Keith Raniere and “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli.
Agnifilo and his wife, Karen Agnifilo Friedman, are also representing Luigi Mangione, who prosecutors say killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk last year.
Combs’s legal team is stacked with other prominent attorneys, including Alexandra Shapiro, who is handling Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal; Brian Steel, who defended Young Thug in his complicated Georgia RICO trial and has a Drake song named after him; and Teny Geragos, a law partner of Agnifolo’s and the daughter of Mark Geragos, a high-profile defense attorney who is advising on the case.
In a recent hearing, Combs confirmed to the judge he was offered the chance to plead guilty to charges that would have resulted in a lighter sentence — but chose to go to trial anyway.
The prosecution side, representing the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, is composed entirely of women. Among the prosecutors is Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI chief James Comey, who successfully prosecuted the sex-trafficking trial of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The trial is the first major criminal case to be overseen by Subramanian, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Joe Biden in 2023. Subramanian is also overseeing a complex antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation, as well as a civil lawsuit from Jeffrey Epstein victims against US Rep. Stacey Paskett, who they allege helped facilitate the now-dead pedophile’s sex trafficking on the US Virgin Islands.
While prosecutors have depicted Combs as a criminal mastermind who exerted his vast resources to manipulate women and men for his sexual gratification, his attorneys have put forward a more mild picture.
They say Combs had a “swinger” lifestyle that involved multiple sexual partners, and that prosecutors have distorted a personal and complicated relationship into a false criminal allegation.
Combs and Ventura “were in love,” Agnifilo said during one bail hearing last year.
“That will be made abundantly clear by the way they speak to each other, by the way other witnesses described their time together, and by the circumstances of how they broke up,” Agnifolo said.
“They were in love, but Mr. Combs wasn’t always faithful,” he continued.
