When the jurors deliberate Sean Combs’s fate in the coming weeks, they will confront a vast trove of evidence from two women who say his treatment of them for years swung between tender affection and sexual subjugation.
At the core of the panel’s review will be the question of whether the women — both put forward by prosecutors as sex-trafficking victims — were willing participants in sex marathons with male escorts that lie at the center of the federal case against Mr. Combs.
The women have testified for days that while they were in romantic relationships with Mr. Combs, they complied with his requests for voyeuristic, drug-fueled sex nights because they feared the retaliation of a man who wielded immense power over them.
Casandra Ventura said she was repeatedly beaten and feared he would make sex tapes of her public as he had threatened. “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, said she was repeatedly pressured to have sex with hired men — once after vomiting, another time on her birthday. She said she worried that, given his pattern of behavior, she would seriously displease him if she stopped, leading him to stop paying the $10,000-a-month rent on the home where she lives with her child.
“It was many, many blurred lines of love and affection mixed with emotional pressure to perform these things that my lover really desired,” Jane said of her relationship on the stand last week, “and so I wanted to fulfill my duties as a good girlfriend.”
Mr. Combs has vehemently denied the sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges against him. The heart of his defense is consent. His lawyers spent hours asking the women to review messages in which they expressed love for Mr. Combs and, at times, interest in the sex sessions.
“This case is about voluntary, adult choices made by capable adults in consensual relationships,” Teny Geragos, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, said at the start of the case.
Measuring the extent to which relationships are participatory versus coercive is among the most difficult tasks that jurors can be asked to tackle, so difficult that some prosecutors have been reluctant to bring cases where mutual expressions of love between the parties complicated matters.
But since the #MeToo movement ushered in a cultural shift in thinking about sex and power, legal experts say, some offices have been more willing to take on complex sexual exploitation cases.
“Years ago many of these cases would not have been brought,” said Julie Rendelman, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “There was a more stringent view of what a sex crime looked like, and as societal views changed, in certain ways the prosecutors needed to keep up.”
Prosecutors who bring such cases often rely on psychologists to delve into issues of emotional manipulation and “coercive control” at trial, bringing them in to testify when, say, a woman who accused a man of abuse later spoke well of him or continued a sexual relationship. In the Combs case, the government presented an expert witness who spoke of the complex behaviors of people who endure sexual violence.
Such testimony was effective during the trials that led to the convictions of Keith Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, and R. Kelly, the disgraced R&B singer. Prosecutors used the testimony of a forensic psychologist to help explain why women might have maintained relationships with a man who abused them.
“It was something that was clear to me from the outset that jurors would struggle with,” said Moira Penza, who prosecuted the Raniere case. “Most people don’t realize that most sexual assault happens within the context of a relationship or where somebody knows their attacker or abuser.”
“There’s a whole host of reasons, including trauma bonding and fear,” she went on. “There’s usually a very strong desire to appease this person who has so much power over your life.”
But juries still wrestle with the concept of a relationship that includes both sexual assault and consensual sex.
At the retrial of Harvey Weinstein last week, jurors delivered a split verdict on sex crime charges in which two of the women said they later had consensual sex with Mr. Weinstein after he assaulted them. During deliberations, which grew unusually heated, the jury asked to rehear a clinical psychologist’s testimony about why a woman who was sexually assaulted would continue any relationship with a perpetrator.
Defense lawyers often fight this sort of expert testimony from witnesses who have not analyzed the defendant or the person making an assault accusation. “It’s prejudicial to the defendant to bring these people in who can say that whatever they want to say fits into the narrative of the case,” said Donna Rotunno, a lawyer who defended Mr. Weinstein at his first trial in New York.
At the Combs trial, Dawn Hughes, the same forensic psychologist who testified in the Kelly and Raniere cases, told the jury about terms such as “love bomb” and “trauma bond” to help explain why victims might stay in abusive relationships.
