The Tragedy of the Diddy Trial

Sean Combs mouthed “thank you” to the jurors, his hands clasped in prayer. The intricacies of their deliberations will be revealed later on, in the requisite television interviews, but, as of Wednesday morning, what mattered was that Combs had been acquitted of the racketeering and sex-trafficking charges that would have put him away for life. The diminishment in reputation, the status as pariah or laughingstock, the looming sentencing for the lesser charges (two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, amazingly, his first conviction)—he would work his troubles into a narrative of redemption. As one of Combs’s associates said in a Profile of the mogul that ran in this magazine more than two decades ago: “Puffy will always come back. He’s like nature.”

On the second day of jury selection in the case of U.S. v. Sean Combs, Arun Subramanian, a federal judge for the Southern District of New York, called for a closed-door meeting with a defense attorney involved in the case. Subramanian, who is in his forties, and appointed to the court by Joe Biden, exudes a kind of good-natured adaptability; he is a disciplinarian, but a reasonable one. And yet his patience had already been tested by the sixty-seven-year-old Mark Geragos, defense attorney to the stars, who was serving as an unofficial adviser to Combs’s legal team.

“This is ridiculous,” Subramanian told Geragos. “I think referring to the prosecution in this case as a six-pack of white women is outrageous.”

Geragos is a seasoned practitioner who gladly plays the churl if the performance will help sway public opinion. (In his younger years, while representing Michael Jackson in a child-molestation trial, he told Jackson’s accusers that he would “land on you like a hammer.”) The “six-pack” comment was not one that he had made in the courtroom; rather, it was part of a rant he delivered on “2 Angry Men,” the podcast that he co-hosts alongside Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ. On air, Geragos belittled the federal prosecutors who had been tasked with arguing the government’s case, which was that Combs, one of the most famous entertainment moguls in the world, was guilty of sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He also complained that a widely circulated video, showing security footage of Combs wearing nothing more than a towel around his waist, striking Casandra Ventura as she attempted to flee from him in the hallway of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, constituted a “character assassination.” (The phrase is a favorite of his; he also used it when representing Hunter Biden during his tax case.)

Made aware of the podcast, the “white women” federal prosecutors argued to Subramanian that Geragos’s behavior endangered the jury-selection process. Subramanian sided with the government—creating precisely the quasi-alliance that Geragos had meant to construct, the stunt having been a way to launder his aggrievement into the record: “I think when you’ve got a Black man who’s being prosecuted and the client feels like he’s being targeted, it’s an observation.” After getting chastised by the judge, Geragos promised to keep things respectful from then on. Subramanian warned Geragos that he’d be listening to his podcast. “As long as you subscribe, I’m all for it,” Geragos replied.

Of the many stories told about Combs inside and outside the courtroom at 500 Pearl Street, in downtown Manhattan, the high-tech lynching plot works the least. This is a man who is on view solely in jail—he spent nine months at the Metropolitan Detention Center, leading up to the trial—and in the courtroom. Federal cases forbid cameras. Combs, who looks thinner and older than we remember—his hair has turned white, as dye is not allowed inside of jail—exists mainly in court sketches, done by Jane Rosenberg, the portraitist of Harvey Weinstein and John Gotti. One day, during a break in the proceedings, Combs asked Rosenberg to soften him, as he felt her style made him look like a koala.

Combs, a human Bacchus, has devoted more than thirty of his fifty-five years to the ruthless building of a life-style empire, beginning with music production and artist management at his record label, Bad Boy, and then venturing into fashion, alcohol, media, television, and, ultimately, the promotion of himself. The boy from Mount Vernon, New York, made more than good—an icon of cultivated living to rival Martha Stewart. Wasn’t it Combs who pioneered the relentless self-advertising that has become commonplace today, licensing his name and his image to brands that fit his standard? Those who defend Combs, those who feel indifferent toward him, those who are convinced of his guilt, can all justify their reasoning through the fact of his proud megalomania, his relentless broadcast of his own name.

Or names. The aliases abound. The indictment against Combs lists five—Puff Daddy and P. Diddy among them—but it is the “Diddy” moniker that has risen above the rest and stuck in the coverage, in the daily conversation. It is his most famous name, yes, but it also rings, usefully, with a sense of peril and puerility.

