"Criminal enterprise": What the Diddy trial is really about
The rapper's lawyers want a jury to believe he's just a domestic abuser, but the charges challenge the public to rethink the nature of wealth, power and impunity.
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Forget the “freak offs,” the celebrities, and the seizure of more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant.
The trial of rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs investigates when and whether the systems built by the powerful to conceal their crimes rise to the level of racketeering. That became clear with the first lines spoken in the prosecution’s opening statement on Monday.
“This is Sean Combs. To the public, he was Puff Daddy, or Diddy, a cultural icon, a businessman. Larger than life,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson told jurors, as the trial began. “But there was another side of him — the side that ran a criminal enterprise."
Prosecutors say that Combs used drugs, violence, bribery, blackmail, a coterie of “lieutenants,” and the implied threat of his power to sexually exploit women in dark hotel rooms. Combs allegedly hired a series of male escorts to have sex with the women, videotaped the encounters, and kept them in line with beatings, MDMA, and the prospect of releasing footage of their humiliation.
Before the day’s end, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed that Combs committed a serious crime: domestic abuse. The defense only denies the federal crimes with which Combs has been charged, the ones that could land him in prison for life.
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The trial of Sean Combs involves serious issues of human trafficking and domestic abuse. National hotlines help support victims and report suspected perpetrators.
Elite impunity
The criminal enterprise that prosecutors allege against Combs spanned two decades, but the allegations against him spilled into public view less than two years ago.
“For 20 years, the defendant and his inner circle committed crime after crime,” the prosecutor told the jury.
There were no public allegations against Combs until Casandra “Cassie” Ventura filed the first of the 78 lawsuits to date against him on Nov. 16, 2023, opening the floodgates to dozens of sexual abuse allegations by women and men. (Only a handful appear to be at the center of his criminal prosecution, and so far, only by women.)
The calm before the legal storm has become a familiar pattern. R. Kelly was first sued in 1996 and criminally charged in 2002, but it would take the #MeToo movement and a documentary to build momentum for the federal prosecution that led to his downfall in 2019. It would take two years after Jeffrey Epstein’s death in pre-trial lockup for roughly 150 victims of his abuse to claim compensation.
Beyond the sheer number of alleged victims, there are other similarities to Combs’s case here. Combs and Kelly both faced charges of racketeering and sex trafficking, and Kelly’s challenge to the prosecution’s use of the RICO statute failed in the Second Circuit, fortifying the use of that statute against Combs in the same jurisdiction. Combs and Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell shared the same prosecutor, Maureen Comey.
That connection isn’t an accident, says former sex trafficking prosecutor Mitchell Epner.
“It’s very clear to me that at least as of last year, the Southern District of New York decided that they were going to make bringing high-profile sex trafficking cases a part of their core business,” Epner said.
The three cases also shared similar defenses: Today, Combs lawyer Teny Geragos called the waterfall of lawsuits against her client a “money grab” by plaintiffs targeting a deep-pocketed cultural icon. Maxwell and Kelly’s lawyers made the same argument, failing to persuade any juror that was the accusers’ motive.
An unavoidable admission
Unlike Kelly and Maxwell, Combs hasn’t been found guilty or civilly liable of any of the sex abuse cases against him, but his attorney started off the eight-week trial with an admission the defense couldn’t deny.
"We take full responsibility that there was domestic violence in this case,” said Geragos, the daughter of celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos. “Domestic violence is not sex trafficking. Had he been charged with domestic violence, had he been charged with assault, we would not be here right now."
Nearly a year ago, CNN aired hotel surveillance footage from 2016, showing Combs kicking, grabbing and dragging then-girlfriend Cassie in California’s InterContinental Hotel. On Day 1 of the trial, jurors saw the fuller, unedited footage from the first witness: Israel Flores, the then-security guard who responded to the assault.
Flores recalled Combs having a “devilish” look in his eye when he arrived on the scene and Combs unsuccessfully trying to buy his silence with a stack of cash adding up to $100,000. Prosecutors call the alleged bribery and obstruction of justice part of a pattern of racketeering activity.
The government’s second witness, stripper Daniel Phillip, delivered graphic testimony about Combs paying him to have sex with Cassie and said he saw Combs throw a liquor bottle past Cassie’s head in a fit of rage. According to his testimony, Combs became violent when Cassie finished an errand before coming to him.
“B*tch, when I tell you to come here, you come. Now, not later,” Combs allegedly shouted at Cassie.
Asked about why he didn’t report the incident, Phillips testified: “My thoughts were that this was someone with unlimited power, and chances are that if I did go to the police, I might end up losing my life.”
The challenge for prosecutors
Only one day into the trial, the jury has seen how many people had to stay silent for the allegations to go unnoticed for so long, including hotel security, a stream of male escorts, and employees willing to do Combs’s bidding. Scores of other witnesses will testify over the next two months.
Opening statements kicked off with a bombshell allegation that Combs grabbed a gun one day and left his house to try to kill Cassie’s lover. Combs didn’t find the man after breaking into his home, but he found Cassie, beating her “brutally” and “flinging her like a rag doll,” according to prosecutors.
To convict on racketeering, prosecutors need to show Combs as more than a jealous domestic abuser engaged in, as the defense put it, a swinger’s lifestyle.
The prosecutor told jurors, "Let me be very clear on this next point: This case is not about a celebrity’s private sexual preferences. The evidence will show that the sexual activity in this case was coercive and criminal."
Jurors will have to unanimously reject the defense’s claim that the encounters were consensual to convict on sex trafficking.
As for the racketeering charge, the elements of the crime require proof beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a criminal enterprise that engaged in interstate commerce and committed at least two of the following acts listed in the indictment: kidnapping, arson, bribery, witness tampering, traveling for prostitution, and drug possession.
In a post-R. Kelly legal landscape, convicting Combs on that count would further reframe the public’s understanding of racketeering from a watchword for the mob to a form of exploitation and impunity that can come with money and power.