Reuters
- Sean “Diddy” Combs addressed a Manhattan court at his sentencing hearing on Friday.
- The hip-hop mogul was convicted in July of prostitution-related charges.
- In a pre-sentencing letter to the judge, Combs asked for a second chance.
In a last-ditch bid for freedom, Sean “Diddy” Combs pleaded for mercy, apologized to his sex trafficking accusers, and said he’s learned his lesson while speaking at his sentencing hearing on Friday following his conviction on prostitution-related charges.
Donning a cream-colored sweater over a white button-down and black pants, the 55-year-old hip-hop mogul said he’s lost his self-respect and hates himself in a speech to US District Judge Arun Subramanian in a packed lower Manhattan courtroom.
“My actions were disgusting, shameful, and sick,” Combs said. “I was sick, sick from the drugs. I was out of control. I needed help, but I didn’t get the help.”
“Because of that, I could make no excuse. And I can really make no excuse because I knew better,” he said.
Before Combs addressed the court, six of his children made emotional pleas for why their father should be released from behind bars and told the judge that Combs was a changed man.
“He is still our dad and we still need him present in our lives,” Combs’ 18-year-old daughter, Jessie, said.
Ahead of his sentencing hearing, Combs urged the judge, in a four-page letter filed with the court on Thursday, to take “mercy” on him.
“I take full responsibility and accountability for my past wrongs,” Combs wrote to Subramanian. “This has been the hardest 2 years of my life, and I have no one to blame for my current reality and situation but myself.”
The Bad Boy Records founder added, “In my life, I have made many mistakes, but I am no longer running from them. I am so sorry for the hurt that I caused, but I understand that the mere words ‘I’m sorry’ will never be good enough as these words alone cannot erase the pain from the past.”
“I can’t change the past, but I can change the future,” Combs wrote, as he asked the judge for a second chance.
“Today, I humbly ask you for another chance—another chance to be a better father, another chance to be a better son, another chance to be a better leader in my community, and another chance to live a better life,” Combs wrote.
“I am writing this not to gain any sympathy or pity, this experience is simply the truth of my existence and has changed my life forever and I will never commit a crime again,” he vowed.
Before the sentencing hearing, several people, including R&B singer Cassie Ventura and a former Combs assistant who accused him of rape, filed impact statements with the court.
Ventura — Combs’ ex and the prosecution’s star witness at the rapper’s seven-week trial this past summer — asked the judge in her letter to consider the “many lives” Combs has “upended with his abuse and control.”
During the trial, the prosecution showed the jury a key piece of evidence — the infamous hotel-beatdown security video showing Combs kicking and dragging Ventura as she tried to leave a so-called “freak off” sex session.
Combs, in his pre-sentencing letter to the judge, said that “the scene and images of me assaulting Cassie play over and over in my head daily.”
“I literally lost my mind. I was dead wrong for putting my hands on the woman that I loved. I’m sorry for that and always will be,” he wrote.
Combs has been locked up at a notorious federal Brooklyn jail since his September 2024 arrest and indictment, and he is hoping to soon be released with a sentence of time served.
“The jury’s verdict spoke loud and clear,” Combs’ defense lawyers wrote in a lengthy pre-sentencing submission to the judge. “To now increase Mr. Combs’s sentence based on evidence the jury rejected at trial would be to trivialize the jury’s work.”
In July, the jury found Combs guilty of two federal counts of transportation to engage in prostitution — known as the Mann Act — but acquitted him of the more severe charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
That acquittal allowed Combs to dodge a possible sentence of life in prison.
In clearing Combs of those top charges, the jury rejected the US government’s claims that the music tycoon sex trafficked Ventura and another ex of his for his freak off sex encounters, and that he ran a criminal enterprise.
Ventura, who dated Combs on and off between 2007 and 2018, and another ex-girlfriend who testified under the pseudonym “Jane,” told the jury during the trial that they were brutally beaten by Combs.
Prosecutors, in their pre-sentencing court filing, argued that Combs “engaged in violence and put others in fear” and should be sentenced to at least 11 years and three months in prison.
Combs’ attorneys argued at his trial that the hip-hop and fashion entrepreneur, once worth close to a billion dollars, had a violent side, but was no sex trafficker.
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