Jurors at Sean “Diddy” Combs’ upcoming sex trafficking and racketeering trial will see a security video showing him assaulting his former girlfriend Casandra Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016, a federal judge ruled Friday.
Also during the hearing, defense attorneys seemed to suggest they would defend Combs by arguing his lifestyle as a swinger was not criminal.
And Assistant U.S. Attorney Madison Smyser disclosed that the government offered Combs a plea deal, but he rejected it. Smyser did not provide details about the offer.
In a setback for Combs’ legal team, U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian said the video, first broadcast by CNN last year, was admissible as evidence. The defense had sought to exclude it from evidence in a motion filed this month, arguing the video “is wholly inaccurate, having been altered, manipulated, sped-up, and edited to be out of sequence” — claims CNN has forcefully denied.
Prosecutors have said the video is a critical piece of evidence and denied it was deceptive.
Combs’ attorneys have also accused CNN of destroying the original footage that showed Combs, wearing only a white towel, beating, kicking and dragging Ventura at the hotel. The video also showed him throwing a vase in her direction.
In a statement last month, CNN said it had “never altered the video and did not destroy the original copy of the footage, which was retained by the source.”
Ventura, who was once signed to Combs’ record label as Cassie, sued him in 2023 over what she said was years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. They quickly settled, and an attorney for Combs said it was not an admission of wrongdoing. After CNN aired the video in May, Combs publicly apologized and said “he took full responsibility” for his actions.
“I was disgusted then when I did it,” Combs said in a video statement. “I’m disgusted now.”
Ventura described the hotel assault in her lawsuit. The video was part of the government’s argument as to why Combs should be denied bail. Combs has been detained at a federal prison in Brooklyn since his arrest in September.
Combs appeared in a prison uniform during the hearing Friday in Manhattan federal court. Prosecutors allege Combs ran a criminal enterprise that engaged in sex trafficking, kidnapping and arson, among other crimes.
Prosecutors have said the 2016 surveillance video showed Combs trying to drag Ventura back to a hotel room where a “freak off” was occurring.
Combs’ five-count indictment, which accuses him of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution, describes freak offs as elaborate sex performances that Combs allegedly “arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded.”
They “occurred regularly, sometimes lasted multiple days, and often involved multiple commercial sex workers,” according to the indictment.
When federal agents raided Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach last year, they seized various freak off supplies, including narcotics and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, as well as electronic devices that contained images and videos of the freak offs with multiple victims, according to the indictment.
Combs’ legal team has said the encounters were consensual.
Smyser said jurors would see some of the freak off videos and asked the court to show them only to the jury and attorneys and that no audio be made public. She said the videos will show victims, escorts and sometimes Combs.
Subramanian also ruled that Dr. Dawn Hughes, a clinical psychologist whose testimony Combs’ legal team had sought to block, cannot testify about coercive control but can tell jurors about coping strategies, delayed disclosure and memory, and why victims stay in relationships.
Subramanian said the defense could also have an expert testify as a rebuttal witness to Hughes in a limited context.
“The jury can understand what abuse and violence is, and it doesn’t need Dr. Hughes to explain an umbrella term of interpersonal violence or to expound at length about different types of abusive conduct as a precursor to offering opinions that the Court has permitted,” Subramanian said.
Marc Agnifilo, one of Combs’ attorneys, argued that prosecutors want to preclude the defense from saying that Combs’ actions were part of a lifestyle.
“What I think we absolutely can say, and have to say, is that it’s relevant to the defendant’s intent that there’s a lifestyle — call it swingers, call it whatever you will — that he was in that he might have thought was appropriate,” Agnifilo said. “And part of why he would have thought that was appropriate is the same reason many people think it’s appropriate. And part of the reason people think it’s appropriate is because it’s common.”
