Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Breaking news, the Department of Homeland Security has just confirmed to CNN that federal law enforcement agents have raided properties owned by musician and producer Sean Diddy Combs. Law enforcement sources familiar with the matter saying the searches are part of a federal investigation led by the Southern District of New York into alleged human trafficking.
Last fall, the Justice Department unveiled a shocking series of allegations against Sean Combs, the media mogul better known as Diddy. This is incredibly disturbing footage. Disturbing new video appears to support some of the accusations of abuse against music mogul Sean Diddy Combs. The surveillance footage that was captured inside of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016 allegedly shows Combs assaulting then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in a hallway.
The government charged Combs with running a criminal conspiracy. ABC News has just confirmed that Sean Diddy Combs was arrested tonight in New York City. Sources say federal agents with Homeland Security investigations took him into custody. A year ago, Sean Combs stood in Times Square and was handed a key to New York City. Today, he's been indicted and will face justice in the Southern District of New York.
For the past seven weeks, prosecutors have made their case in a Manhattan courtroom, laying out the accusations in graphic detail. And soon, a jury will issue a verdict. Today, my colleague Ben Cesario, who's been in court since the trial started, explains why this case may not be as simple as it seems. It's Friday, June 27th. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you. First time on The Daily. Appreciate it.
So this is obviously a huge case. Diddy is one of the most famous artists around, and his trial has just been a complete media circus. You've been a music reporter for two decades? Yes. That is a fact. You can say that. Okay, good. I'm wondering, what has it been like to cover this trial day to day?
It's been very intense. It is a media circus in some way. I was thinking that, at least in terms of music, it's probably the biggest one since Michael Jackson's child abuse trial 20 years ago. Wow.
So the amount of press that has descended on it, the tents outside the courthouse for TV reporters doing their updates, the print reporters coming in and out with notebooks, but also the influencers, the TikTokers, people doing live updates on their phones on breaks from the court. It's evident when you get a block away from the courthouse that something big is going on there.
Inside the courthouse, it's less so because it's the controlled environment of the courts. But it's still very intense and it was really remarkable just to see Sean Combs there.
because he is so famous, and these are such serious accusations against him. Yeah, I would imagine that a lot of the intensity has to do with the fact that the allegations against him are, by all accounts, truly alarming. And I have to say, I have not been in the courtroom as you have, but it feels as though the general impression is that Diddy has kind of been backed into a corner, that Sean Combs...
is accused of things that have really shocked the public. Is that right? Absolutely. But the legal case surrounding it is a bit complicated, and we've seen that played out at the trial where the government and the defense are arguing over the fine points of that. Okay. Well, that's what we're here to talk about. Let's get into the case. And I want to just start at the beginning. What exactly is Sean Combs being charged with?
And why isn't it so simple? He's being charged with sex trafficking against two women, using violence repeatedly against one of them and at least one time against the other, and also of sort of controlling a whole entourage of people who do his bidding for him. And according to the government, in order to commit some of those crimes and cover them up,
I think what he's accused of doing is something that is very clear, sexually abusing women and using violence against them. One of them is the singer Cassie. Her real name is Cassandra Ventura. She was his girlfriend for about a decade. And the other is a woman who is anonymous, but she's testifying under the name Jane.
And the accusation is that he coerced them into these sort of sex marathons where they were forced to perform sex acts with hired sex workers while Sean Combs watched, told them what to do, sometimes filmed them. And the government's case is that the women didn't want to do this but felt that they were compelled to.
And that if they didn't do what he wanted, they would suffer serious repercussions like violence, like having those sex tapes released to the public to embarrass and humiliate them, or that he would revoke the financial support that they had become dependent on. Hence why this is a sex trafficking case. Yes.
I think that in general, we think of sex trafficking as sort of a matter of like international crime rings transporting women across borders for prostitution. Right. That's true. That's part of what that law covers. But that's not all that it covers. It also covers people being forced into sex acts using fraud or coercion. And he's also charged with racketeering conspiracy crimes.
