America is riveted by the Diddy trial for many reasons: celebrity, kink, drugs, violence, guns, baby oil. You can almost hear Ryan Murphy calling FX now to pitch American Crime Story: Diddy Do It? Influencers are staking out the courthouse, live-updating X with witnesses’ testimony, and providing TikTok updates that one creator calls “Diddy-lations.” And people are eating it up.
Diddy—whose legal name is Sean Combs—has pleaded not guilty to the charges he faces of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. Many Americans have taken to the comment sections to offer their full-throated belief in his innocence. Despite the video evidence of domestic violence, the photos of Combs’s guns with serial numbers removed, and the multiple witnesses testifying that Combs threatened to kill them, this group insists that Diddy’s biggest sin is nothing more than being a hypermasculine celebrity with “libertine” sexual tastes.
The trial is estimated to take eight to 10 weeks; we’ve made it through just two. No one can predict the outcome. But why do so many men—and a surprising number of women—feel the need to defend this man? The jury has already watched the now-infamous surveillance footage of Combs dragging Cassie Ventura, the prosecution’s star witness, by the collar of her sweatshirt through a hotel—and that’s not even one of the things he’s on trial for.
I can’t look away from the Diddy trial, because it feels like the trial not of one man, but of something much larger. The jury—made up of eight men and four women—will decide whether to convict Combs, but the broader culture, in its response to this trial, is deciding whether #MeToo was a movement or a moment.
At the center of the trial is the question of coercion. Did Ventura participate in hundreds of drug-fueled sexual encounters with strangers for Combs, who liked to watch, because she enjoyed them? Or did Combs use his power over her to force her? When they met, she was 19, an eager and ambitious singer. He was 17 years older, and arguably the most powerful man in the music industry. His label, Bad Boy, signed her to a highly unusual, long-term 10-album deal. He was her boss and, soon, her boyfriend. The evidence presented by both sides serves as a Rorschach test. How you see it says a lot about how the #MeToo movement did—or did not—alter your vision.
The facts seem clear. Ventura was a legal adult, but barely, when her career was effectively handed over to Combs in 2006. Today, musical artists such as Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter invent their own persona. But in the mid-2000s, many artists were strictly controlled by their labels. Particularly when the artists were women. The people paying the bills didn’t just dictate what these women sounded like—they dictated their hair color, their weight. You have to watch only one episode of Combs’s MTV show Making the Band to get a taste of the climate he created. He made artists compete in singing battles to earn a bed to sleep in and ordered them to walk miles from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get him a specific slice of cheesecake. Behind the scenes, things were worse. One singer said Diddy controlled every aspect of her appearance “down to my toenails.”
Sure, maybe Ventura loved him. But sometimes hostages fall in love with their captors. Even the ones who beat them. Sure, women have an array of sexual tastes, just like men. But it’s hard to imagine a woman enjoying having intercourse while, as Ventura said in her testimony, suffering from a painful urinary tract infection. It’s hard to imagine feeling aroused after your partner threw a glass bottle at you, as a male sex worker said he witnessed Combs do to Ventura. And when people are having a consensual good time, they don’t usually try to sneak out of the room, barefoot—as Ventura was seen doing in the hotel surveillance footage—only for their partner to catch them, grab them by the back of the neck, throw them to the ground, and kick them. Repeatedly. Ventura said that the sex acts made her feel “worthless.” But, as the video showed, attempting to extract herself came with a price.
It’s been almost eight years since the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement forced a reassessment of abuse and power. In the future, I remember thinking, we will not just speak out against bad actors; we will refuse to participate in the systems that protected them. Going forward, everyone would understand that, in a world of power imbalances, the difference between what a woman chooses and what happens to her can be very big indeed.
Instead, something else happened over the subsequent years. American women have seen our rights eroded and our access to lifesaving health care curbed. An accused sexual abuser is president of the United States, and his administration is hard at work on schemes to persuade more women to stay home and have kids. Many men have fought hard to undermine the progress of the #MeToo movement. Like Combs running after Ventura in that video, they have tried to drag women back into the past, where they could do as they liked.
And lately, they have been having a lot of success.
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