The most haunting image of the Sean Combs trial for many of us will be the video of him, wearing a towel and striped socks, kicking and dragging a limp Casandra “Cassie” Ventura down the hall of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. It’s haunting on its own terms, witnessing such abuse. But it’s also haunting now that the trial is over, knowing that Mr. Combs could not be convicted of that behavior, because of failures in our legal system.
On Wednesday, Mr. Combs was acquitted on the most serious charges against him: sex trafficking and racketeering. A jury convicted him on two counts of transporting people to engage in prostitution, for which he faces as many as 20 years in prison. But it seems likely that he will serve much less than that. The prosecutors are asking for about four to five years in prison, while Mr. Combs’s attorneys are seeking less than two and a half.
That the hotel tape is not by itself enough to convict Mr. Combs — of something — speaks to the system’s failures. When that video was released, prosecutors were subject to the statute of limitations for domestic violence in California. The time to prosecute Mr. Combs’s evident violence had long since run out.
Mr. Combs’s domestic abuse came up again and again in that trial — by the prosecutors, by the witnesses, and even by his own defense team. It came up so often, even in his lawyer’s own closing argument — “We own the domestic violence. I hope you guys know that.” — that it seemed to me practically a wink, a shrug, at Mr. Combs’s documented abuse. How hard is it to own domestic violence with no charges?
Mr. Combs himself offered up a grossly inadequate apology once the tape became known. “I make no excuses,” he said, and then went on to make excuses, saying he’d “hit rock bottom” in his life. What is rock bottom, I wonder, for someone with hundreds of millions of dollars, a staff tending his every whim, multiple houses, all the benefits and trappings of fame, talent and power? And in any case, is “rock bottom” ever a justification for violence?
There is also another more subtle, more sinister image that prosecutors tried and failed to get the jury to see: That video showed violence, yes, but, more importantly, it showed how a powerful man coerced and controlled a woman. But how were they to prove coercive control when text messages showed both Ms. Ventura and “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, appearing to want to participate in the baby oil-fueled orgies called “freak-offs,” which they even sometimes helped arrange? To the uninitiated, these women hardly sound coerced; they sound exactly like what Mr. Combs’s lawyer, Teny Geragos, described: “capable adults” making “voluntary adult choices.”
Laura Richards, the behavioral analyst and host of the podcast “Crime Analyst,” which covers gender-based violence, likes to say, “When fear is present, consent is not.” And fear is the context in which Ms. Ventura testified she had participated, her enthusiasm a hopeful deposit into Mr. Combs’s account of good will. It was that kind of deposit that brought her to that hotel just days before her first big movie premiere: “If I pleased him with a freak-off,” she testified, “then my premiere would run smoothly.” (In the end, she had to prepare for the premiere with a busted lip and a black eye.)
She said Mr. Combs wasn’t just controlling her physically (as was captured on that videotape); he was controlling her emotionally, professionally and psychologically. She said he had power over her career to such an extent that he suppressed her music — Why did she only release one album if she had a contract for 10? She said he sometimes even controlled how she did her nails.
With this context, the acquiescing texts can be read as a kind of transaction: if she makes enough deposits into this good-will account by appearing enthusiastic, maybe she’ll earn some steps toward freedom. It’s the same reason a girlfriend suffering severe domestic abuse marries her abuser: She hopes that with this show of loyalty she will wrest back some piece of her autonomy. Kit Gruelle, an advocate for domestic violence victims in North Carolina, calls women in situations like these “passive hostages.”
What about the male stripper who testified he could hear Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura, and Ms. Ventura crying, in the next room? Or the friend who testified she saw Mr. Combs drag Ms. Ventura by the hair and push her to the ground, so she hit her head on brick? Or the former employee who testified that she watched Mr. Combs beat Ms. Ventura? That’s what isolation looks like. Surrounded by people, all of whom stand by and follow his orders, while she is abused. The author Leslie Morgan Steiner, who survived an abusive relationship, compares it to being in the Mafia. “You really feel like everywhere you turn is this real danger,” she said.
The sociologist Evan Stark wrote what is arguably the clearest definition of coercive control, as “a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to an alien will by violating their physical integrity, denying them respect and autonomy, depriving them of social connectedness, and appropriating or denying them access to the resources required for personhood and citizenship.” In other words: violence, intimidation, isolation and control. How many of these four elements were there, in Ms. Ventura’s and “Jane”’s stories?
In Mr. Stark’s view, physical abuse can be part of coercive control, but the coercion — the fear, the loss of agency — is how you’d entrap someone. One of the most common forms of coercion that I’ve seen in my years of reporting on domestic violence is the use of children to gain leverage over a victim, particularly with threats to hurt the children or threats to take full custody of children if a victim does not obey. But more and more often, technology is used to maintain control and indeed, Ms. Ventura testified that she feared leaked videos would be ruinous for her.
Some states are beginning to recognize the implicit role that coercion has in a domestic abuse situation and a wave of new legislation has proliferated across the country in Massachusetts, Colorado, New Jersey, Connecticut and other states. After the hotel videotape emerged, California put forward a bill to extend the statute of limitations on domestic violence crimes. It was signed into law last September and now allows for seven years — but that still would have been too short for prosecutors in Mr. Combs’s case.
Maybe if that searing video cannot, by itself, garner accountability from a perpetrator in our current system, then perhaps we ought to rethink that system.
Rachel Louise Snyder (@RLSWrites) is a professor of literature at American University. She is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” and “Women We Buried, Women We Burned.”
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