This is a law that was written originally for criminal organizations like the mafia. Yeah, that's what I associate it with. It's been applied many, many times for that reason, but it's also been extended into other kinds of situations. And the idea is that there is a business or an organization that is devoted to committing crimes, that the organization itself, part of its purpose is doing those crimes and or covering them up
And as with the mob, the idea is that there could be underlings who are the ones who actually do the crimes, but they're acting at the behest of the boss. And so what the government is saying is that he had this whole sort of group of assistants and security guards and people who worked for him. And that part of what he did is he had those people help him do the sex trafficking of these two women and sometimes cover it up.
Can I ask, why would you add a racketeering charge if you're the government here? Like, it seems pretty straightforward why they might pursue sex trafficking. Why this kind of other charge?
I think it's the how. It's not just did he do something terrible to these women, but how did he accomplish it? How did such a famous person who would be recognized anywhere that he went, how did he actually accomplish this? And so part of their argument is he had all these assistants who made all kinds of arrangements. They booked hotels for
They ordered all kinds of supplies. They got drugs for it. There were copious amounts of baby oil and lubricant. There were lights. There was music. It was almost like a music video production is part of what they're saying. So that's part of it. It's not just that he abused the women sexually, but that he had a whole organization that helped him do it. Right. So it sounds like part of this is about understanding the machinery behind this crime, right? Exactly.
I think that's a perfect word for it, the machinery, the idea that he controlled a big operation. They did his bidding for him. Okay, I want to talk about something that is central to all that, which is how Diddy amassed all this power, how Sean Combs amassed all this power. How should we be thinking about that story? It's kind of a Horatio Alger story.
of a young man who came from pretty much nothing and went to the pinnacles of American society. He's from Harlem and...
As a young man, he sort of talked himself into the music business, and he showed that he was just kind of a genius at not only producing hit music, but packaging the artist, giving them an identity, giving them sort of a look and a feel and a sound. He did that with Mary J. Blige. He did that with the notorious B.I.G., who was his biggest star.
The two of them like rode that into the stratosphere. Right. There's also something special about him. Most music producers you've never heard of. You wouldn't recognize them if you saw them on the street, but you know him. Right. So he's one of the few people who sort of both behind the scenes and right up front in the camera. But he didn't stop there.
And that's where the ambition really comes in. He has the Sean John fashion line, which is named after him. Matter of fact, you can call me Sean John. Sean John, hip-hop mogul. He has Making the Band, the reality show. Making the Band 3. Strong young women that sing, that can dance. That's what I'm looking for. He does Ciroc Vodka, where he's making TV commercials where he's like pouring vodka into a bowl of cereal. When I celebrate life, I celebrate with the best. Ciroc Ultra Premium Vodka.
In some ways, he is kind of a model for how celebrities make their money and build their influence today. He's not just in one thing or another thing. He's kind of in everything. He's everywhere. It's branding, and he is the brand. Diddy is the brand. Yes!
He throws these huge parties. They're called the White Parties. There it is, an estate on the Hamptons. And Martha Stewart is there. Wow. All kinds of celebrities are there. So thank you all very much for coming. So let's party. And introduce yourself again for me, sir. I'm Barack Obama. I'm the U.S. Senate candidate from the state of Illinois.
He interviews a young Barack Obama on MTV News. I didn't know that. Yes. Absolutely. Listen, you're a motivating force for young people all across the country. Your music moves people. You're a trendsetter. But what part of...
And he just inserts himself in that way where he becomes part of the upper echelon of American society. He's extremely wealthy. He's always making the Forbes lists. And at a certain point, that just attracts more attention and more power.
And everyone wants to work for him. Everyone wants to be in his orbit. And he becomes kind of an icon for that reason. A cultural icon. A total cultural icon. How does that story of his immense influence that has grown over time play out in the courtroom? Like, tell me how the prosecution makes its case that this power was involved in the criminal acts they say he committed.
There were 34 witnesses called by the government, and it felt like about 20 of them said some variation of, he's larger than life.
And that comes from the assistants who signed up to work for him and worked these like grueling jobs where they didn't sleep for days, sort of catering to his every need. And also the girlfriends where the charisma of this person they found attractive. They were fascinated by. They wanted to please him.
