The testimony of one woman who has accused Combs is uncertain. (2025)

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Sean Combs trial begins with explicit accounts of sex and violence.

In lurid detail, Emily A. Johnson, the prosecutor who delivered a 50-minute opening statement for the government, portrayed Mr. Combs as a man who ordered the performance of sex acts and “called himself the king.”

“To the public, he was Puff Daddy or Diddy,” Ms. Johnson said. “A cultural icon, a businessman — larger than life. But there was another side to him, a side that ran a criminal enterprise.”

One of the government’s first witnesses was a man who said he been paid as much as $6,000 to engage in lengthy sexual encounters with Mr. Combs’s girlfriend Casandra Ventura while the music mogul watched. He said he also overheard what he believed to be Mr. Combs striking Ms. Ventura in an adjoining room.

Mr. Combs, 55, one of the most successful producers and entrepreneurs in the history of hip-hop, faces charges of sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution and racketeering conspiracy, a federal crime best known for its use in prosecuting organized crime syndicates.

If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges. “The evidence is going to show you a very flawed individual,” Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said in her opening statement. “But it will not show you a racketeer, a sex trafficker or somebody transporting for prostitution.”

The trial of Mr. Combs is being closely watched by his legions of fans and the celebrities and stars who once turned in his orbit, attended his extravagant parties or listened to the hit music he helped to produce.

The charges against Mr. Combs brought into the popular lexicon “freak-offs,” which Mr. Combs used to describe the drug-fueled sex bacchanals he organized that could last for days. At the core of the case is the government’s contention that Mr. Combs, acting like royalty, dispatched a crew of employees to abet his behavior and resolve any problems that it caused.

In the packed courtroom on the 26th floor of a Southern District of New York courthouse, the mogul’s mother, Janice Combs, sat in the second row of the gallery, dressed in black-and-leopard print, and surrounded by family members.

Her son, who has been in custody since his arrest in September, wore a sweater, a collared shirt, slacks and lace-less shoes. He sat at the defense table, reading a Bible, his graying hair and beard revealing his months in detention, where he cannot dye it.

Ms. Johnson told a jury of eight men and four women that the case would center on the testimony of three women, including Ms. Ventura, 38. Better known as Cassie, she was also a singer formerly signed to his label. In addition, Ms. Johnson said, the jury would view videos of parties where Mr. Combs directed sexual encounters.

“You will see for yourself the defendant’s violence and its aftermath,” she said.

In one particularly graphic detail, Ms. Johnson described a party at which Ms. Ventura “felt like she was choking” when Mr. Combs “made an escort urinate into her mouth.”

Ms. Ventura, who was a 19-year-old model and aspiring singer when she met Mr. Combs in the mid-2000s, was physically abused early on in the relationship, Ms. Johnson said, describing how in 2009, Mr. Combs threw Ms. Ventura to the floor of an S.U.V. and stomped repeatedly on her face.

When it was their turn on Monday, Mr. Combs’s legal team portrayed their client as a “complicated man” who rose from humble beginnings and built an entertainment empire. They acknowledged violent tendencies, jealousy-fueled disputes with former girlfriends — and that he was responsible for domestic violence.

But despite his “bad temper,” he was being wrongly prosecuted for his “private, personal sex life,” Ms. Geragos said.

She told the jury that there might be multiple points during the trial, which is expected to last about eight weeks, “where you think he is a jerk, he is mean.”

“But he is not charged with being mean,” Ms. Geragos said. “He is not charged with being a jerk. He is charged with running a racketeering enterprise.”

Ms. Geragos described the witnesses testifying against Mr. Combs as “capable, strong, adult” women who were in love with Mr. Combs and who are now interested in financial gain. Ms. Ventura stayed in the relationship with Mr. Combs for over a decade, Ms. Geragos noted.

Over his three-and-a-half decade career, Mr. Combs helped make artists like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige into household names. Under the name Puff Daddy, he had a No. 1 smash of his own in 1997 with “I’ll Be Missing You.” Mr. Combs’s lavish White Parties, held in the Hamptons, Beverly Hills and other playgrounds of the rich, were magnets for celebrities and music stars.

The line to enter the courthouse on Monday morning was filled with reporters, podcasters, TikTok influencers and curious members of the public. Inside they found a clash of high-profile lawyers. Mr. Combs’s eight-person legal team is led by Marc Agnifilo, perhaps best known for representing Keith Raniere, the leader of the Nxivm sex cult.

