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Daily Mirror
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Diddy trial shows society doesn't care about women's suffering
He's a man known by many names: Diddy; Puff Daddy; Puffy; Sean Combs; and now a convicted criminal. His music was ubiquitous with the 2000s, collaborating with some of the biggest names in pop, from Christina Aguilera to Justin Bieber. His Bad Boy Record label brought artists such as Janelle Monáe and Machine Gun Kelly to the world. But now, after two months on trial his fame should pale in significance to the crimes he committed. Over a period of eight weeks, a jury at Manhattan's Federal Court in New York City heard the case against Sean Combs. He was tried on two counts of transportation for prostitution in relation to Cassie Ventura and another woman known as 'Jane', as well as two charges of sex trafficking with regards to Ventura and 'Jane', and one charge of racketeering conspiracy. On June 6, he was found guilty on both counts of transportation for prostitution, and not guilty on the other three charges. Combs denied all allegations against him and pleaded not guilty to all charges. This case has garnered significant attention, not least from the media and fans alike. A fan outside the court wore a T-shirt that read 'A Freako is not a R.I.C.O'. The so-called 'Freak-offs' are drug-fuelled, days-long sex parties, where hundreds of bottles of baby oil seized from Diddy's Los Angeles home became an emblem for the excess and distress. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act has been used in the past to tackle criminal organisations, most notably in 1985 when Rudy Giuliani charged the heads of the so-called 'Five Families' of the New York Mafia. But where do we go from the news that one of the most recognisable men in music is dangerous? In May 2024 leaked surveillance footage from 2016, showed the world how Diddy brutally assaulted his then girlfriend Cassie Ventura at the InterContinental Hotel in L.A . In a response on Instagram, Diddy described his 'behaviour as inexcusable.' The footage is difficult to watch: what I see is a woman in a moment of desperate hope trying to flee her abuser. But I'm not convinced that everybody sees this pain in the way I do. The video is right there for all to see, but yet the era of disinformation has equipped some with the ability to think: 'Well, maybe we're not getting the whole story here'. Ignorance is the best case scenario for those who waited outside the Diddy court holding bottles of baby oil, rooting for his imminent release. But at worst, I think that fundamentally these people don't care about how women are treated. Heavily pregnant and weeping on the stand, Ventura told the court about her relationship with Diddy. She told the court about being plied with drugs and coerced into having sex with male prostitutes - which was sometimes recorded by Diddy. This was not the first public declaration by Cassie about Diddy's abuse. In 2023, the singer went public with allegations of rape and abuse that she suffered from Diddy. The media mogul settled this case out of court for $20million. Reading her testimony from the 2025 trial, the resilience to carry on in the hope of justice is inspiring. In a move that is both insensitive to survivors and out of touch with the testimony that came before, Diddy's defence lawyer Marc Agnifilo in closing arguments on June 27, described their relationship as a "great modern love story". He said: "It's complicated, but they are truly in love with each other, and that is what defines their relationship. It is based on love." Love should not result in bruises, split lips, and non-consensual sex. Love should not hurt. This is not a modern love story; this is a nightmare that plays out for far too many women. The National Centre for Domestic Violence defines domestic abuse as ranging from physical and sexual abuse to threatening or coercive behaviour. They report that 1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic abuse in their lifetime. When the verdict was read out in court, Diddy buckled with relief. His legal team put in a request for bail pending sentencing, which was denied. He remains behind bars until the proposed sentencing date of October 3. The New York Times reported that when this decision was handed down by Judge Arun Subramanian his jubilance turned to a 'darkened demeanour'. Outside the court Ventura's lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor praised the singer for her bravery, saying: "She displayed unquestionable strength and brought attention to the realities of powerful men in our orbit and the misconduct that has persisted for decades without repercussion. This case proved that change is long overdue, and we will continue to fight on behalf of survivors." But orbits are not eternal, and will eventually decay away, dropping stars out of alignment. Survivors will be the change-makers, as they continue to come forward and advocate for future women's safety. It is what we must do to ensure that powerful men cannot commit crimes unhindered.
