Before the music mogul Sean Combs went to trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges this year, an avalanche of lawsuits had already cast him as a brazen, A-list supervillain, capable of almost anything.
In dozens of cases, many filed anonymously, Mr. Combs was accused of sexual assaults across decades, some of them said to have involved druggings at well-attended, star-studded parties and industry events. The accusers included men and women, and more than a dozen said they were minors at the time they were assaulted.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers have vehemently denied the abuses alleged in the suits, most of which are still working their way through the civil court system. But the sheer volume of complaints fueled speculation that the criminal prosecution of Mr. Combs could expose a shadowy underworld of celebrity depravity, and perhaps the enabling behavior of music industry executives.
The trial of Mr. Combs, 55, turned out to be something else entirely.
While filled with graphic details of explicit sex, the case that ended last week centered on a much narrower, more private sphere of Mr. Combs’s life. The sexual encounters at issue took place on smaller stages: isolated hotel rooms and homes. These were not orgies where Mr. Combs interacted openly with celebrities and music honchos, but discrete encounters with long-term girlfriends and typically a single male escort.
That these sessions involved voyeuristic sex that stretched over hours, even days, while Mr. Combs watched, masturbated and filmed, was without question salacious. But given the length of the investigation, the intensity of the federal raids on his mansions and the government’s interview of a man who said he had seen sex tapes involving minors (such tapes never materialized and the accusation did not lead to charges), the scope of what prosecutors were pursuing seemed broader than the resulting indictment.
“I think we were all expecting something very different,” said Mara S. Campo, a journalist who covered the case against Mr. Combs and had worked previously as an anchor at Revolt, his former television network. “I think that he’s been helped tremendously by the expectation that this was going to be very different than what it turned out to be. This didn’t look like what most people think of when they think of sex trafficking.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Combs was acquitted of the most serious sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges after an eight-week trial at which two former girlfriends testified that they were repeatedly pressured into sex with male escorts. Mr. Combs said the encounters had always been consensual. But he was convicted on two counts of transporting escorts across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, and faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years on each count.
The testimony of the women depicted Mr. Combs as a violent and manipulative man who caused them mental and physical harm. But the jurors did not find that, based on the evidence they saw, he had acted like a sex trafficker or a racketeering kingpin.
Mr. Combs, best known as Diddy or Puff Daddy, was not accused at trial of sexual or physical violence against anyone under the legal age of consent or anybody he did not know intimately. Contrary to widespread internet speculation and innuendo, the graphic sexual recordings entered as evidence did not feature any other well-known entertainers.
“These conspiracy theories took hold on TikTok and Instagram, and people thought something was happening that just wasn’t,” Teny Geragos, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, said in an interview.
At the start of the trial, Ms. Geragos urged jurors to set aside what they had seen on social media, in the news or from civil lawyers “looking for a payday,” asking them to focus only on the evidence presented in the courtroom.
At trial, the wider music industry was invoked only as biographical background. The mogul’s famed White Parties — the soirees he held from Beverly Hills to the Hamptons that have been whispered about as settings for V.I.P. bacchanalia — were mentioned just once, in passing. The only major celebrities to testify were Mr. Combs’s former partner, the singer Casandra Ventura, or Cassie, and the musician Kid Cudi, a momentary romantic rival.
“There was a lot of talk about whether the trial was going to be about these massive debaucherous parties and what other celebrities would be implicated and taking the stand,” Ms. Campo said. “That set the expectation for the trial.”
Even after Mr. Combs was indicted in September 2024, the sparse details provided by the government about what constituted the racketeering network it cited left many wondering if a #MeToo reckoning was finally coming for music, a realm that had long escaped scrutiny.
Instead, the case hardly grew broader than the kind of conduct reported in a November 2023 lawsuit that Ms. Ventura had filed. That suit had triggered the federal investigation and it listed much of the same behavior that the government would later recount in its indictment. In her suit, which was settled for $20 million in one day, Ms. Ventura accused Mr. Combs of years of physical and sexual abuse while they were involved romantically and professionally for more than a decade.
A second woman, testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” said Mr. Combs had also manipulated her into unwanted sex with escorts. The accusations amplified those of Ms. Ventura, but the encounters were, again, set in hotel rooms, away from the public eye and attended by only a handful of people at a time.
The settings for the deluge of civil suits that Ms. Ventura’s own filing unleashed were more varied. Many complaints described abusive encounters in the back rooms of events attended by large groups of people. The pattern described in the court papers was often similar: a drink at a fancy party, unusual wooziness and a sexual assault.