Among the six prosecutors on the case is Maurene Comey, who has experience with complex criminal matters, like the 2021 sex trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. She is the daughter of the former F.B.I. director James Comey.

Mr. Combs has had other brushes with the law, including allegations of assault and a 1999 shooting inside a Manhattan night club that left three people injured. He had been at the club with his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, and was ultimately acquitted.

But the most widely seen episode of violence involving Mr. Combs came last May when CNN aired surveillance footage of him attacking Ms. Ventura in the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016. In that video, Mr. Combs, wearing only a towel around his waist, is seen brutally kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura. On Monday the jury was shown the footage but it was slowed down — Mr. Combs’s lawyers had said the tape had been sped up and made the actions seem faster than in real life. A government expert corrected the speed.

The prosecution’s first witness on Monday was Israel Florez, a Los Angeles police officer who had been a security guard at the InterContinental Hotel. He testified that he responded to a woman in distress on the sixth floor and found Mr. Combs seated in a towel, motionless but with “a devilish stare.” Huddled in the corner was Ms. Ventura, who had a “purple eye,” Mr. Florez said.

Mr. Florez said Mr. Combs offered him a stash of cash that he understood to be a bribe. “He was telling me, ‘Don’t tell nobody,’” Mr. Florez said. The prosecution has said that Mr. Combs bought the surveillance footage from hotel security for $100,000. But copies apparently remained.

The prosecution’s second witness was Daniel Phillip, the male stripper who said he was invited multiple times by Ms. Ventura to have sex with her while Sean Combs watched and masturbated.

During more than an hour of explicit testimony, Mr. Phillip said he saw Mr. Combs once threw a liquor bottle at Ms. Ventura when she did not immediately go to him when called. He then dragged Ms. Ventura to another room, testified Mr. Phillip, who said he heard what sounded like Mr. Combs smack her. “Bitch, when I tell you to come here, you come here now, not later,” Mr. Phillip testified he heard Mr. Combs say.

During his testimony, Mr. Combs’s three teenage daughters left the courtroom.

Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.

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The testimony of one woman who has accused Combs is uncertain.

One of the prosecutors, Maurene Comey, said last week that the government had been struggling to make contact with the woman’s lawyer, and that her participation in the case was in doubt.

“She has been served with a subpoena,” Ms. Comey said in court. “We do not know whether she intends to appear, and we are trying very hard to find out because we are having trouble communicating with her counsel.”

In the government’s opening statement on Monday, the prosecution did not appear to focus at all on the account of Victim-3.

Victim-3 is less critical to the government’s case because she is not associated with the two major sex trafficking charges Mr. Combs is facing. Her accusations are one small piece of the racketeering-conspiracy charge against the defendant; Mr. Combs has been accused of leading a criminal enterprise that facilitated a series of crimes — including sex trafficking — over a 20-year period.

Mr. Combs has denied sex trafficking anyone, and his lawyers have said the government is misconstruing consensual sex with long-term girlfriends.

The prosecution has said in court papers that throughout the course of their relationship, the woman known as Victim-3 “disclosed the defendant’s financial coercion and abuse to members of the defendant’s staff” and kept notes about the relationship on her phone.

At one point, the woman was expected to testify under her real name, but now it is unclear whether she will take the stand at all.

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Here are the charges against Sean Combs.

The charges include:

• Count 1, racketeering conspiracy: This count accuses Mr. Combs of conspiring to engage in sex trafficking, forced labor, enticement to engage in prostitution, kidnapping and other offenses. The count also says he used his global business empire to enrich himself and associates, in particular those who have demonstrated loyalty to him and a willingness to conceal his crimes.
  Maximum sentence: life in prison

• Count 2, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion: This count concerns Victim-1, Casandra Ventura, Mr. Combs’s longtime girlfriend and the R&B singer known as Cassie. Mr. Combs lost a bid to keep all footage of his 2016 hotel assault on Ms. Ventura out of the trial, and she is expected to testify in court under her own name.

  Maximum sentence: life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years

• Count 3, transportation of Ventura and “commercial sex workers” with the intent they engage in prostitution.

  Maximum sentence: 10 years in prison

• Counts 4 and 5 accuse Mr. Combs of similar crimes involving Victim-2, who has not been identified publicly and is expected to testify under a pseudonym.

The office prosecuting Sean Combs is led by an interim Trump appointee.

Mr. Clayton, 58, a lawyer at the firm Sullivan & Cromwell who has never been a prosecutor, served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 to 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term.

