Casandra Ventura, Sean Combs’s former girlfriend and the star witness at his federal trial, asked the judge in the case to consider “the many lives that Sean Combs has upended with his abuse and control” in deciding the music mogul’s sentence for prostitution-related convictions.
Ms. Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, was one of seven people whose letters about Mr. Combs were part of a legal filing by prosecutors submitted to the court early Tuesday, which asked Judge Arun Subramanian to sentence Mr. Combs to 11 years and three months.
The testimony of Ms. Ventura had been central to prosecutors’ accusation that Mr. Combs led a criminal enterprise whose purpose included committing and covering up sex trafficking.
In July, at the conclusion of an eight-week trial at Federal District Court in Manhattan, a jury rejected the bulk of the government’s case, acquitting Mr. Combs of the most serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, but finding him guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Ms. Ventura and another woman, identified in court only as Jane, were depicted by the government as having been coerced into drug-fueled sexual encounters with hired men — called “freak-offs” or “hotel nights” — that were the basis of the prostitution convictions. Though the jury rejected the government’s contention that the encounters were coerced, Ms. Ventura and others connected to the case had the opportunity to share their perspective on the effect those crimes had on them to help inform the judge’s sentencing decision.
“While the jury did not seem to understand or believe that I engaged in freak-offs because of the force and coercion the defendant used against me,” Ms. Ventura wrote in her three-page letter, “I know that is the truth, and his sentence should reflect the reality of the evidence and my lived experience as a victim.”
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The post Cassie Asks Judge to Weigh Her Suffering When Sentencing Sean Combs appeared first on New York Times.
