Prosecutors presented a trove of text and audio messages at Sean Combs’s federal trial on Monday that involved the music mogul’s former chief of staff, as they seek to weave together the evidence in their racketeering conspiracy case.
Though the former employee, Kristina Khorram, has not testified, she has been a main character at Mr. Combs’s trial, where prosecutors have sought to prove that an inner circle of staff members helped facilitate the sex trafficking of two women. Mr. Combs has referred to Ms. Khorram as his “right hand.”
The messages presented by prosecutors showed Ms. Khorram’s involvement in directing assistants to handle logistics for Mr. Combs’s stays at luxury hotels. Prosecutors say that for years, Mr. Combs’s staff booked him hotel rooms, stocking them with baby oil and drugs, for coerced sex marathons between his girlfriends and hired men who were generally paid in cash.
“Can you run four thousand dollars cash to PD’s hotel?” Ms. Khorram texted one of Mr. Combs’s assistants in 2016, using a nickname for Mr. Combs. Earlier, she had asked the assistant to stock a Four Seasons hotel room with Gatorade, water and chicken noodle soup.
Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. His lawyers have argued that the women at the center of the case were long-term girlfriends who repeatedly consented to sexual encounters with male escorts. They have asserted that his inner circle was working for an entirely lawful business, not a criminal conspiracy.
“Not one witness will get into this courtroom and will take that witness stand and tell you that they were part of any ‘Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization Act’ enterprise,” said Teny Geragos, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, at the start of the trial, referring to the federal law underlying the case.
“And the reason is simple,” she went on, “There was not one.”
In outlining the final witnesses scheduled to testify this week, prosecutors have not signaled that Ms. Khorram will take the stand. Instead, they have been seeking to underscore her roles through years of communications.
The text messages were presented through the testimony of an employee from the prosecutor’s office who reviewed extensive charts containing the communications.
During cross-examination, the defense suggested that the texts about nights at hotels told an incomplete story of Ms. Khorram’s work for Mr. Combs. It highlighted text messages that showed efforts to keep business expenses and personal expenses separate in an attempt to support its argument that Mr. Combs’s private sex life had “nothing to do” with his businesses.
The government seized Ms. Khorram’s cellphones in March 2024, when she was with Mr. Combs at a Florida airport, on the same day that agents raided two of the mogul’s homes.
In the messages, Ms. Khorram referred to Mr. Combs wanting a “wild king night” — one of several terms, in addition to “freak-offs,” that prosecutors say was used for the sex marathons with escorts and his girlfriends. Messages involving Ms. Khorram and, at times, Mr. Combs’s security employees detailed purchases from a person referred to as “Guido,” who has previously been identified by witnesses as a drug dealer.
The prosecution also highlighted Ms. Khorram’s interactions with the women at the center of the government’s case: Casandra Ventura and a woman who goes by the pseudonym Jane in court, who both testified at the trial for days.
Ms. Ventura testified at length about repeated beatings from Mr. Combs throughout their relationship, saying the violence contributed to her compliance in the sexual encounters. Jane said she started to feel obligated to participate because Mr. Combs would bring up the $10,000-a-month rent that he paid for her home in Los Angeles.
Jurors saw texts from 2017 in which Ms. Ventura appeared to text Ms. Khorram about Mr. Combs’s violence, saying “no one deserves being dragged by their hair” and that she locked the door for her safety. In that exchange, Ms. Khorram asked if Ms. Ventura was OK and told her she would try to talk to Mr. Combs.
In 2023, after Ms. Ventura filed a lawsuit alleging years of physical and sexual abuse by Mr. Combs, messages showed that Ms. Khorram was privy to the growing conflict between Mr. Combs and Jane over the sex nights.
Around that time, when Jane was telling him that she had been traumatized by the events, Ms. Khorram urged Mr. Combs to be honest with her, saying, “We all know what your kryptonite is and where you don’t make the best choices.” In that exchange, Mr. Combs texted Ms. Khorram asking for her to ensure that Jane’s rent had been paid.
The next month, Jane texted Ms. Khorram that Mr. Combs had threatened to send videos of the sex nights to her child’s father. “Mind you, these are sex tapes where I’m heavily drugged and doing things that he asked of me for the past three years that I am currently recovering from,” Jane wrote to Ms. Khorram. Jane previously testified that she later had a conversation with Ms. Khorram in which the aide assured her that “nothing is going to happen with these tapes.”
At the start of Monday, the judge overseeing the trial dismissed a juror after the man gave inconsistent information about where he lives, raising concerns that he had been seeking a spot on the jury of the high-profile case.
Lawyers for Mr. Combs have acknowledged that the jury is diverse, but strenuously opposed the juror’s removal, arguing that the dismissal of the man, who is Black, would unfairly disadvantage Mr. Combs. The alternate juror who will replace him is a white man.
Prosecutors raised the issue last week after the juror, in casual conversation with a court staff member, said he had recently moved in with his girlfriend in New Jersey. During jury selection, the juror, who works in accounting for the Department of Corrections in New York, had said he lived in the Bronx with his fiancée. The prosecution said the inconsistency demonstrated a concerning “lack of candor.”
Judge Arun Subramanian said that during discussions with the man — Juror No. 6 — in his robing room, the inconsistencies about where he lived only deepened. The judge said Juror No. 6’s explanations raised the concern that he was “shading answers” to try to get on the jury originally — and to stay on the jury once his qualifications were questioned.
“There’s nothing that the juror could say at this point that would put the genie back in the bottle,” the judge said on Monday.
Last week, after prosecutors first raised concerns about the juror, a lawyer for Mr. Combs accused the government of making a “thinly veiled effort to dismiss a Black juror.” The jury is racially mixed, but the defense has noted that Juror No. 6 was one of two Black men.
Judge Subramanian quickly rejected the accusation, saying there was no basis for it.
“To be perfectly clear, from the outset of this proceeding to the current date, there has been no evidence and no showing of any kind of any biased conduct or biased manner of proceeding from the government,” he said.
Anusha Bayya and Ben Sisario contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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