Sean Combs, "Mia," and "Trauma Brain"

The grilling of a key witness in the Diddy trial highlights a familiar trend in discrediting sexual abuse accusations, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump.

Photo entered into evidence during Sean Combs’s trial

All Rise News editor-in-chief Adam Klasfeld discussed his live court coverage on CNN’s “Laura Coates Live” shortly after the proceedings. Watch below:

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A former personal assistant for Sean Combs testifying under the pseudonym “Mia” has spent two days telling a jury that the rapper and cultural icon subjected her to sexual, physical, financial and emotional abuse, leaving her traumatized and ruining a once-promising career.

Trying to mitigate the blow of that testimony, Combs’s lawyer Brian Steel kept a laser-like focus during the first day of cross-examination on a single topic: Mia’s Instagram feed.

It’s become an increasingly common strategy in the high-profile trials of the #MeToo era, and Mia’s trauma-focused answers to the line of attack have become more familiar to the general public, as well.

Combs pleaded not guilty to all of the federal charges against him, but the defense acknowledged his domestic abuse during opening statements.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline offers resources for survivors and their supporters.

Instagram in the courtroom

During her first day of testimony, Mia testified that Combs sexually assaulted her on his 40th birthday at New York City’s Plaza Hotel, after giving her two shots of vodka.

Combs’ attorney kept turning his questioning to Mia’s Instagram posts on the anniversary of that date, praising her “mentor, inspiration, brother and friend” on subsequent birthdays.

One of the posts had a still frame from a comedy video where Combs pretends to deliver her baby, along with the message: “Thank you for always letting me give birth to my dreams.”

Steel asked with heavy irony, “Your rapist [was] delivering the baby, right?”

Mia had previously testified that Combs had her career in film and television in his hands, and she said that she was proud of that still frame because it showed her role in a comedy video. Though she was trying to please her boss, Mia openly acknowledged that her affection for Combs was real.

For hours, Steel kept showing Mia scores of other social media posts praising Combs as a “legend,” “forever one of my greatest friends,” and perhaps most creatively, “the coolest alien rockstar unicorn pizza slice.”

Asked why she never posted anything negative, Mia said, “Instagram is a place to show how great your life was, even if it’s not true.”

The jury saw plenty of evidence that the glamorous and globe-hopping posts weren’t all that they seemed to be on the glossy surface. One picture, taken in Cape Town, South Africa, showed Mia and Combs’ ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura smiling for the camera.

Hours before the jury saw that photo, they learned that Combs flew into a jealous rage while Mia and Ventura were in Cape Town. Records showed Combs and his staff frantically calling Mia during the early morning hours after learning that Ventura was cheating on him. Combs repeatedly threatened to fire Mia for failing to immediately pick up the phone.

At a different time and place, Mia and another witness, stylist Deonte Nash, testified that they saw Combs smash Ventura’s head into a bed frame, leaving her bleeding profusely.

“It’s called psychological abuse”

Roughly two years ago in the same courthouse, Donald Trump’s then-attorney Joe Tacopina tried to undermine E. Jean Carroll by digging up her Facebook post praising “The Apprentice.” Carroll’s fandom of the show didn’t bother the federal jury, which found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. (Just today, Trump refused to rule out a pardon for Combs if the rapper is convicted.) Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers also confronted witnesses about their social media feeds, without compromising the women’s credibility in the minds of the jury.

Despite this history, Combs’s legal team is leaning into the same strategy. Jurors dutifully examined the images on their screens, and they passed along a scrapbook that Mia made Combs for his birthday.

Mia said that Combs described feeling jaded about his professional success at that stage of his career, and she hand-wrote a message to try to rekindle the excitement he felt about his journey. She coolly acknowledged that her warm message and concern for him were sincere.

Asked how she could give that gift to someone who “ruined your life,” Mia replied: “It’s called psychological abuse.”

She said that Combs’s entire entourage made her treatment seem normal.

“There was nobody around us that ever flinched at his behavior,” she said.

After hours of questioning about Mia’s social media posts, that line appeared to strike a cord with at least two jurors, who started scribbling in their notebooks. The jurors continued to write as Mia spoke about the battle between her “logic brain and my trauma brain.”

“My trauma brain wins all the time,” Mia said matter-of-factly, calling herself a “people-pleaser” and a “rule follower.”

There is a reason the line may have resonated with the jury, who heard testimony earlier in the trial from forensic psychologist Dawn Hughes.

Earlier in the trial, Hughes spoke generally about the “trauma bond” that forms between a perpetrator and a victim, without offering opinions about the facts of this case.

“We know that in these types of relationships there is almost always love and attention and attraction and companionship, and it’s those positive feelings that when they get paired with the violence and the abuse make it very difficult for the victim to see their way out,” Hughes told jurors, according to CNN.

Just as they had with other witnesses, Combs’ attorneys suggested Hughes had a financial motive for her testimony. Defense attorneys tried to argue the same in the other major cases where Hughes delivered expert testimony, including those of R. Kelly, Keith Raniere, and Johnny Depp.

With the exception of the Depp case, those efforts also failed.