FILE -Sean 'Diddy' Combs participates in "The Four" panel during the FOX Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif., Jan. 4, 2018. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) – For 10 months, rumblings, lawsuits, law enforcement raids and mounting allegations of widespread sexual abuse had surrounded Sean “Diddy Combs. The business empire, cultural cachet and fatherly image he had cultivated in the decades since he became a hot young hip-hop mogul in the 1990s had begun to erode.
On Tuesday, those ripples became a wave with the unsealing of a sweeping indictment alleging years of sex trafficking and conspiracy, to which he pleaded not guilty before a federal magistrate ordered him jailed without bail as he awaits trial.
The indictment accuses Combs of presiding over a sordid empire of sexual crimes that used his “power and prestige” for “sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.”
It describes the inducement of female victims and male sex workers into drugged-up, elaborately produced sexual performances dubbed “Freak Offs” that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during and often recorded. The events would sometimes last days and require IVs to recover from, the indictment said, and Combs used his employees as though they were a film crew.
It alleges he coerced and abused women for years while using blackmail, including the videos he shot, and shocking acts of violence to keep his victims in line, coordinated and facilitated from the top down by a network of associates and employees.
Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo declared his client’s innocence, and said they would appeal the bail decision, with a hearing expected Wednesday afternoon. Combs, 54, was led out of court without handcuffs, and turned to his family as he left.
“Sean Combs has never evaded, avoided, eluded or run from a challenge in his life,” the defense said in a court filing. “He will not start now.”
For all the revelations that came Tuesday, most of the acts it outlines had been described in detail in the original November lawsuit filed by his former longtime girlfriend and protege, the R&B singer Cassie, whose legal name is Cassandra Ventura. The suit was settled the following day, but its allegations would do anything but go away.
Its descriptions of beatings, sexual assaults, silencing tactics and “Freak Offs” were echoed throughout the criminal indictment, though it did not use her name or the names of any other women.
Agnifilo, also without naming Ventura but clearly referring to her, argued at Tuesday’s arraignment that the entire criminal case is an outgrowth of one long-term, troubled-but-consensual relationship that faltered amid infidelity.
The “Freak Offs,” Agnifilo contended, were an expansion of that relationship, and not coercive.
“Is it sex trafficking?” Agnifilo asked. “Not if everybody wants to be there.”
Prosecutors, however, portrayed the scope as far larger. They said in court papers that they had interviewed more than 50 victims and witnesses and expect the number to grow.
Like many aging hip-hop figures – including many of those he beefed with in the bi-coastal rap feuds of the 1990s alongside the Notorious B.I.G. – the Bad Boy Records founder Combs had established a gentler, more worldly public image, as a doting father to seven children and a respected international businessman, whose annual “White Party” in the Hamptons was once a must-have invitation for the jet-setting elite.
But prosecutors said he used the same companies, people and methods he used to build his business and cultural power to facilitate his crimes. They said they would prove it with financial, travel and billing records, electronic data and communications and videos of the “Freak Offs” to prove their case.
Both Ventura’s lawsuit and a Tuesday court filing from prosecutors say Combs set fire to someone’s vehicle by slicing open its convertible top and dropping in a Molotov cocktail, and describe his punching Ventura, dragging her by her hair and kicking her at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.
Security video aired by CNN in May showed that beating. Combs soon apologized, saying, “I was disgusted when I did it.” But it would be a major turning point in public perception. He returned a key to the city at the request of New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Howard University cut ties with him.
“A year ago, Sean Combs stood in Times Square and was handed a key to New York City,” Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference Tuesday. “Today, he’s been indicted and will face justice.”
The AP does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Ventura did.
Combs was arrested late Monday in a Manhattan hotel, roughly six months after federal authorities raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami and revealed they were conducting a sex trafficking investigation.
During the searches, law enforcement seized narcotics, videos of the “Freak Offs” and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, according to prosecutors. They said agents also seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers.
The indictment portrays Combs as so violent that he caused injuries that often took days or weeks to heal. His employees and associates sometimes witnessed his violence and kept victims from leaving or tracked down those who tried, the indictment said.
A conviction on every charge in the indictment would require a mandatory 15 years in prison with the possibility of a life sentence.
Combs and his attorneys denied similar allegations made by others in a string of lawsuits filed after Ventura’s.
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Dalton contributed from Los Angeles.