The suits include allegations of assaults at several White Parties, in the V.I.P. section of a nightclub in 2015 and at a party in the penthouse of a Manhattan hotel in 2022.
Many of the complaints were filed by a Houston-based litigator named Tony Buzbee. He said that one of his clients spoke to the government but that several others declined when investigators reached out. None of them testified in the case. He said he thought prosecutors might have decided against calling witnesses who had pending lawsuits to avoid the “so-called ‘money grab’ defense.”
Mr. Combs’s representatives have portrayed the many lawsuits as fabrications made in search of financial settlements, and have said that Mr. Combs’s parties were being unfairly swept into a narrative built on false allegations.
“It’s disappointing to see the media and social commentators twist these cultural moments into something they were not,” representatives for Mr. Combs said in a statement last year.
But in advance of the trial, Mr. Combs’s Gatsbyesque appetite for drawing attention to his parties had already helped fuel a narrative of wild gatherings rife with drugs and sex. The government said it had recovered some 1,000 bottles of baby oil from Mr. Combs’s properties, a sexual proclivity that spawned countless jokes.
“Diddy parties” became an unavoidable meme — a provocative joke used by high schoolers and stand-up comedians alike. Hosting “Saturday Night Live” this year, Dave Chappelle used his opening monologue to refer to “freak-off parties.”
“Can you imagine if you were me reading a newspaper and found out everyone in Hollywood had an orgy behind your back?” he joked.
These attitudes filtered into the trial. Potential jurors were questioned about what they knew about the case, and it became clear that the months of headlines had not missed them. “Oh, my God, P. Diddy — these terrible parties,” said one New Yorker as he recapped for the federal trial judge a conversation he’d had with his wife about the allegations.
Another potential juror told the judge, “I heard that Mr. Combs was known to have parties at his home and these parties had areas of the party where there were drugs and alcohol and sex,” noting that he had heard about the allegations on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
As the case progressed, however, it became clear that the prosecution’s narrative would focus on how Mr. Combs had operated in two long-term romantic relationships and as the boss of a retinue of assistants and bodyguards.
Before the trial started, prosecutors had attempted to introduce a number of additional sexual abuse accusers who would take the witness stand, but the judge overseeing the case hemmed them in. These accusers had not been part of the indictment but the government said they would demonstrate a pattern of Mr. Combs “refusing to take no for an answer.”
Mr. Combs’s lawyers aggressively opposed the introduction of the additional witnesses whose identities and the specifics of their allegations were not disclosed publicly.
Judge Arun Subramanian rejected the introduction of all but one of them, saying that the approved witness had allegations that aligned more closely with the timeline and substance of the indictment. But the proposed witness, who the defense described as another former girlfriend of Mr. Combs, was not called to testify. Neither was an additional former girlfriend who was referenced in the indictment. The government has not disclosed its rationale for not calling the additional witnesses.
When testimony did focus on the glitzy, rarefied world behind the velvet ropes, it tended to be fleeting. A party at Prince’s house, for instance, was not described as a setting for sexual abuse, but the trigger for Mr. Combs becoming upset that his girlfriend had attended.
Only the woman who testified as Jane got close to presenting the broader sense of bacchanal that Mr. Combs had become associated with.
She described a birthday party weekend in Las Vegas — led by another very famous rap icon (who went unnamed) and involving a private jet. She said the party ended with a sexual performance in a hotel room that was witnessed by a handful of others. But, she said, Mr. Combs had not been there.
The civil litigation has been out of the spotlight while Mr. Combs stood trial. Now, as he faces sentencing for the lesser charges, he will also have to contend with that pile of civil complaints, which consists of more than 50 lawsuits that accuse him of sexual abuse dating back as far as 1990.
More than half of the suits against Mr. Combs that remain were filed by Mr. Buzbee. After Mr. Combs was arrested last September, Mr. Buzbee teamed up with a legal advertising company in search of plaintiffs who had run-ins with Mr. Combs. They used social media ads and a hotline that they said was deluged with 12,000 calls in the first 24 hours after the number was publicized.
In an interview, Mr. Buzbee acknowledged the distance between the narratives of the civil suits and the criminal case. But he argued that the facts uncovered at trial — sex, multiple partners, “indiscriminate conduct with all kinds of drugs involved” — could still ultimately help his clients.
“Our cases involved different alleged victims, different burden of proof, very similar conduct, and no issue of consent,” Mr. Buzbee said.
In the final week of testimony at the criminal trial last month, Mr. Buzbee filed three new lawsuits naming Mr. Combs.
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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