The defense has aggressively opposed her testimony from the start, arguing that her discussion of broad generalities and “pop-psychology” terms would not help jurors understand the case in front of them. Mr. Combs’s lawyers are expected to introduce a forensic psychiatrist to rebut Dr. Hughes’s testimony and argue that “vague psychological profiles” are not helpful in evaluating an individual case.
When it comes time to deliberate, jurors will be asked to consider the legal definition of coercion: whether Jane and Ms. Ventura were compelled into the sex acts under threat of “serious harm,” which could mean physical, psychological, financial or reputational harm.
They will also have to consider the arc of the relationships, which were replete with conflicts over jealousy. Each of the women dated Mr. Combs for years and agreed to the encounters at the outset. But when they expressed reluctance, he would be dismissive of their concerns or put them down, they said.
Once, in 2024, after a violent brawl between Jane and Mr. Combs that left her with welts, he would not take no for an answer, she testified. Demanding that she take an Ecstasy pill and have sex with an escort, she said, Mr. Combs — his face an inch away from hers — said “is this coercion?”
If jurors are not convinced, it would undercut not just the government’s sex-trafficking case but also its broader racketeering conspiracy case, which argues that an inner circle of Mr. Combs’s employees helped to facilitate a pattern of sexual exploitation.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have focused on the text messages and other written communications in which the two women appeared to convey enthusiasm for the sexual encounters or took an active role in their planning, picking up supplies such as lubricant at the store and handling the logistics of hiring escorts for encounters in luxury hotel rooms.
“I’m always ready to freak off lolol,” Ms. Ventura wrote to Mr. Combs in 2009 in a message that was shown to the jury.
“I had so much fun, baby,” Jane wrote to Mr. Combs in 2022, after the couple spent a night with a man she described as an “entertainer.”
But in their testimony, Jane and Ms. Ventura sought to bring jurors into what they depicted as the complex dynamics of their relationships, explaining that they complied with his sexual demands both under pressure from Mr. Combs and out of a desire to please a man they both described as “larger than life.” Both women said they took the psychedelic drugs he gave them throughout the encounters — which could last several days — to distance themselves from the experience.
“I just didn’t feel like I had much of a choice — I didn’t really know what ‘no’ would be or what ‘no’ could turn into,” said Ms. Ventura, who was a 21-year-old singer, known as Cassie, on Mr. Combs’s record label when they began dating.
Ms. Ventura testified that she feared making Mr. Combs angry, describing a pattern of violence that left her with busted lips, black eyes and bruises.
The jury has repeatedly seen 2016 surveillance footage from a hotel where Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura had been having a “freak-off,” in which the music mogul threw her to the ground, kicked her and began dragging her. The defense has acknowledged that Mr. Combs had a problem with violence, but it has argued that the violence was fueled by jealousy and drug use and not related to any sexual coercion.
Ms. Ventura described years of consensual sex with Mr. Combs, saying that she only wanted to have sex with him and him alone. But she testified that at the end of their relationship, he raped her on the floor of her living room. Several weeks later, she said, they had consensual sex, before their relationship ended for good.
Jane’s relationship with Mr. Combs ended only nine months ago, when Mr. Combs was arrested, and she said on the stand that she was still processing parts of their sexual history.
In 2023, Jane sent Mr. Combs a stream of messages over several months in which she told him that she felt traumatized by the nights of sex with hired men. “I keep having nightmares about forced nights and all the times I felt like I couldn’t say no,” she texted him that November, shortly after Ms. Ventura filed a bombshell lawsuit against him.
Amid explosive fights over the issue, she said, Mr. Combs repeatedly brought up the home where he paid her rent and once threatened to send sex tapes to her child’s father.
During that period of tension, she and Mr. Combs even had a discussion over the phone about consent, Jane testified, in which he told her that if anyone watched videos of the hotel nights it would look like she was consenting and having the “best time.”
“I know I was consenting, and like you say, on tape, you could never tell I was uncomfortable,” she texted him later, “but being in my position I just didn’t want to let you down and, in turn, I let myself down.”
A prosecutor asked her if it was true that she was consenting.
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” she replied.
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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