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MANHATTAN (CN) — Music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs rested his defense case on Tuesday afternoon without calling any witnesses as his criminal sex trafficking trial entered its seventh week.
Combs’ attorneys entered a series of stipulations into evidence for 23 minutes before formally concluding the entirety of his defense’s presentation.
Federal prosecutors rested their case earlier on Tuesday, having called 34 witnesses across two months of testimony.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering charges that could put him in prison for life.
The Department of Justice’s final witness for the prosecution was Joseph Cerciello of Homeland Security Investigations and the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, who guided prosecutors through reams of summary charts containing text messages and travel logs. Cerciello illustrated how Combs and his staff paid the transportation costs to fly sex workers across state lines for luxury hotel room orgies in Los Angeles, New York City and Miami.
Across 29 days of prosecution testimony, jurors heard from two of Combs’ ex-girlfriends — the R&B singer Cassie Ventura and an Instagram model referred to as “Jane” — who both recalled feeling pressured into participating in the Bad Boy CEO’s ecstasy-fueled hotel sex parties that included the hired male escorts putting on protracted erotic performances with the girlfriends as Combs watched.
The routine was referred to by Ventura as “freak offs,” while anonymous witness Jane said they were called “debauchery” or “hotel nights.”
Jane’s recollection of the “hotel nights” with Combs — including his specific preferences for lingerie, “stripper heels,” red mood lighting, cream-colored fingernails and lots of baby oil — aligned with many details of Ventura’s testimony about “freak offs” from the first week of the trial.
Both women testified that they did not actually want to have sex with men besides Combs, who they each considered their romantic partner at the time, but went along with sexual performances because they were what Combs desired.
The girlfriends, along with male sex workers who testified at trial, said Combs would watch the carnal displays and masturbate along, while intermittently recording videos on a phone or iPad.
Prosecutors claimed at trial Combs collected sexually explicit videos from those “nights” and used them as leverage over the women, threatening to leak the videos and destroy their reputations.
Jane testified that she and Combs would occasionally rewatch the videos together for intimate, consensual trysts they called “movie nights.”
Ventura said she felt like her entire career in the music industry was contingent on participating in “freak offs” with Combs, while Jane testified that she was trapped in financial dependence on Combs who was paying the $10,000 monthly rent on her Los Angeles luxury condo.
Prosecutors also questioned an aggregation of Combs’ former personal assistants and Bad Boy employees, including one assistant who testified she was raped by her former boss, and another who said she was kidnapped and forced to take polygraph tests for days over suspicions that she had stolen loaner diamond jewelry.
One of Combs’ former assistant Brendan Paul, testified last week about setting up and cleaning up after “wild king nights” during the years Combs was dating Jane that resulted in thousands of dollars of hotel destruction fines.
Combs is standing trial on five criminal charges: one count of racketeering conspiracy; two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He has emphatically denied the accusations against him and pleaded not guilty to his indictments.
Notably absent throughout the seven weeks of trial were many A-list celebrities who had been speculated to somehow be involved in the case, with the exception of rapper Kid Cudi, who testified about an arson incident as a prosecution witness, and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who briefly showed up to the courthouse in an all-white outfit before quickly walking out after he was directed to an overflow courtroom.
Arson is among the RICO predicates included in Combs’ indictment, in addition to kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.
The trial is expected to run up to eight weeks into early July. Jurors could potentially begin deliberating a verdict as early as Friday.
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