The much-accused Sean “Diddy” Combs is fighting to stay out of prison for the rest of his life if found guilty on sex trafficking and other charges. To that end, with a trial set to start on May 5, the currently incarcerated ‘All About the Benjamins’ performer and his defense team have been tossing one legal grenade after another recently to blow up the fed’s case against the not guiltily pleading Combs.
Now Combs’ crew want the so-called “unconstitutionally broad” search warrants the government utilized squashed, along with all “the evidence and all fruits obtained from the warrants to search Combs’s residences, his person, his iCloud account, and his devices.” Along with past accusations that prosecutors are using “racist” laws against him and desiring to “police non-conforming sexual activity,” Diddy’s team are hoping to bleed out the case from the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York before it even gets in front of a jury
“On a theory that Mr. Combs’s entire life was a criminal enterprise, the government sought virtually limitless authority to seize any evidence related to that ‘enterprise’—all his digital devices and the information they contained, all information in his iCloud accounts, plus troves of records and items in his houses, almost none of which was contraband,” states a very heavily redacted memorandum of law in support of the motion to “suppress evidence obtained through search warrants.”
“The misrepresentations and misleading omissions in the warrants are frequent and patterned,” the filing asserts.
Arrested by the NYPD on September 16 in a Manhattan hotel lobby, Combs is charged with racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. Already behind bars at Brooklyn’s hardcore Metropolitan Detention Center, where United Healthcare CEO alleged assassin Luigi Mangione is too, Combs has repeatedly been denied a $50 million bail. Attacking the U.S. Attorney’s case on many fronts from almost the moment her was arrested, and facing dozens and dozens of civil suits of assault and more, Diddy is represented in the criminal case by a legal team led by Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos – though lawyer Anthony Ricco wants to exit., as he made clear last week.
Racked by turbulence due to Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the usually powerful and independent SDNY U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment Monday on the latest filing by Combs’ lawyers. With more women added to Combs’ case and indictment last month, the presently Matthew Podolsky-led SDNY will have to respond to the motion before Judge Arun Subramanian in the federal court docket sooner or later.
In the meantime, in their February 23 memo on search warrants and evidence, Agnifilo, Geragos and other members of Combs’ defense declare: “The government had in its possession, for example, a variety of evidence—including REDACTED —suggesting Victim-1’s participation in the alleged ‘freak-offs; (FOs) was voluntary and consensual, not coerced as the government suggested in its applications. The government’s claims REDACTED was based primarily on statements from Producer-1, an utterly unreliable witness whose claims were contradicted by other evidence that the government failed to mention. And the government’s obstruction allegations were based largely on texts and statements taken out of context—a critical part of the context being that REDACTED The affiant also failed to mention that nearly every witness he interviewed had REDACTED, giving them a financial motive to fabricate or embellish.”
“In the alternative and at a minimum, this Court should order a Franks hearing to hear additional evidence and determine whether the warrants were improperly obtained through deception,” adds the memo if Judge Subramanian decides not to stamp down the warrants and the evidence they unearthed.
Now, taking shots at the credibility of the feds and their tactics has long been a tried-and-true defense method from the Mob arrests of the 1970s and right up to this MAGA era. In Combs case, from the quickly settled for $30 million rape and abuse suit from his long-time ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in November 2023, the raids on his LA and Miami homes a year ago, his arrest at the Park Hyatt in September and the October sweep of his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the strategy has been building over the past several months – to varying degrees of success.
In its past responses in hearings on the case, prosecutors have said over and over that they worry Combs is or will try to intimidate or buy off witnesses – and has sought to discover who and with whom that may be occurring.
Along with Ricco’s February 21 request to depart Combs’ team because “under no circumstances can I continue to effectively serve as counsel for Sean Combs, consistent with the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice,” the once mogul has seen the case of an alleged repeated rape of a 13-year-old in 2000 by he and Jay-Z dismissed by the plaintiff on Valentines’ Day. On the other side, on February 12, Combs sued NBCUniversal for $100 million in a defamation action over so-called “outrageous set of fresh lies and conspiracy theories” in the Peacock documentary Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy.
As mentioned, besides that now NBCU matter, the tossed Jay-Z suit and the criminal case, Combs is accused in over 25 other cases of assault, abuse, rape and more. Cases that will see him in and out of court long after the sex trafficking case is done and dusted, regardless of the outcome.
The post Sean “Diddy” Combs Wants Sex Trafficking Evidence Squashed; No One “Coerced Into Sex,” Claims Heavily-Redacted Filing appeared first on Deadline.