In seeking to block Mr. Clayton’s confirmation, Mr. Schumer said Mr. Trump “has made clear he has no fidelity to the law and intends to use the Justice Department, the U.S. attorney offices and law enforcement as weapons to go after his perceived enemies.”

In response to Mr. Schumer’s move, Mr. Trump announced that he would appoint Mr. Clayton to the U.S. attorney’s post on an interim basis and that he would continue to pursue Mr. Clayton’s Senate confirmation. Mr. Trump said Mr. Clayton had served with “great distinction” as the S.E.C. chair “and earned the respect of everyone.”

Mr. Clayton last week announced the appointment of Amanda Houle, a former senior prosecutor in the office, to serve as the new chief of the Southern District’s criminal division.

The federal charges against Mr. Combs were announced in September by the U.S. attorney at the time, Damian Williams, who served in the post during the Biden administration.

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Sean Combs’s lawyer says he committed violence, but not sex trafficking.

“The evidence is going to show you a very flawed individual,” Ms. Geragos said, “but it will not show you a racketeer, a sex trafficker or somebody transporting for prostitution.”

Over nearly an hour, the lawyer tried to undercut the government’s contention that Mr. Combs coerced two women into drug-fueled sex marathons with male prostitutes. Ms. Geragos described those sexual encounters as “consensual threesomes by adults.”

“We will not shy away from the things Mr. Combs did,” Ms. Geragos said, but the defense would not “own things he did not do.”

She implored the jury not to judge Mr. Combs by his “sexual preferences,” adding, “You may know of his love of baby oil,” referring to more than 1,000 bottles of the product that federal agents found in his home. “Is that a federal crime? No.”

Ms. Geragos homed in on a widely publicized video showing the 2016 assault of Ms. Ventura, describing it as fueled by jealousy — a common theme in their relationship. She said the encounter was a dispute involving a phone and described the footage as “overwhelming evidence of domestic violence.” But the lawyer pushed back on the government’s contention that it was evidence of sex trafficking.

At the beginning of her opening statement to jurors, Ms. Geragos introduced Mr. Combs as a magnetic, “larger-than-life figure” who rose from a modest upbringing in Harlem to become a wealthy executive and business owner. “No one gave him a dime,” she said.

Much of the lawyer’s opening statement focused on Ms. Ventura, seeking to portray her as a long-term girlfriend who loved Mr. Combs despite frequent tensions in their relationship. Ms. Ventura made “a choice to stay with him, a choice to fight for him, because for 11 years that was the better choice,” Ms. Geragos said.

The defense urged jurors to evaluate the potential motives of witnesses, highlighting the civil cases that have been filed against Mr. Combs over the past year and a half, starting with Ms. Ventura’s suit in late 2023. (Ms. Ventura’s suit was settled in one day for an “eight-figure” sum.)

She also addressed another former girlfriend of Mr. Combs who is at the center of the government’s sex-trafficking case and is being referred to by a pseudonym, Jane, in open court.

Their relationship may have been “toxic” and “dysfunctional,” Ms. Geragos argued, but the sex was consensual. “Regret does not mean that she was coerced,” she said.

As for another accuser, a former employee under the pseudonym Mia who is accusing Mr. Combs of coerced sex, Ms. Geragos implored jurors to “evaluate her motive” and read her real-time messages that will come into evidence.

Ms. Geragos framed the trial as something of an opportunity for her client following a year and a half of accusations in the news media and in civil lawsuits. “The story about this case can finally come out,” she said.

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The prosecution depicts Sean Combs as a serial abuser, and outlines three key witnesses.

Mr. Combs has been charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. The racketeering charge, in particular, is complex — to succeed, the government must show that Mr. Combs directed an organization in committing and covering up crimes; the law is usually used to prosecute mobsters and the leaders of organized crime rings.

For the jury, Ms. Johnson put the case — and Mr. Combs — in simpler terms: an abusive, controlling figure who terrorized women and had a pool of employees at his disposal to carry out and cover up crimes. Those included “freak-offs” — coerced, highly orchestrated sexual encounters that could last for days — along with arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

“During this trial, you are going to hear about 20 years of the defendant’s crimes,” Ms. Johnson said. “But he didn’t do it alone. He had an inner circle of bodyguards and high-ranking employees who helped him commit crimes and helped him cover them up.”

In an opening statement of about 50 minutes, Ms. Johnson described how the government would attempt to prove those accusations, through the testimony of at least three women who were coerced into sex with him, along with documentary evidence like videos, text messages and photographs.

