Sean “Diddy” Combs will remain in jail after failing to convince the second federal judge in as many days to accept his $50 million bond package.
US District Judge Andrew Carter, who will oversee the trial, cited what federal prosecutors described as Combs’ longstanding and ongoing efforts to intimidate witnesses and obstruct justice, including through acts of violence.
“That video is quite disturbing,” the judge said at one point, referring to video showing Combs beating his main accuser, R&B singer Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura, in a hotel hallway in 2016.
The decision may keep Combs confined in a notoriously violent and uncomfortable Brooklyn jail until he takes a plea or goes to trial. A trial date has not been scheduled.
In arguing for continued detention without bail, federal prosecutor Emily Johnson divulged new, more extreme details of the “Freak Offs” and Combs’ alleged intimidation tactics.
She quoted from a series of texts sent to Combs by his alleged victims to demonstrate how Combs allegedly ensured the continued silence and compliance of his victims, including by taping their participation in the “Freak Offs,” and threatening to “leak” the recordings.
Johnson also gave the judge more granular details of Combs’ alleged barrage of texts and phone calls to witnesses in the ten months since Ventura went public with many of the same allegations he’s now charged with.
Combs reached out to victims dozens of times to try to feed them false narratives that they had willingly engaged in consensual sex acts, the prosecutor told the judge.
On Tuesday, US Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky had also rejected Combs’s bail proposal, finding that there was too great a risk of witness intimidation and to the safety of the community at large.
She also cited evidence of his violent outbursts, and of his admitted substance abuse.
“I don’t know that I think you can trust yourself, and I don’t believe that counsel has the ability to control you, given the very significant concerns I have, particularly because of substance abuse and what seem like anger issues,” Tarnofsky said at the Tuesday hearing.
Records from the federal Bureau of Prisons show he is incarcerated in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a notorious jail that has been home to other high-profile criminal defendants, including Sam Bankman-Fried, R. Kelly, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Michael Cohen.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have accused Combs of sex-trafficking, illegally transporting people for sex, and running a racketeering conspiracy.
The indictment unsealed Tuesday alleges that for more than a decade Combs planned and ran an elaborate series of “Freak Offs” — highly orchestrated sexual performances, typically held at hotels, at which he used drugs, violence, and threats to coerce women into engagine in sexual activity with male commercial sex workers.
Combs assaulted women and threatened to leak videotape of the performances to make sure they did what he wanted, prosecutors allege.
Combs pleaded not guilty at Tuesday’s hearing. His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said his relationship with the victim identified in the indictment, the singer Cassie Ventura, had been consensual and “mutually toxic” at times during their 10 years together. Ventura filed a civil lawsuit against Combs in November 2023, which spurred the criminal investigation against him. Combs settled the lawsuit for “an undisclosed and large amount of money,” Agnifilo said.
Angifilio stressed at the Tuesday hearing and in court documents that Combs had taken extraordinary measures to cooperate with prosecutors for months.
Combs made a “bad business decision” to pay off the mortgage of his $48 million Miami home so that it could be offered unencumbered as collateral for his proposed bond, he said.
Emails filed to the court show that Combs’s lawyers had emailed prosecutors about the singer’s travel plans and assured them that he had surrendered his passport so that he would not fly overseas and outside the Justice Department’s jurisdiction. Combs’ companies have also turned over 144,000 pages of documents over the course of the investigation, Angifilio said.
Prosecutors were unpersuaded by Combs’ actions and asked for him to be jailed pending trial, noting he still has “vast resources” at his disposal to help him flee if he wanted to, and alleging that he repeatedly called grand jury witnesses to get them to change their stories about him.
Lawyers representing defendants in the Metropolitan Detention Center often complain that the conditions make it hard to work with their clients and plan a trial defense. Maxwell’s lawyers frequently complained about how poor conditions — rodents and bugs scurrying across the rooms, flashlights shining onto the defendant’s faces at night — made it hard for her to sleep. More recently, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys complained about arbitrary-seeming rules, like limitations on electronic devices in rooms where lawyers meet with their clients, that made it hard for them to review evidence with their client.
Carter, the district court judge, may now decide whether to reconsider the terms of Comb’s release and set him free pending trial.
Combs or prosecutors may also appeal Carter’s decision to the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and from there to the US Supreme Court.
This is a breaking story; please check back for developments.