Any hopes Sean “Diddy” Combs had for a new trial or for his charges being thrown out of court were dashed yesterday, after a judge declined his legal team’s request for both.
A federal judge says prosecutors laid out “overwhelming evidence” that Diddy violated the Mann Act, citing testimony and digital records that pointed to repeated misconduct.
In a newly filed 16-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian wrote that the government’s case against the music mogul was proven “many times over,” with evidence that included testimony from Combs’ ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and another woman identified only as “Jane.”
The judge insisted that the prosecution overwhelmingly proved his guilt pertaining to the two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
“That by itself might be enough to dispose of Combs’s challenge,” the judge continued in his ruling. “But the other factors don’t do much to help Combs either. He concedes that under the second factor ‘if the inflammatory evidence would have been admissible anyway on a separate trial for the remaining counts” then his ‘claim of spillover prejudice likely fails.’ That narrows any factual challenges to evidence unrelated to the Mann Act charges, like arson or forced labor, to give a few examples. But on the first factor, it isn’t at all clear that this evidence worked to incite the jury or prejudice Combs. It weighs heavily that the jury declined to convict him on any of the counts related to that conduct. Had the prejudice indeed been so great, one would expect a jury to convict on the most relevant counts before it could spill over and infect the others.”
Diddy is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.