Sean “Diddy” Combs’ legal team is painting the violent Cassie Ventura video as just one “side” of a “mutually violent” relationship.
According to TMZ, the disgraced rapper’s lead defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo, told the judge Friday that the team “is going to take the position there was mutual violence in their relationship.”
This comes after Combs first denied the allegations of physical abuse in Ventura’s 2023 lawsuit against him, calling them “offensive and outrageous” before he was caught lying last May when CNN released footage showing him savagely beating her in a hotel hallway.
Combs is not denying the allegations this time, according to his attorney.
“We are absolutely going to admit to domestic violence,” Agnifilo said, according to TMZ, “But at what point does it become coercive?”
The team will submit a “corrected” version of the CNN hotel footage to prove that “both” parties were “violent” during the 2016 hotel incident, along with two cell phone videos taken of the beating by a security guard that will supposedly show Ventura being just as abusive as Combs.
The disgraced mogul turned down a plea deal earlier this month to risk defending himself in the sex-trafficking, racketeering, and prostitution case. Sources told Deadline that Combs feels confident he can beat the charges. He seemed confident he would do so when he greeted jurors on the first day of his trial this week, nodding at them with his hands in his pockets.
Things seemed to go Combs’ way the past two days—the defense was granted additional time to wrap up jury selection, which was supposed to end on Friday but will be extended until just before opening statements on Monday. By holding the final phase of selecting jurors on Monday, there’s less of a chance for jurors to drop out over the weekend or be influenced by other factors. The prosecution opposed the delay, according to The Guardian.
Combs had another win this week, too: The prosecution’s star witness and her attorney have both gone missing ahead of the trial. Victim-3, as she has been referred to in court documents, was set to testify about decades of abuse she suffered at the hands of Combs, thus establishing a longstanding pattern of behavior.
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