'Diddy' Combs committed no crimes, says his defence

Sean "Diddy" Combs used violence and threats to coerce women into drug-fueled sexual encounters that he recorded, a prosecutor said yesterday in opening statements at Combs’s sex trafficking trial.

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“This is Sean Combs,” assistant US attorney Emily Johnson told the jury, pointing at Combs, who leaned back in his chair in a Manhattan courtroom. “During this trial you are going to hear about 20 years of the defendant’s crimes.” Those crimes, she said, included kidnapping, arson, drugs, sex crimes, bribery and obstruction.

Combs’s lawyer Teny Geragos, though, described the trial as a misguided overreach by prosecutors, saying that although her client could be violent, the government was trying to turn sex between consenting adults into a prostitution and sex trafficking case. The judge said he expects the trial to take eight weeks.

“Sean Combs is a complicated man. But this is not a complicated case. This case is about love, jealousy, infidelity and money,” Ms Geragos told the jury of eight men and four women. “There has been a tremendous amount of noise around this case over the past year. It is time to cancel that noise.”

Ms Geragos conceded that Combs’s violent outbursts, often fueled by alcohol, jealousy and drugs, might have warranted domestic violence charges, but not sex trafficking and racketeering counts. She told jurors they might think Combs is a “jerk” and might not condone his “kinky sex,” but “he’s not charged with being a jerk.”

Prosecutors seized on Combs’s violence as they questioned their first witness and showed jurors a key piece of evidence: a nowinfamous video without audio of him kicking and dragging the R&B singer Cassie, his longtime girlfriend, at a Los Angeles hotel in March 2016.

Combs shook his head slowly side to side as the footage played. Jurors ended up seeing it four times as former hotel security officer Israel Florez testified, including once as Combs’s lawyer tried to poke holes in his recollection.