Diddy to stay jailed ahead of sentencing

MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal judge on Monday afternoon refused to release entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs from a Brooklyn jail into house arrest while he awaits his sentencing in October on a pair of convictions related to prostitution.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian affirmed in a two-page order on Monday that Combs had not proven any “exceptional reasons” warranting a departure from the mandatory detention on the two counts of violating the Mann Act by transporting people for purposes of prostitution.

Subramanian previously denied Combs’ application for bail on the day a New York jury returned a split verdict that acquitted the hitmaker on the most serious counts of racketeering and sex trafficking he was accused of.

“Increasing the amount of the bond or devising additional conditions doesn’t change the calculus given the circumstances and heavy burden of proof that Combs bears,” the Joe Biden appointee wrote, finding that Combs’ renewed application for bail had not moved the needle in regards to dangerousness or risk of flight. “On this basis alone, Combs’s application is denied.”

Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo had argued in the bail motion that Combs was participating in a consensual “swingers” lifestyle “that is not uncommon today,” where he and his girlfriend “arranged for adult men to have consensual sexual relations with the adult long-term girlfriend.”

Agnifilo further argued that in similar Mann Act convictions, where there was no conviction on the sex trafficking or violence offenses, but a conviction on the prostitution transportation offense, the defendants were released pending sentencing.

Subramanian, however, was not persuaded to find sufficient equivalency between Combs’ convictions and other prostitution-related cases highlighted by his defense.

“Combs’ Mann Act arguments might have traction in a case that didn’t involve evidence of violence, coercion or subjugation in connection with the acts of prostitution at issue, but the record here contains evidence of all three,” the judge wrote. “That makes this case unlike any of the cases Combs points to and places it outside the narrow exception to detention that Congress otherwise deemed mandatory.”

Representatives for Combs did not immediately respond to request for comment on Monday evening.

Combs, 55, faces up to a maximum sentence up to 20 years in prison on his convictions for the two prostitution-related counts under the Mann Act.

Combs has been detained at the troubled Metropolitan Detention Center in South Brooklyn for nearly 11 months, since his arrest at the Park Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan in September 2024.

Combs’ numerous applications for release on bail before his case went on trial, secured by his $48 million Star Island Miami mansion as collateral, were repeatedly denied by multiple judges who cited his 2016 beating of R&B singer Cassie Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel and subsequent apparent attempts at witness tampering.

During the trial, Agnifilo conceded that Combs had subjected Ventura to domestic violence, and said Combs would have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges. Instead, he is standing trial on racketeering and sex trafficking counts.

“We own the domestic violence,” he said during the defense’s closing summation.

Those very same episodes of domestic violence were referenced in Subramanian’s decision to keep Combs detained after the jury’s split verdict was returned in early July, acquitting Combs on the top RICO and sex trafficking counts but convicting on the Mann Act prostitution-transportation crimes.

Combs’ sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 3rd, 2025, three months after his convictions.

Subsequent to the renewed bail motion, Combs’ defense requested that the Mann Act convictions be overturned or retried because there was insufficient evidence that Combs transported any individuals with the intent to engage in “prostitution.”

Represented on the separate motion by Alexandra Shapiro, a partner at Shapiro Arato Bach specializing in appellate law, Combs argued that he was producing legal “amateur pornography” when he paid for male escorts to perform at consensual hotel sex parties with his girlfriends.

Two weeks after the jury returned the split verdict, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice fired former Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, who led the team of Manhattan federal prosecutors who brought the Combs case to trial.

Asked last week about potentially pardoning Combs, Trump told Newsmax he considered Combs “sort of half-innocent” following the split verdict but said the “Vote or Die!” entrepreneur’s past criticisms of Trump have rendered the possibility of clemency “more difficult to do”.

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