I think the best example of this is Cassie, which is really where this whole case starts. Okay. Tell me about Cassie. What does she say? What's her testimony? She was his girlfriend for more than a decade. She was signed to his label. And right out of the gate, as a young woman, she had a big hit. It's called Me and You. Years later, she files a bombshell lawsuit where she accuses him of rape, of sexual abuse, and physical violence over years and years.
And we know that immediately after she files the lawsuit, the federal government starts to investigate this as a crime. And that leads to his arrest last year. So she's pretty central to the case. She is absolutely central. She was one of the first witnesses who was brought on. Part of the reason for that is that she was almost nine months pregnant when she testified. So they were under pressure to get her on the stand and get her testimony before she gave birth.
But she took the stand and she told the story of their relationship from her perspective. And that relationship starts very sweetly where they begin a romantic affair. And then he tells her about this fantasy that he has that he calls voyeurism, where he wants to watch her having sex with another man. And so they hire a guy from an escort service and they hire this man and she has sex with him in front of Combs.
She didn't really like it, but she did it to please him, and she thought, okay, this is a way for us to try something in our relationship. Sure. But she said, very soon it turned into a regular thing. It happened weekly. It happened again and again and again. They called these encounters freak-offs.
And these episodes, which were fueled by lots of drugs, could go on for days. They left the people exhausted. They were unpleasant. She got infections from doing it. It was a gruesome thing to hear. He beat her frequently. He beat her in front of other people. There were other people who testified that they said they saw this happen. There was one time that he beat her so severely that
She had bruises on her face and she was taken to a hotel room to recover in secret, hidden away from the rest of the world so that no one could see what had happened to her. And in the courtroom, the whole place would go still at moments like this, listening to her tell this story.
There's also a video that was released on CNN last year that was Combs assaulting her in the hallway of a hotel in L.A. It was horrific. I saw the video. It was hard to watch. She said that happened sort of right in the midst of a freak-off. He had beaten her, and so she left. And as she was leaving, he chased after her wearing a towel.
and beat her and dragged her through the hallway. It was all caught on video, and it was leaked. And that not only, I think, set public opinion because people saw it on TV, but it was played repeatedly at trial for the jurors. And we also heard all kinds of testimony from different people about what happened before, during, and after. And just so I'm clear, Ben,
It seems like the prosecution's case here is that the violence that she says was a part of their relationship is key to the coercion here, that she feels forced into these sexual encounters in part because she's dealing with a man who is willing to put hands on her. That's exactly right. That's part of the coercion. She was afraid that she would be beaten if she didn't do these things, but
She also felt that she had to do them for the sake of her career since she was signed to his record company. And he would sometimes film these incidents. And she said that he threatened to release these tapes. Blackmail, essentially, she's saying. Exactly. She called it blackmail materials. And what's Diddy's defense here? What did his lawyer say to this? You said this was complicated, but this part, at least, feels fundamentally straightforward. Yeah.
They don't deny the violence. They fully admit
that he did these things. They admit that he beat her. They don't deny that these freak-offs, the sex encounters, happened. Their argument is that she willingly participated in it. She was his girlfriend. This is what he was into. She could have left, but she didn't. And they said a number of times at trial, this may be domestic violence, but domestic violence is not the same as sex trafficking. How do they make their case that she was gay?
not coerced into this, that she wanted to do it. A big part of that is text messages. There were voluminous text messages that have been introduced at trial between the two of them. And in a lot of them, Cassie seems to be showing that she's interested, that she's into it, that she's excited about it. She even gets involved in the planning of it sometimes. There are a lot of exchanges between them where they're talking about, what do you want to do? And in one example,
Cassie texts him, I'm always ready to freak off. That's one of probably hundreds. So to the defense, this is proof that she was willingly involved in it and that she was even excited about it and that this is what she was telling her partner. So this is the information he had about it. The point being from the defense's perspective that Combs was under the impression that she was really into this, that this is something she wanted to do.
