ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 26: Sean Combs Onstage throughout Make investments Fest 2023 at Georgia World Congress Heart on August 26, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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This report incorporates descriptions of bodily and sexual assault.
Sean Combs’ protection group used its closing arguments on Friday to reframe the prosecution’s narrative at his federal trial in Manhattan.
Talking for greater than 4 hours at a Southern District of New York courtroom, lawyer Marc Agnifilo alternated between sarcasm and solemnity in refuting the federal government’s allegations of intercourse trafficking and racketeering. Combs has pleaded not responsible to all fees.
The prosecution used its closing arguments on Thursday to elucidate how practically six weeks of proof and testimony proved that Combs ran a prison enterprise that facilitated and hid intercourse crimes for many years. Prosecutor Christy Slavik mapped out a long-standing sample of abuse that started with one of many authorities’s key witnesses, Combs’ former girlfriend, the singer and mannequin Casandra “Cassie” Ventura. Slavik confirmed texts and testimony from Ventura telling Combs she did not wish to take part in “freak-offs,” and stated that Combs used sexually specific movies to threaten her into following his calls for. “All of this was designed to do one factor — to make Cassie afraid to say no to him,” Slavik stated.
Throughout his remarks, Agnifilo known as the connection between the hip-hop mogul and Ventura, “an incredible fashionable love story.” He additionally acknowledged, nonetheless, that the jury has seen videotape of Combs kicking, shoving and dragging Ventura by her hair in a California resort hallway in 2016. Ventura additionally testified to a historical past of abuse, and a number of other different witnesses stated that they both noticed Combs bodily attacking Ventura or noticed her bruises, fats lips and different proof of abuse.
“We personal the home violence,” Agnifilo stated. Over the course of his remarks, he added that Combs leads a “swinger’s way of life” and that “he has a drug drawback, no query.”
However Agnifilo additionally sought to recast Ventura from an alleged abuse sufferer right into a conniving participant who deftly juggled romantic rivals and schemed for an enormous payday from Combs, who settled a civil lawsuit together with her in Nov. 2023 for $20 million.
“Cassie is no person’s idiot,” Agnifilo asserted. “She’s sitting someplace on this planet in the present day with $30 million,” he stated, referring to each the settlement with Combs and a later settlement with the proprietor of the resort the place Combs attacked her in 2016. “He is in jail. It is like a slaughter.”
Agnifilo equally attacked the credibility of the prosecution’s different prime witness and alleged sufferer, Combs’ former girlfriend who testified underneath the pseudonym “Jane,” saying that Jane too was seeking to profit materially from her relationship with Combs, reminding the jurors that he’s nonetheless paying for Jane’s dwelling and her authorized prices.
He additionally sardonically thanked federal brokers for his or her raids on Combs’ properties: “The streets of America, protected from Astroglide!” he exclaimed, referring to the tons of of bottles of lubricant and child oil that had been discovered at Combs’ properties.
Agniflo additionally tried to dismantle the credibility of different key witnesses, together with Combs’ former staff Capricorn Clark, who testified that Combs and his associates had kidnapped her twice, and the girl who testified on the stand as “Mia,” who stated that Combs had sexually assaulted her on a number of events. “This was not undesirable sexual contact,” the protection legal professional stated.
He repeatedly reframed the movies Combs product of Ventura and Jane having intercourse with male escorts as “do-it-yourself porn,” and argued that Combs had paid for the lads’s time, and never the intercourse itself. He additionally requested the jury to think about how Combs is on trial for racketeering — and but there aren’t any different individuals who had been indicted with him. “No witness stated they had been a part of an enterprise,” he added.
Agnifilo repeatedly looped again to among the protection’s key arguments from its opening assertion: that every one of Combs’ relationships had been consensual. “You possibly can name it swingers, you may name it threesomes,” he stated. “No matter you wish to name it, that is what it’s.”
As a part of his detailed breakdown of the predicate acts the federal government is accusing Combs and his associates of getting dedicated — which embody arson, bribery, kidnapping and drug distribution — Agnifilo disputed that Combs might have had any involvement within the alleged arson assault on a automobile belonging to the musician Scott Mescudi, who information as Child Cudi, and was briefly romantically concerned with Ventura, or that Combs had allegedly gone to Mescudi’s home with a gun with the intent to confront him.
Agnifilo known as arson “cowardly” and never Combs’ “type,” and asserted that Combs, whom he in comparison with the actor John Wayne, would have gone to battle Mescudi in a “good, old school fistfight.”
Close to the tip of his remarks, Agnfilo accused the federal government of “focusing on” Combs after Ventura filed her civil lawsuit. Prosecutors objected to his assertion, saying that such hypothesis mustn’t have been made to the jury. Choose Arun Subramanian agreed, later instructing the jurors that the decision-making of both prosecutors or a grand jury in whether or not or to not cost a defendant is “none of your concern.”
In her rebuttal to Agnifilo’s presentation, prosecutor Maurene Comey tried to refute what she stated had been the protection’s three most important arguments: that there was no fee by Combs for intercourse; that there was no prison enterprise; and that Ventura, Jane and Mia had all lied on the stand.
Talking of the male escorts, Comey stated: “They weren’t paid for his or her scintillating dialog. They had been paid to have intercourse.”
She additionally defined to the jury concerning the racketeering cost that Combs’ companies might serve each lawful and illegal functions concurrently, that at the very least a few of his staff had been conscious of or participated in unlawful actions corresponding to prostitution and bribery.
In a very impassioned second, Comey described a violent episode with Jane that allegedly happened in June 2024, after Combs knew he was the topic of a federal prison investigation, saying that for “20 years, he had gotten away with crime after crime.”
Comey went again to testimony Jane gave on the stand, by which she stated that in that 2024 episode, Combs pressured her to provide oral intercourse to a male intercourse employee, whereas she already had welts on her head and a blossoming black eye from Combs’ assault. On the stand, Jane stated that she repeatedly advised Combs she didn’t wish to have oral intercourse with the person. Combs leaned in, she testified, and allegedly stated to her: “Is that this coercion?”
“The defendant totally understood what was taking place was coercion, was intercourse trafficking, and he made a acutely aware resolution to do it anyway,” Comey declared.
Comey added: “The defendant was brazen sufficient to suppose he might hold getting away with crimes whereas he was underneath federal investigation. In his thoughts, he was untouchable, a god amongst males … and who would stand as much as a god?”
Choose Arun Subramanian stated that he would give the jury their directions on the legislation on Monday morning; deliberations are set to start instantly afterward.