I covered Diddy’s first trial, back in 2001, when he was still Puff Daddy and facing charges of gun possession and bribery after a nightclub shooting that wounded three people. During breaks, I sometimes spoke with his mother, Janice Combs, who was warm, rattled, and oddly charmed by my British accent. She liked it so much she even asked me to record the outgoing message on her cellphone. Her anxiety was clear. His father had been killed when Diddy was just a toddler, and as our correspondent Michael Daly wrote in his dispatches from this latest courtroom drama, that kind of trauma doesn’t just haunt a man… It molds him.
That first trial ended with an acquittal and a triumphant strut. This one ends with a weary ambiguity. Outside the Manhattan courthouse, a group of fans were already rubbing baby oil on their arms in a show of loyalty, an on-brand, if grotesque tribute to the flawed hero. A cheer went up when they learned Diddy had just been found not guilty on three of the five charges against him, including racketeering and sex trafficking.
The verdict was partial, messy, and perhaps, like a three-day-long “freak off” that never seemed to climax, determinedly unsatisfying.
Diddy has always been more than a man. He’s a brand, a myth, a billionaire, a slick mashup of Harlem hustle and Hamptons billionaire hedonism. But the trial that just concluded at least cracked the gloss. And what spilled out wasn’t swagger. It was control, desperation, and a rapacious appetite for power.
This trial was never just about the alleged assaults or trafficking. It became a referendum on coercive control, the insidious psychological terrain where men don’t force but manipulate. Where women aren’t dragged but coaxed. Where ambition is weaponized. Cassie Ventura and “Jane” weren’t kidnapped at gunpoint. They walked in with dreams of stardom and stayed for the high of proximity to fame. Their ambition was used against them. That was the deal. But as the trial made painfully clear, it was a one-sided deal, the currency was humiliation. That’s why Jennifer Lopez walked away. She was already somebody. Cassie and Jane were still becoming. Diddy could help them. Instead, he hurt them.
The “freak-offs,” the IV nurses hired not to heal but to help the girls stay on their feet, the NDA-choked silences weren’t scenes from a dystopian music video. They were part of a brutal machinery to keep these young and beautiful women fed, medicated, visible, and obedient. Not for love. Not even for lust. But for a man whose addiction wasn’t to sex or women, it was to domination.
The testimony revealed so much, but what lingers isn’t just the decadence and depravity. It revealed the panic. Diddy himself, on the phone, groveling to hotel security to bury the tape of him assaulting Cassie:
“If it gets out, I’m finished,” he reportedly said. He got it. The $100,000 wasn’t just a payoff. It was an emergency flare from a crumbling empire built on shame, surveillance and silence.
The jury gave him a narrow escape. Two guilty counts of transporting prostitutes. Lighter charges. Lighter sentencing. I’ve covered enough trials to know juries don’t behave as expected; they don’t just weigh the law, they weigh fatigue, internal dynamics, holidays, doubt. We haven’t heard from a single juror yet, but I suspect they felt the bind: Diddy isn’t Epstein. He didn’t ferry underage Snow Whites, as they were called, to a private island. Diddy sauntered in through the VIP entrance, operated in the open, strolled the red carpets with Cassie on his arm, hoisted Grammy trophies and launched his couture line at the Met Gala.
As the verdict came down, Diddy treated three out of five “not guilty” as a win, pumping a fist in the air and applauding. Denied bail, he’s back in jail for now, awaiting sentencing on Oct. 3.
Janice Combs was relieved but this trial has been an ordeal. She sat silently, head down behind the defendant in courtroom 26a, and heard how the celebrity son she had worked three jobs and driven a school bus to support had paid male escorts to urinate in his girlfriend’s mouth.
Diddy never shied away from attention, including posing bare-chested on the cover of the September 2021 Vanity Fair with the word “LOVE” tattooed on his body. That’s why he assumed that if the assault tape came out, he’d be finished. But it turns out he lacks imagination. America loves a redemption story, a second act, even if it has collectively gasped at surveillance video of you storming down a hotel corridor, punching and kicking your girlfriend and dragging her back to the room from which she has just tried to escape.
Molded by the bullet that killed his heroin-dealing father, he’s probably already planning his Public Penance tour. Expect yet another name change. A prime-time interview with Gayle King where he will try to present himself with more restraint than R. Kelly. A new track will drop on YouTube, soulful, repentant, ghostwritten. Slowly, the celebrity friends will drift back, although they won’t post selfies online.
And somewhere, a luminous and talented young woman who wants to be a star will decide he’s worth her affection. That she’ll be the exception. That his past was overblown. That Cassie was crazy, and it was all just a hideous smear campaign.
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