It was September 2023, and Sean Combs was on top of the world.
On the 12th day of that month, he accepted the global icon award at the MTV Video Music Awards, which recognized Mr. Combs’s decades of success as a trailblazing record producer and media mogul.
Three days later, he released “The Love Album: Off the Grid,” his first solo studio LP in 17 years, and Mayor Eric Adams of New York gave him the key to the city, recognizing Mr. Combs as “the embodiment of the New York City attitude.”
That month, Mr. Combs was also busy planning sexual encounters involving his girlfriend “Jane” and hired male escorts, at hotels in New York and Miami Beach, Fla. These encounters, which the government has described as elaborate, drug-fueled sex marathons with hired men that Mr. Combs coerced two women to participate in, are central to the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
The arrangements for those encounters — flight plans, hotel reservations, negotiations over escort rates and a web of payments — were laid out in detail at Mr. Combs’s trial on Monday. Maurene Comey, the lead prosecutor in the case, asked a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations to walk jurors through the planning of the events by reading from text messages, American Express bills and other records as the 34th and final witness for the government before it rests its case.
Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty and denied the accusations against him. His lawyers have argued consistently throughout the seven-week trial that Mr. Combs’s sexual arrangements were all consensual, and that no criminal conspiracy exists.
The events in September 2023 came just a couple of months before Mr. Combs’s life was upended. In November of that year, Ms. Ventura — the singer Cassie — accused him of rape, sex trafficking and years of physical abuse in a bombshell lawsuit, and prosecutors in New York began the criminal investigation that led to Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024.
According to evidence laid out for jurors — much of which was not visible to the public to protect the privacy of Jane, who testified earlier under a pseudonym — Mr. Combs spent 17 days that month at one Manhattan hotel, while he arranged for an escort to join him and Jane at another.
The gathering almost did not happen. The day before she was set to fly from Los Angeles to meet Mr. Combs, Jane sent him a bitter and angry text message. She had just heard Mr. Combs bragging on a podcast about having a marathon sex session with another woman.
“I’m not coming to New York,” Jane wrote. “I feel disrespected.” She added: “I don’t want to be used and locked in a room to perform and fulfill your fantasies.”
“Girl, stop,” Mr. Combs told her, and they spoke by phone. Fifteen minutes later, Jane sent a message to a Combs aide: “OK, we spoke. I’ll be able to travel tomorrow.”
Earlier in the trial, Jane testified that she had expected to have a romantic time with Mr. Combs, and that they would have dinners, go shopping “and just be together.”
As the time for their encounter neared, Mr. Combs was busy negotiating with an escort service over the price of a man he wanted to hire.
“Stop raising my rates,” he told Bridget, a booking agent at the escort service, Cowboys4Angels. “I’m a long timer.”
“You want the best guys, they got the highest rates,” Bridget responded.
In New York, Jane had six with two hired men in succession. The first did not go well — “He couldn’t even perform,” Mr. Combs complained to the escort agent — and so Jane reached out to another man she had been with before.
After the events were over, aides to Mr. Combs texted about hiring a nurse to administer intravenous injections to help the participants recover.
Evidence presented to the jury by Joseph Cerciello, the Homeland Security special agent, showed that a company controlled by Mr. Combs paid an American Express bill containing charges related to encounters at that hotel. A business manager who worked with Mr. Combs was authorized to wire $5,000 to Jane, and Jane used Venmo to send the escort agent $1,000.
A week later, Jane traveled to Miami Beach for another hotel encounter with one of the escorts from New York. Text messages presented to the jury showed that around the same time, Mr. Combs invited another woman to the same hotel for another session.
As prosecutors near the end of their case, they have been laying out the arrangements for encounters like these, underscoring financial transactions that tie Mr. Combs and his companies to them.
Earlier on Monday, jurors saw 14 sexually explicit video clips that prosecutors said each showed Jane, along with Mr. Combs and other men. Following an order from the judge, the videos — which totaled about 18 minutes — were not shown to reporters or the general public, and the jury watched them on screens, listening on headphones.
While the videos played, showing encounters from 2021 and 2022, one juror’s eyebrows shot up; another scowled and took notes. One of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, Nicole Westmoreland, studied the panel’s faces closely. But they were largely impassive.
As the videos played, Mr. Combs leaned to whisper to another of his lawyers, Teny Geragos, scanned the jury and jotted notes by hand.
Anusha Bayya, Olivia Bensimon and Julia Jacobs contributed reporting.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
The post As Sean Combs Took a Victory Lap, He Planned Sex Nights, Prosecutors Say appeared first on New York Times.
