“Mr. Combs has been singled out because he is a powerful black man, and he is being prosecuted for conduct that regularly goes unpunished,” declares a Tuesday filing by the incarcerated Sean “Diddy” Combs to toss out the government’s claim the Bad Boy Records founder violated the Mann Act, officially known as the White-Slave Traffic Act.
Facing dozens and dozens of civil lawsuits claiming assaults, abuse and retaliation, Combs has been behind bars at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his September 16 arrest on criminal charges. The day after the arrest, Combs entered a not guilty plea and has consistently denied he raped or abused anyone — even walking back his apology from the 2016 hotel security footage of him beating then girlfriend Cassie Ventura. Failing on several occasions to get released on $50 million bail, Combs is set to go to trial on racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution charges starting May 5.
It is that last charge that Combs and his Shapiro Arato Bach and Agnifilo Intrater lawyers are claiming is being weaponized by the once-Damian-Williams-run U.S. Attorney’s office for the South District of New York against the ‘All About the Benjamins’ performer because of his race.
“What was racist in its inception has often been racist in its operation,” the 13-page Memorandum of law in support a motion to dismiss Count Three of the superseding indictment. “The statute’s target was black male sexuality, and from Jack Johnson to Chuck Berry, the statute’s most notorious prosecutions targeted famous black men accused of deviant sexual behavior,” the February 18th filed document goes on to say. “This case continues the trend. In Count Three, the government charges a violation of the Act based on allegations that Mr. Combs transported male escorts—from a legal escort service—across state lines to have sex with his girlfriends.”
Looking at life in federal prison if found guilty on the current trio of claims and now open about his use of male and female escorts, Combs and his team are requesting a hearing at “a date and time to be determined by the Court, for an Order dismissing Count Three of the Superseding Indictment.”
Nothing is on Judge Arun Subramanian’s calendar yet.
Once a hearing is granted, there might be some bumps in the road coming from the prosecution.
Williams was running the SDNY U.S. Attorney’s office when the Combs probe began and indictments came down. The Joe Biden appointee exited his powerful position in the weeks before Donald Trump‘s return to office on January 20. Once the former Celebrity Apprentice host was back in the White Houses, Danielle Sassoon was named Acting United States Attorney for the so-called “Sovereign” District. However, Sassoon, former clerk to late SCOTUS Justice Justice Antonin Scalia, resigned last week along with a number of prosecutors in the SDNY office and elsewhere after being order by DC to drop bribery charges against NYC Mayor (for now) Eric Adams. Matthew Podolsky is now the Acting United States Attorney for the SDNY.
With that, the office did not respond to request for comment on Combs’ move to get Count Three stripped off his indictment.
Having called out the feds last month as prudes for going after him on the sex trafficking charge, Combs certainly directly tainted the sprawling SDNY in Tuesday’s filing. “It has gone out of its way to humiliate Mr. Combs and to prejudice the jury pool with pretrial publicity that plays on racist tropes,” the former music mogul and his attorneys said of the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Sticking with the New York court system, Combs sued NBCUniversal on February 12 for $100 million over what the rapper terms an “outrageous set of fresh lies and conspiracy theories” stemming from Peacock’s Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy documentary. Last week also saw the case that Combs and Jay-Z repeatedly raped a 13-year-old in 2000 dismissed by the Jane Doe plaintiff.
The lawyer for that now middle-aged Jane Doe is one Tony Buzbee. The Texas-based lawyer is representing over 100 clients with allegations of extreme misconduct against Combs — many of which looked headed for trial in the next year or so, regardless of what happens in the criminal case.
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