That's what the defense is presenting to the jury. There is another side of it, though, where Cassie is saying, I was saying this because this is what he expected of me. And if I didn't do that, there would be repercussions for me. And part of what Cassie says in those messages and then she explained on the stand was this was sometimes her only opportunity to be with him.
She wanted to have intimacy with him. She was jealous if he gave his attention elsewhere. And she felt, I need to do this because he's my partner. He's my lover. This is what he wants. And even if I don't like it, this is my only opportunity to be with him.
And this is kind of why the case is, as you said earlier, more complicated than it looks from the outside, because a lot of this seems to turn on where you draw the line. What is coercion and what's willing participation? And there's another example of this in the trial. It's a woman named Jane. She's testifying anonymously, but using that name.
She's in a relationship with Combs after Cassie. And in some ways it's very similar. It starts off romantically and then they start to have what she calls hotel nights, which are essentially the same thing as the freak offs where she's having sex with men who are hired for it while Combs watches and sometimes makes videos. But
But Jane pushes back a lot more explicitly, at least in the text messages. Jane was on the stand for six days and there were parts of the trial where they're reading her text messages and some are very strong. She tells him that she doesn't want to do these things anymore. And in one example, she says, it's dark, sleazy and makes me feel disgusted with myself.
And she says, I don't want to feel obligated to perform these nights with you in fear of losing the roof over my head. Wow. He was paying the rent on her house, $10,000 a month.
So this is a literal expression of, I don't want to lose my home. Yes. And she expresses that quite strongly a number of times. Another interesting thing about Jane's case is that Combs is dating her when Cassie's lawsuit is released. And
She texts him and she says, I feel like I'm reading my own sexual trauma. This is Jane texting Combs. This is Jane texting Combs while she's reading Cassie's lawsuit. Wow. And she's stunned to read that this has happened with another woman before her. After she sends that message, there's a phone call between them.
It was being recorded, and that audio was played at the trial. And she's crying, and he tells her, everything we did, we did mutually together. He seems to be laying the foundation in that call to persuade her that what happened between them was consensual and not coerced. Okay, this sounds pretty damning.
How did it play in the courtroom? It was shocking to hear all of this, and that was palpable in the courtroom. But Combs' lawyers mounted a pretty strong defense, as they had with Cassie. They presented lots and lots of text messages in which Jane was saying that she wanted to do it. They were very sexually explicit where she was talking about some of the sex acts that they performed. There's a lot of suggestive emojis that were read out loud in court.
And so what they're trying to argue is that she was not coerced. She was willing. She did it because she loved him, even if she didn't necessarily want to. Similar to the argument they made in Cassie's case. That's why the sex trafficking charge for both of them is a little complicated. And there's a whole other part of the case that might even be more complicated, which is the racketeering conspiracy charge. We'll be right back.
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Okay, let's talk about the other part of the case, the racketeering charge. How does the prosecution go about arguing that Diddy, this music mogul, was also a criminal operation? Their argument is basically that through his various businesses, like his record company, his personal assistants, his bodyguards, he had a whole security entourage there.
that these people sort of took orders from him that allowed him to commit the sex trafficking. So they set up the hotel rooms with all the supplies they needed. They would buy drugs, transport them various places. They got the baby oil. They got the lights that they would have in these hotel rooms.
afterward, they would bring in a nurse who could administer the IV drips to allow people to recover from two or three days of drug-crazed sexual activity. My God. And their argument is that he had these underlings who took care of all of this for him so that he could do this. I have to ask, you cover the music industry. How...
rare is it that you have an artist with like a huge entourage that's devoted to doing their bidding? I understand that this involved a lot of coordination, but presumably there are a lot of musicians who have assistants getting them drugs, right? I think that's a safe thing to assume. Right. What's different about this for the prosecution? What do they say about that?
What the government is saying is they weren't just getting drugs for the sake of having some drugs. They were getting drugs in order to coerce a woman to do something that she didn't want to do. Okay, and how did the witnesses that the prosecution called describe this operation? Why were these employees doing this for him? What was the inside of that machinery that we talked about?