She laid out what she said was just one night of many in the experience of Casandra Ventura, the singer — and Mr. Combs’s longtime girlfriend — known as Cassie. Mr. Combs found out that she was seeing another man, Ms. Johnson said, so the mogul woke up an employee in the middle of the night and said he was going to kill the man. They broke into the man’s house, but he was not there. Mr. Combs went looking for Ms. Ventura, Ms. Johnson said, and “did what he had done countless times before — he beat her brutally.”

The prosecutor described another victim, identified only as Jane, a single mother who started spending time with Mr. Combs in 2020. Jane agreed to participate in a freak-off to please Mr. Combs, Ms. Johnson said. Jane thought it was a one-time thing, but it did not turn out that way. Jane wanted Mr. Combs to wear condoms, but many times he would not. Once, when Jane vomited after taking drugs for a freak-off, Mr. Combs told her to “hurry up” and get back to join the escort, Ms. Johnson said.

A third woman, identified pseudonymously as Mia, is a former employee who the government said would testify about the times that Mr. Combs “forced himself on her sexually,” including forcing her to perform oral sex and sneaking into her bed to “penetrate her against her will.”

“You will see for yourself,” Ms. Johnson said, “the defendant’s violence and its aftermath.”

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Who’s who on Sean Combs’s defense team.

Mr. Agnifilo is a longtime criminal defense attorney who has represented high-profile figures like the former pharma executive Martin Shkreli; Keith Raniere, the leader of the Nxivm sex cult; and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who in 2011 was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York. (The case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was dismissed before a trial.) Along with Karen Friedman Agnifilo, his wife, Mr. Agnifilo is also part of the defense team for Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with murder in the killing of a health care executive.

In and out of the courtroom, Mr. Agnifilo has been perhaps the strongest voice in Mr. Combs’s defense. At a hearing last month, he reiterated the defense’s argument that Mr. Combs’s “freak-offs” — sexual encounters that the government contends were coerced — were consensual, with Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend Casandra Ventura a willing participant. “Call it ‘swingers,’ call it whatever you will,” Mr. Agnifilo said.

In media interviews, he has called the case an “unjust prosecution” and said that Mr. Combs is “an imperfect person but is not a criminal.”

Mr. Agnifilo was a longtime lawyer at the firm Brafman & Associates but left last year to help start Agnifilo Intrater. With him, he brought Ms. Geragos, whose father is Mark Geragos, the celebrity lawyer who has represented Mr. Combs in the past. Ms. Geragos has also spoken publicly about the case, including in a series of TikTok videos that she posted before Mr. Combs was arrested in September.

The team also includes Alexandra Shapiro, a prominent appellate court lawyer at the firm Shapiro Arato Bach who was once a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the Combs case. She graduated from Columbia Law School and was one of the first clerks for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. She also wrote a novel, “Presumed Guilty.”

Ms. Shapiro is widely recognized for her success rate at trial and on appeals. “If you want to maximize your chances of either prevailing at trial or on appeal against the S.D.N.Y., then you should call Alexandra Shapiro (if you can afford her),” the legal newsletter Original Jurisdiction wrote last year.

Given her specialty, Ms. Shapiro may be keeping a close eye during the trial on any issues that might be useful if the defense appeals a verdict.

Mr. Combs’s defense also includes Jason Driscoll of Shapiro Arato Bach and Anna Estevao of Harris Trzaskoma.

In the last few weeks, Mr. Combs has added several other lawyers.

Most prominent is Brian Steel, who defended the rapper Young Thug in a long-running racketeering trial in Georgia. Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, pleaded guilty to participating in criminal street gang activity, and was released with time served. But Mr. Steel — who was recently profiled in The New Yorker — drew wide notice, in legal circles and beyond, for a courtroom showdown where he accused a judge of improperly meeting with a witness. He was held in contempt but later vindicated when the judge was ordered to recuse himself from the case.

Mr. Combs’s team has also recently added Xavier Donaldson, a New York lawyer whose LinkedIn profile describes him as “litigator, professor, speaker, crisis manager,” and Nicole Westmoreland, who represented one of Young Thug’s co-defendants in his trial.

In April, Mr. Combs’s legal team asked for a two-month delay of the trial to consider what it said was newly produced evidence by the government. The judge denied the request, noting that Mr. Combs had four law firms working for him, giving him ample resources to prepare.

Since then, Mr. Combs has added two more.

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