NEW YORK — Hip-hop impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs once presided like a prince over his White Parties in the Hamptons, attracting A-list celebrities, gossip columnists and photographers. But at a trial starting Monday, prosecutors will cast the entertainer as a criminal sexual deviant who exploited his fame to abuse women at gatherings held far out of public view.
For over two decades, prosecutors allege, the Bad Boy Records founder used the power and prestige he’d gained in building a hip-hop empire to destroy young lives.
He faces an indictment that includes descriptions of “Freak Offs,” drugged-up orgies in which women were forced to have sex with male sex workers while Combs filmed them.
Numerous witnesses have come forward to accuse Combs of terrorizing people into silence by choking, hitting, kicking and dragging them, often by the hair, prosecutors say. Once, the indictment alleges, he even dangled someone from a balcony.
Combs’ lawyers contend prosecutors are trying to police consensual sexual activity.
And while Combs, 55, has acknowledged one episode of violence — the caught-on-camera beating of his former girlfriend, R&B singer Cassie — his lawyers say other allegations are false.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday at a federal courthouse in Manhattan. Testimony will likely start the following week.
If convicted on all charges, which include racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transporting people across state lines to engage in prostitution, Combs faces a possible sentence of decades in prison.
Although dozens of men and women have alleged in lawsuits that Combs abused them, this trial will highlight the claims of four women.
One of them is Cassie, who filed a lawsuit in late 2023 saying Combs had subjected her to years of abuse, including beatings and rape after they met in 2005.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, did.
Her lawsuit, which offered the first public account of the Freak Offs described in the indictment, was settled in a day. Four months later, though, federal investigators raided Combs homes in Los Angeles and Miami and confronted him at a private airport in Florida, seizing 96 electronic devices. They also found three AR-15-style rifles with defaced serial numbers.
The three-time Grammy winner was indicted last September. He has since been held in a federal jail in Brooklyn after judges ruled that he would be a threat to intimidate witnesses and victims if released.
The 17-page indictment against Combs accuses him of using employees of his business endeavors — including record labels, a recording studio, an apparel line, an alcoholic spirits company, a marketing agency, a television network and a media company — to facilitate his crimes through acts that included kidnapping, arson and bribery.
Prosecutors plan to show jurors travel records, text messages and emails, hotel records and videos to supplement testimony and support their claims about what they call “Freak Off activity.”
Jurors will also see security camera video showing Combs punching, kicking and then dragging Cassie in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.
After the video aired on CNN last year, Combs apologized, saying, “I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”
Combs’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said at a bail hearing that Combs wrote “a very large check” to Cassie after she filed her lawsuit. The lawyer said the payout motivated others to come forward with false claims.
Agnifilo said Combs was “not a perfect person” and that there had been drug use and toxic relationships, but he said the rapper was undergoing therapy before his arrest.
He said Cassie and Combs were in a 10-year relationship that was “very loving at times” and sometimes chose to bring a third person into their intimacy.
“That was their thing,” he said. “It was a sought-after, special part of their relationship.”
The trial is not Combs’ first. In 2001, he was acquitted of bringing an illegal handgun into a crowded Manhattan dance club where three people were wounded by gunfire. A rapper in Combs’ entourage, Jamal Barrow, who performed under the name Shyne, was convicted in the shooting and served nearly nine years in prison.
At a pretrial conference Thursday, Combs confirmed to a judge that he turned down a plea offer that would have carried a lesser penalty than what he might face if he is convicted at his upcoming trial.
Just before he left the courtroom after the hearing, he defiantly shook his fist in the air.