There were a bunch of personal assistants that he had hired over the course of many years. And a lot of them told a sort of similar story of how somehow they got a connection, they got an interview for the job, and immediately they sort of found themselves in the whirlwind. They were working around the clock.
They were working for this famous man. He was a very demanding boss. They had to keep spreadsheets of like his favorite hotels around the world and the favorite foods that he likes to eat. But then they would say occasionally there'd be these weird things that would happen where they'd be told they have to bring a bag to a hotel room that had drugs and baby oil and stuff into it. And they would sort of bring it, leave it in the hotel room.
come back in a few days and clean up the baby oil that had been spilled all over the place. There was violence that they witnessed. There was one assistant who said they were on Combs' private plane, and there was a sort of bed compartment in the back.
The door was ajar. They heard Cassie scream. And he looks through the door and he sees her on the floor and she looks terrified. And Combs has a sort of tumbler glass in his hand. And Cassie says, isn't anybody going to do anything?
And nobody did a thing. And he actually gave a very interesting explanation when he was asked, why didn't you do anything? And he talks about being sort of torn, like, do I want to help her? Would that threaten my employment with this famous person? I want to have a career in the music industry. Should I help her or should I not help her? And he elected not to help her.
There was also the sense that they had to cover up embarrassing deeds by their boss. The videotape of Sean Combs attacking Cassie in the hotel that was leaked to CNN, a big part of the testimony of the trial was how they tried to capture and suppress that videotape. Right after it happens, another assistant of Combs calls the security officer at the hotel and says, "How can we get that tape?"
And the security guard says, no, I can't give it to you. They try again and again. And eventually this assistant connects the guy with Combs, who personally pleads and says, if this got out, it would ruin me. And so they make a deal to sell the tape...
And an address is given. The security guard goes to this building. He brings a USB drive with him with the footage on it. And they hand it over. And he's given $100,000 in cash in a brown paper bag.
This happens all in about 48 hours after he beat her. And the impression that comes across was that this was a fairly routine business matter, that immediately afterwards, somebody knew what to do. Call the hotel, get the tape, suppress the tape.
have money to pay for it. I think that's an example of how a machine can work and how big celebrities can have these machines surrounding them, and part of their job is to protect the image of the celebrity at sort of any cost. Right. But it sounds like you're saying this went much further than the typical celebrity assistant arrangement.
Absolutely. And the prosecutors say that this machinery was extended way beyond just the women at the center of the case. It also affected other people, including Kid Cudi, famous rapper. He was on the stand, and he said that for a little while he was dating Cassie, and that Combs became enraged with jealousy about this. And an assistant to Sean Combs says that he shows up at her apartment with a gun. And
and tells her, come on, we got to go after Cuddy and kill him. She's terrified, but she goes along with it. And Cuddy says that Combs entered his home when he wasn't there, opened some Christmas presents, locked his dog in his bathroom. And then a couple of weeks later, Kid Cuddy's car blew up. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the convertible of his Porsche.
And Cuddy said he believed that it was Sean Combs who did it, though there's no evidence of that. They didn't find any trace of Combs or any sign that anyone from his entourage was there. But, I mean, allegations of, you know, breaking and entering, a car bombing, it does seem like something kind of out of a mob movie. It came across that way in court. What was Combs' response to that depiction of him and of his entourage, of how they operated?
The defense pushed back very strongly about this point, the racketeering charge. They say there was no criminal organization. They say assistants were doing their job as assistants.
Just the other day in court, there was a very strong argument by one of Combs' lawyers basically saying there's no proof that a conspiracy existed and that for something to be a legal conspiracy, two parties have to understand and agree that they are committing an illegal act. The way that the mob boss and the mob lieutenant know what they're doing when they bomb somebody's car or intimidate them or hurt them is
But they say that the government has not established that that is what happened with Sean Combs. Very important part of this is that they say that the assistants didn't know what was happening in those hotel rooms. They may have been hired to deliver supplies for it. They may have been told, clean up afterward. But they weren't in the room. Basically, what the defense is saying is that
Proving that this was a criminal conspiracy really requires that everybody involved had knowledge of what was going down. And their argument is, look, the employees were pretty ignorant about much of this. And so how can you say this was a conspiracy?
