You think you’ve lost the ability to be shocked, and then you see supporters of Sean Combs—the rapper and producer also known as Diddy—spraying baby oil on one another outside the New York City courthouse where his trial was held.
This greasy display of militant fandom is even more bizarre once you know that the trial did not exonerate Combs. Although he was acquitted on Wednesday of racketeering and sex trafficking, he was found guilty of “transportation to engage in prostitution.” These counts relate to incidents where his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and an anonymous woman, known in court as Jane, were asked to have sex with male escorts while he watched or filmed. The fans’ jubilant tone also ignored perhaps the most salient fact of the case: In court, Combs’s own defense team conceded that he was a domestic abuser.
Now, I understand why Combs himself might be relieved by the verdict. The racketeering charges carried a potential life sentence, whereas the lesser offenses had no minimum jail penalty attached. But his lawyers had no grounds to do what they did—which was to walk out of the courtroom and stand triumphantly in front of the newly lubricated crowds, acting as if Combs had been cleared. “It’s a great victory for Sean Combs; it’s a great victory for the jury system,” Marc Agnifilo, one of his lawyers, said in the post-verdict press conference.
No. The charges on which Combs was acquitted were developed for Mafia bosses, and are an uneasy fit for a case where the alleged conspiracy is not gun-running or a protection racket, but a network of employees and enablers dedicated to one man’s sexual gratification. His acquittal on these charges should not obscure the simple fact that Combs beat up Ventura, repeatedly, over many years. That is not in dispute, not least because some of it was captured on video. Last year, CNN published a surveillance clip, recorded in a hotel in 2016, that shows a clothed Ventura attempting to call an elevator, before Combs—dressed in only a towel—chases after her, grabs her by the neck, throws her to the ground, and kicks her twice while she is on the floor. “We own the domestic violence,” Agnifilo told jurors. “We own it. I hope you guys know this.” (The judge took note of the admission when denying Combs bail.)
Read: The disturbing implications of the Diddy verdict
Another man might have been ashamed of kicking his girlfriend while she lay motionless on the floor. Combs let his lawyers peacock around because he didn’t also get convicted of trafficking her. Our client is innocent! (Of some of the charges.) His reputation has been restored! (Say it enough, and it might come true.)
Maybe this brazenness will work. We now live in a time when what matters is declaiming half-truths, loudly and bullishly, in the expectation that most people aren’t paying attention to the details. Combs’s entire defense had a sassy, made-for-TikTok quality, shamelessly playing to the gallery—a tactic pioneered by O. J. Simpson’s lawyers in the age of television. One of Combs’s attorneys, the 30-something Teny Geragos, went viral with TikTok clips defending the mogul before the trial. His lawyers were performing for two audiences: the jury, and the online Diddy stans. The defense declined to put Combs on the stand to explain himself, and called no witnesses. That left the spotlight squarely on his accusers. As a result, it was their testimony that was harshly scrutinized online, not his actions.
From the start, this trial was not a vindication of Combs’s life choices. Over and over again, witness accounts portrayed a character that only a mother, or a defense team, could love. (Combs’s mother, Janice, was a staple of the public gallery, along with his six older children.) His lawyers presented his “freak-off” parties, where he invited men to have sex with his girlfriends, as a mere kink, part of an unorthodox but harmless swingers’ lifestyle. When federal agents searched his home in Miami Beach, they found 25 bottles of baby oil and 31 tubes of another lubricant in one closet. In total, prosecutors said that searches uncovered more than 1,000 bottles of such products—an assertion that only enthralled Combs’s admirers.
What the glistening fans outside the courthouse ignored is that Combs’s defense team, in dodging the racketeering charges, conceded that his relationship with Ventura was marked by threats and violence. The defense had to grant that premise, because those allegations had already led to a $20 million settlement with Ventura after she filed a lawsuit in 2023. Combs paid up the day after the documents became public. (That civil suit, and others filed by women against Combs, apparently helped trigger the federal investigation that led to his trial.)
Despite this history, his lawyers performed an impressive judo move, using the very fact of the settlement against Ventura, during the four grueling days of testimony to which she was subjected. Aren’t you just a gold digger? was the heavy implication. Ventura said that she would happily give back the money if she could also undo the freak-offs. Her civil lawsuit stated that she had not pressed criminal charges because she had no confidence in obtaining justice: “She recognized that she was powerless, and that reporting Mr. Combs to the authorities would not alter Mr. Combs’s status or influence but would merely give Mr. Combs another excuse to hurt her.”
This belief has been thoroughly vindicated. Nevertheless, the idea of a mercenary motive was clearly a potent line—and one that Combs’s lawyers have also deployed in the dozen civil suits now awaiting him from other alleged victims. “We live in a world where anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason,” they said when 10 more suits emerged in February of this year, on top of several existing claims of grooming, exploitation, and abuse of minors. Combs has denied these allegations.
Although people across America had seen the video from CNN, Combs was not on trial in New York for assault, so the defense argued that the incident was irrelevant to the charges. “Domestic violence is not sex trafficking,” Geragos, one of Combs’s lawyers, said in court. Combs’s team contended that the video did not show Ventura being punished for leaving a freak-off party, as the prosecution suggested, but instead followed an argument between her and Combs over a phone.