New York Times
04-03-2025
- New York Times
Selwyn Raab, Tenacious Reporter Who Covered the Mob, Dies at 90
Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who in exacting detail explored the Mafia's many tentacles, and whose doggedness helped lead to the exoneration of men wrongly convicted of notorious 1960s killings, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90. His son-in-law, Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter, said the cause of his death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was intestinal complications. Though the phrase surely fit him, Mr. Raab didn't much care to be described as an investigative journalist. Rather, he said, 'I believe in enterprise and patience.' He had both qualities in abundance across a long career, whether looking into fraudulent methadone clinics, or the life sentence given to a boy who was only 14 when convicted of murder, or the Mafia's grip on New York City school construction. He was also the author of a number of books about the mob, including one that became the basis of the 1970s television police drama 'Kojak.' The mob had his enduring attention as far back as the 1960s, and it led to his definitive 765-page book on New York wiseguys, 'Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires,' published in 2005. The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik described him in a 2020 article as 'the Gibbon of the New York mob.' His prose tended to stray from elegance. But Bryan Burrough, reviewing 'Five Families' for The New York Times Book Review, said that 'what makes Raab so wonderful is that he eschews legend and suspect anecdotage in favor of a Joe Friday-style just-the-facts-ma'am approach.' Mr. Raab posited that it was Charles (Lucky) Luciano who invented the modern Mafia nearly a century ago, organizing Italian criminal operations into distinct families, with a 'commission' created to resolve territorial disputes and policy matters. In addition to tried and true enterprises — drug trafficking, gambling, prostitution — Cosa Nostra control extended to much of municipal life, Mr. Raab wrote, be it garbage removal, the garment industry, unions, construction, or fish and meat markets. Despite a popular tendency to look upon gangsters as 'amiable rogues,' he said, they were murderous predators and 'the invisible government of New York.' As a boy on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he lived almost his entire life, Mr. Raab saw the mob up close. There, he told Time magazine in 1974, he was 'surrounded by the kind of legendary criminals you read about — bookmakers, con artists, Jewish and Italian gangsters.' 'I grew up with guys I later covered,' he said. A former Times colleague, Ralph Blumenthal, said that Mr. Raab tended to be humorless but was 'a demon for the facts.' He added, 'When you think of the causes he adopted, they were groundbreaking.' That was true even before Mr. Raab joined The Times, his digging having helped free men wrongly convicted of some of the New York region's more shocking murders. One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — 'career girls,' as the tabloids called them. Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged. Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect's right to counsel. Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, 'Justice in the Back Room,' which became the basis for 'Kojak,' the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. 'I'm not a detective,' Mr. Raab said. 'I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.' He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J. The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, 'Hurricane,' and in a 1999 film, 'The Hurricane,' in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington. Mr. Raab received many honors across the years, including the Heywood Broun Award from the New York Newspaper Guild and an Emmy for his work on 'The 51st State,' a WNET program that dealt with New York City issues and on which he was a reporter and an executive producer for three years before moving to The Times. Selwyn Norman Raab was born on June 26, 1934, in Manhattan, one of two sons of immigrant parents: William Raab, a New York bus driver born in Austria, and Berdie (Glantz) Raab, a homemaker born in Poland. As a boy, Mr. Raab boxed in a program run by the city's parks department. He graduated from Seward Park High School in Lower Manhattan in 1951 and from the City College of New York in 1956, with a bachelor's degree in English. After college, he worked for The Bridgeport Sunday Herald in Connecticut (now defunct) and The Newark Star-Ledger before joining the World-Telegram staff. On a blind date in 1962, he met a social worker named Helene Lurie. They were married on Dec. 25, 1963. Mrs. Raab, who helped her husband with his research, died in 2019. Mr. Raab is survived by his daughter, Marian, a freelance writer and editor, and two grandsons. At City College, he was an editor on Observation Post, a student newspaper. He was twice suspended from classes for brief periods because of what he wrote — first for strongly resisting student government and faculty attempts to kill the newspaper, later for criticizing college administrators who had fired several professors under attack in the McCarthy era. He recalled those days in 2009, when he received a Townsend Harris Medal, an award given by City College in memory of its founder. His suspensions taught him a couple of things, Mr. Raab said. One was 'Never seek safe harbors to avoid contentious but important issues.' The other: 'Never sacrifice integrity on fundamental principles, especially if there is a clear distinction between right and wrong on vital issues.'