That is exactly what they're arguing. Some of the acts that are part of the racketeering charge, they're denying those. They're saying that Sean Combs did not blow up Kid Cudi's car and neither did anyone who worked with him. They're saying that paying money to the security officer at a hotel was not technically a bribe. But the bigger point they're making is exactly what you said. Buying an incriminating tape from a hotel security camera is
It was a bad look, and it was being done to prevent embarrassing information from getting out, but that it was not an example of racketeering. It was him telling an assistant, get rid of this problem for me. Right. So again, like the sex trafficking charge, this racketeering charge is just, it's not simple at all.
It's not, and a lot of the trial was devoted to this. The prosecution took 28 days to make their case. The defense rested its case in 25 minutes. What? They presented no witnesses. Combs did not testify in the trial.
They got a lot of their case in through cross-examination. Some of them were very, very long, and they introduced a lot of evidence in those text messages. But it still was pretty striking how quickly the defense rested after such a long case put on by the government. And, Ben, is there any indication of where things may go, of what the jury is thinking, how they're reacting to this?
Not really. The jury has been pretty stone-faced through a lot of it. They did play videos of the freak-offs for the jurors. This is sealed evidence. The public could not see it.
But what we could see was jurors sitting in the box looking at screens with headphones on. Oh, wow. While they saw clips of them. So you watched them watching the freak-offs. Yes. So everybody had their eyes trained on the jurors to read their reactions. And you could see some discomfort. One juror at one point pulled the headphone off as soon as it was done. You saw somebody kind of wiping their hands on their head. We don't know what the jury's going to decide, of course.
But it's not necessarily an open and shut case for the government because the charges are complicated and the stories are complicated. You have both Jane and Cassie were in long-term relationships with Combs, and there's this gray area of was their consent involved or not? Were they coerced or not?
When it comes to the racketeering charge, were the assistants just doing the work of an assistant, told to drop a bag off at a hotel room and leave, or were they aware that something bad was happening inside that hotel room? Yeah, it seems as though the prosecution is really trying to do something quite ambitious.
I mean, for all the drama around this case and the sense I think that we have as a news-consuming public that we understand that these are really harrowing accusations, the complexity is in defining this very difficult to define thing, how power works. And...
figuring out whether there are consequences to the way it's wielded. The question of how does power work and whether there are consequences, I think that's exactly what the jury is going to be considering in their room while they deliberate. Ben, thanks for being in the studio. Thank you, Natalie. We'll be right back.
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the official in charge of enforcing the Senate's rules rejected a slew of measures in the Republican sprawling policy bill that's designed to enact Trump's domestic agenda. It was a blow to party leaders as they rushed to salvage the legislation before the July 4th deadline that the president set for it to be passed.
The official, Elizabeth McDonough, serves as the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan role. She said several provisions that would account for billions of dollars in savings could not be included in the legislation in their current form. Republicans tried to use special rules to shield the bill from a filibuster, which would deprive Democrats the chance to block it.
But in order to qualify, the legislation has to comply with a strict set of budget restrictions. McDonough is in charge of ensuring the bill meets those requirements. While some Republicans attacked McDonough on social media, Senate Majority Leader John Thune from South Dakota played down the setback, saying the bill was still on track.
And an advisory panel that was recently appointed by the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., voted on Thursday to walk back long-standing recommendations for flu vaccines that contain an ingredient that vaccine skeptics have falsely linked to autism. Kennedy fired all 17 experts on the panel about two weeks ago and appointed eight new members.
At least half of those new members have expressed skepticism about some vaccines. The committee advises the CDC on vaccine efficacy and safety, and makes recommendations about who should receive a vaccine. Insurance companies and government programs like Medicaid are required to cover the immunizations that the CDC recommends and states-based school mandates on the agency's guidance.
Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Nina Feldman, Alex Stern, and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Mike Benoit. Fact Check by Caitlin Love. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.
That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitcherle. See you Monday.