This was an impressive sleight of hand. If someone’s partner can be that violent in an everyday argument, then surely that affects their ability to say no to anything else that happens in the relationship? Ann Olivarius, a lawyer who specializes in abuse and harassment cases in the United States and Britain, told me that following the trial was a demoralizing experience for her. “I was glued to Cassie’s testimony,” she said over instant message. “I thought she was compelling, strong, admirable and also being crucified by the Defence.” She said that the defense’s acknowledgment of Combs’s domestic violence was a way “to put it in a neat little box and say: ‘When she wasn’t beaten black and blue, she happily and freely consented every time.’”
Other witnesses testified to violent and controlling behavior by Combs. The singer Dawn Richards said she had seen him kick Ventura when she was on the floor, after attempting to hit her with a skillet when she was cooking him eggs. (While the jury was out of the room, the defense called this allegation a “drop-dead lie.”) The makeup artist Mylah Morales testified that she saw Ventura with a split lip and a swollen eye. Ventura’s former friend Kerry Morgan said that she was present when Combs tried to break into Ventura’s apartment with a hammer after the hotel assault. She also said she once saw him drag Ventura down a corridor by her hair. Ventura’s mother, Regina, told the court that Combs had threatened to release sex tapes of her daughter. Two men testified that they had been paid to have sex with Ventura, and one of them, an escort named Daniel Phillip, told the court he had overheard Combs slap Ventura until she cried in another room.
As is quite common in allegations of coercive control, the defense could produce affectionate and sexually explicit messages from Ventura that seemed to undermine her claims of victimization. The fact that the prosecution could produce footage of her literally being victimized did not, apparently, offset the effect of these messages on the jury. Nor did the fact that Combs was not just her boyfriend, but also in charge of her career: They met when she was a 19-year-old aspiring singer, and he signed her to his label.
Jane, the anonymous witness who was a recent ex-girlfriend of Combs’s, told a story of coercion much like what Ventura faced. She said she had been pressured into “hotel nights” where she had sex with male escorts hired by Combs. These were painful and often left her with infections, she added, not least because Combs became angry when she asked the men to wear condoms. But she went along with the sex sessions because she was in love with Combs and “didn’t want to indicate any negativity.”
One thing the prosecution did right was bring in an expert on coercive control to explain to the jury that in abusive and controlling relationships, the victims become quintessential people pleasers—their entire lives end up being dedicated to placating their partner. “You destroy someone’s normal,” is how a British man named Luke Hart described the situation to me, when I interviewed him for my book Difficult Women. His father, Lance, had terrorized the whole family for many years, and when Luke’s mother finally walked out in 2016, Lance tracked her down at a local swimming pool and shot her dead, along with Luke’s 19-year-old sister. Lance then killed himself.
After the murders, Luke and his brother finally realized that their childhood had been abusive—even though, to outsiders, they had looked like a normal family. An orderly and well-behaved one, in fact, because everyone had been frightened of triggering Lance’s temper. Luke described being yelled at for hours over minor infractions, until he learned to modify his behavior to avoid his father’s anger. “Every part of your life is the slow crushing of those prison bars,” he told me.
Explained like that, most people can see how someone might send loving messages to their abuser. But juries still struggle with the situation, particularly when you add in our ambient sense that rich and successful people probably do attract gold diggers and hangers-on, as well as our self-flattering belief that we wouldn’t put up with being abused and would walk straight out the door.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Diddy’s defenders
Feminist theorists have also come up with an explanation for why people downplay or excuse abusers’ actions. Quite simply, doing so asks less of us. If, as a Diddy fan, you believe that Ventura consented to her abuse, then you can go on listening to his music without a moral scruple. If you are a business associate of his, you can keep cashing checks with a clear conscience. Believing her instead requires something from you—setting yourself against a powerful man and all the people who will line up behind him.
In the Combs case, the women’s testimony was parsed for minor inconsistencies by social-media creators, but the rapper’s voice was heard only through the respectable tones of his lawyers. This trial-by-TikTok means Ventura leaves the court with a vague stink on her. She must have liked this weird stuff if she hung around.
The sentencing hearing, likely in the fall, will let us know whether Combs’s lawyers have failed in their main objective, of minimizing his time behind bars. But their secondary aim has always been to create a perception of martyrdom, which will preserve Brand Diddy as a moneymaking enterprise. In the final week of the trial, Combs’s son Christian released an album, under the name King Combs, that included a track called “Diddy Free.” On the same day, another son, Justin, was accused of participating in a rape alongside his father in 2017, having lured a woman to Los Angeles with the promise of a job. (Combs’s lawyers deny the accusations.)
More is at stake here than just Combs’s freedom. “Celebrity court cases are how we metabolise these questions of power, sex and men and women,” Olivarius told me. The real tragedy of the Combs case is that Ventura did not feel confident enough to file criminal charges against him for domestic abuse. If she had done so, any resulting trial would have focused on his violence and threats, rather than the more nebulous charges of trafficking and racketeering. As a result, it would have been harder for his lawyers—and his fans—to maintain that he has been vindicated.