The Diddy federal trial is the outgrowth of a civil suit filed, in 2023, by Ventura against Combs. Both a former girlfriend and a former employee of Combs’s, Ventura, a model-dancer-singer from Connecticut, met him in 2005, at the age of nineteen. He was thirty-seven. Combs signed Ventura to his label, Bad Boy Records. Then he promoted her to lover and muse, throwing her on his suit-clad arm, for the duration of some fifteen years, as if she were jewelry enfleshed. This was no love match—Combs still publicly pined for his former girlfriend Kim Porter, the mother of the majority of his children, and he still lived in the shadow of the music-royalty dynamic that he once had with Jennifer Lopez. But a fun, mutually beneficial daddy-baby relationship, we thought—or perhaps did not think, as their pairing stirred little intrigue. The end of their relationship, though, did trigger gossip alarms. Ventura moved on with Alex Fine, the physical trainer who first worked with Combs and then Ventura to help her maintain her look. What changed? Why fall in love with “the help”?

The civil suit unveiled the mystery. Ventura described years of coercion, sexual abuse, rape, and physical battering at Combs’s hands. His business-maverick persona could convey mercilessness, but a tolerable amount. The Ventura suit suggested sadism. Combs forced her to take drugs and have sex with male sex workers, she claimed, all for his voyeuristic pleasure. He exhausted her; he used her as a sort of plastic doll. Perhaps more shocking than the suit was the speed with which Ventura settled it, within twenty-four hours. She had filed the suit in New York State under the Adult Survivor Act, an extension of the statute of limitations for sexual-abuse civil suits. The legislation, which has lapsed, was a #MeToo reform signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul. Notably, Ventura did not take her allegations against Combs to the press—a coöperative strategy that requires the memoir-ish truth-telling of the victim, and the impartial investigation of a journalist. The decision to bypass culture, in a sense, and go straight to the law points to the power of her adversary, a living metaphor for the culture itself.

The hotel security footage was leaked to CNN in May, 2024. Combs posted an apology video to Instagram, deploying therapy speak, but the damage was done. The narrative everyone uses is that of the fall from power. Government raids of the mansions in Los Angeles and Star Island producing images of a small armory and, more disturbingly, many bottles of baby oil; the silly rumor of the flight overseas; the spectacle of his arrest in New York City, in September, 2024; the deluge of civil suits, the deluge of alleged victims, both approaching the triple digits. In Billings, Montana, Reciprocity Industries—“a software development company with specialist expertise in legal and television advertising and call center services,” according to its website—set up cubicles for workers who droned into their headsets: “Were you or your loved ones sexually abused by Sean (Love) Combs, known as Diddy, Puff Daddy, and P. Diddy?” In March, two months before the trial began, the Times reported that the hotline had received twenty-six thousand calls. An atmosphere of opportunism and conspiracy coalesced, fed by shock jocks, TikTok psychologists, and citizen-journalist bloggers, who have become characters in the saga, and by Combs himself.

On the morning of May 12, 2025, eight men and four women filled the jury box. Subramanian promised them that he would move the trial along quickly. Combs is reported to have faced them, appearing professorial, in a sweater, his hands clasped over a notebook. The demographic data in celebrity criminal trials is a point of obsession, given the stratum of the star defendant: Who are Combs’s peers? Apparently, they are between thirty and seventy-four years old. Professions include architecture, nursing, biology, investment analysis, and massage therapy. The massage therapist was debated over, the defense offering a concern that his expertise in body work might influence his view of physical trauma. There were debates over race, too. Marc Agnifilo, one of Combs’s defense lawyers, accused the government of purposefully striking Black jurors. Subramanian staved off the identity-politics hysteria. In the end, the desired rainbow: the final panel included one Asian person, two who were identified as “Hispanic,” four whites, and five Blacks, which would diminish to four, by mid-June, after Subramanian dismissed Juror No. 6, who he believed had shaded his testimony to get a seat.

Emily Johnson, a U.S. Attorney, took fifty minutes to deliver her opening statement. She sought to kill the celebrity in the jury’s mind: “To the public, he was Puff Daddy, or Diddy. A cultural icon, a businessman—larger than life. But there was another side to him, a side that ran a criminal enterprise.” The RICO statutes (named for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) conjure the Mafia, a highly orchestrated and highly mythologized network that carries out dastardly crimes. How to frame the bon vivant as a felon? The vernacular of Combs’s activities comes across as kinky, not immediately nefarious. During the trial, jurors watched clips of what Combs has described as “freak-offs,” voyeuristic sessions in which he would allegedly force women, who were under the influence of drugs, to have sex with other men in his presence. When allegations of arson, rape, and abuse were introduced, particularly as described by two key witnesses, Ventura and a woman who testified under the pseudonym of Jane, the jury felt the gravity. But the charges required proving the high standard of conspiracy. Johnson’s task was to prepare the jury to interpret, for example, the use of a company card to buy baby oil, or a flight for an escort, as the predicate offense warranting life in prison. The argument was that Combs’s employees, following his orders, facilitated a pattern of coercion and violence that far exceeded typical celebrity shenanigans. “He called himself the king and expected to be treated like one,” Johnson said.