What Diddy's mixed verdict means — for him and for us

Vox

2 days ago

Sean 'Diddy' Combs accepts the BET Lifetime Achievement Award on stage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles, California.for BET
Jurors in the federal criminal trial of Sean 'Diddy' Combs reached a mixed verdict Wednesday, finding the rapper and music mogul not guilty of the three most serious charges levied against him.
The jury deliberated for 13 hours across three days before reaching the verdict and found Combs guilty of two of the five charges against him, both for transportation to engage in prostitution.
They found Combs not guilty of the more serious offenses: sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Combs will avoid the harshest sentence — life in prison — but could still face up to 20 years if given the maximum sentence for his remaining convictions. The outcome was seen as a victory for Combs, who responded by falling to his knees before his courtroom chair, applauding the courtroom gallery, and crying out, 'Thank god' and 'I love you' several times.
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The verdict concludes a seven-week trial that contained plenty of lurid details about Diddy's decades of 'freak-offs' and other sex parties along with shocking anecdotes of his bizarre and controlling behavior toward both his girlfriends and his employees. The defense ultimately chose not to present any witnesses for Diddy but rested after cross-examining the prosecution's case, relying largely on a strategy of persistently hammering away at the credibility and motivations of prosecution's witnesses.
With all that hammering away, the Diddy trial resurfaced some of the very same rape myths that the Me Too movement worked to dismantle a few short years ago, including the one about the perfect victim. The fact that the prosecution's tactics appear to have been by and large successful is just the latest indication that America is prepared to put the lessons of Me Too in the rearview mirror.
1. What was the verdict? What does it mean?
Jurors convicted Diddy on two charges under the Mann Act of transporting his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and another woman known in the courtroom only as Jane for the purposes of prostitution. He was found not guilty, however, of sex trafficking Ventura or Jane.
Effectively, that means while the jury accepted the state's argument that Diddy illegally transported the women for purposes of engaging in sex work, they were not convinced that the women were actually coerced into participating in these acts.
Legal analyst Paul Mauro, who correctly predicted this split verdict, emphasized that the prosecution had to prove coercion. Given that Judge Arun Subramanian excluded all discussion about coercive control — the overall environment of controlling behavior that can have a coercive effect upon an abuse victim — from the trial, the jurors may not have had enough context to accept the prosecution's framing of events.
Jurors revealed that they were most divided on the first charge of racketeering conspiracy, telling Judge Subramanian on Tuesday that they were deadlocked before ultimately finding him not guilty. This is a lesser charge than racketeering itself, but it requires that prosecutors prove the defendant participated in a criminal enterprise and agreed to commit crimes to further that enterprise.
This is a complicated charge, however, since it requires the jury to accept that Combs intended to run a criminal enterprise. The defense instead portrayed Combs as a swinger with a troubled history of incidents of domestic abuse rather than a controlling, powerful mogul who systemically used his many businesses to support illegal sexual activities.
2. What happens next?
Prosecutor Maurene Comey has stated the government will seek the maximum on the remaining two counts, which means Combs could still face up to 20 years in prison — 10 years for each count.
Judge Subramanian, a federal district court judge, is currently weighing whether to release Combs from detention while awaiting his sentencing hearing.
3. What new information did we learn from Diddy's trial?
From the moment testimony in the case kicked off May 12, the trial was packed with one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Ventura, Combs' ex-girlfriend, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when 2016 surveillance footage surfaced in 2024, that appears to show Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway.
In addition to that harrowing moment, a litany of Combs' former girlfriends and staff testified to experiencing what amounted to decades of abusive and controlling behavior from Combs. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura's, testified that Combs once allegedly hoisted her to the balcony ledge of a 17th-story apartment and then threw her into the balcony furniture. One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that Combs threatened to kill her on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point, forced her to come with him to stalk Kid Cudi, whose car he later allegedly firebombed out of jealousy over Cudi's relationship with Ventura.
Multiple former Combs staffers testified to having been required to take polygraph tests by Combs to keep their jobs, sometimes including days of grueling interrogations before he was satisfied. Often the abuse staff allegedly endured was every bit as terrifying as the incidents against his girlfriends. One former staffer, using the pseudonym Mia, testified that she was forbidden to lock the doors or leave the property while she was staying at Combs' residence. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him.
Even though Combs was acquitted on the most serious charges against him, it will be hard — justifiably so — for the public to erase many of these stories and allegations from their collective memory.
4. What does the mixed verdict mean for Me Too?
The jury's mixed verdict represents, in a sense, the fraught place the Me Too movement holds in America's public consciousness these days.
Me Too arguably opened the door for the federal investigation into Combs, which appears to have kicked off after Ventura filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2023. In it, Ventura made the first shocking public accusations that Combs was involved in human trafficking and sexual assault, launching the stream of accusations that would end in a criminal trial and a mixed verdict.
Ventura filed her lawsuit under the New York Adult Survivors Act (NYASA), a law explicitly passed as a response to the Me Too movement. It offered survivors of sexual violence a one-year window, from November 2022 to 2023, to file civil lawsuits against their alleged attackers, even if the statute of limitations had lapsed.
The idea behind the NYASA was to acknowledge the unusual cultural moment that Me Too created. It's well established that survivors of sexual assault frequently face too much shame to acknowledge what happened to them, which is part of why sex crimes are so difficult to prosecute: By the time a survivor decides to come forward, the statute of limitations may well have lapsed. The Me Too movement briefly created a space in which survivors were able to acknowledge what had happened to them, which meant that suddenly, a lot of people were coming forward about sex crimes that could no longer be prosecuted. The NYASA was designed to allow survivors to get closure for their attacks in civil court, without reopening the door to criminal charges.
Although Ventura eventually settled her civil lawsuit with Diddy, it led to more accusations. It turned out that some of the charges were still prosecutable in criminal court, and that's where the federal case began. Me Too and its legal victories made the whole thing possible.
All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse.
Now, the cultural energy that animated public interest in the first wave of Me Too trials has faded away. All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse, especially the one about how no true rape victim will appease their attackers. During Ventura's cross-examination, lawyers for Combs dwelled at length on text messages in which Ventura appeared to speak positively about the encounters Ventura now says she was coerced into participating in. If she were really raped, their argument implied, she would never have been willing to pretend otherwise.
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In real life, it's extremely common for victims of sexual assault to maintain contact with their attackers, even sometimes covering for them. Most perpetrators of sexual violence know their victims, and in many cases — especially in these celebrity trials — they hold professional or financial power over their victims, too. All of those facts combine to leave survivors frequently unwilling to completely sever ties with their attackers. All of this was discussed at great length in Me Too discourse back in 2017.
Yet Harvey Weinstein has high-profile supporters who make much of the fact that his victims maintained contact with him after he attacked them. Combs's lawyers relied on the same argument in this case, and the judge blocked prosecutors from presenting expert testimony on coercive control. Apparently, the angle convinced enough members of the jury that they felt no need to convict Combs of the most serious charges he faced.
Me Too achieved real legal victories, but they were temporary — a one-year statute here and there. Its great achievements were its cultural changes. And every day, it seem they are chipped away more and more. The mixed verdict in Combs's case, and Combs's partial victory, shows just how badly they've already eroded.