By Larry Neumeister and Michael R. Sisak
NEW YORK (AP)During closing arguments Thursday, a prosecutor told a jury in the music mogul’s sex trafficking trial that Sean Diddy Combs believed his celebrity, fortune, and power put him above the law as he ran a criminal enterprise for twenty years, using violence, fear, and force to carry out heinous crimes.
“You’ve learned a lot about Sean Combs over the past few weeks,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Christy Slavik said. He is in charge of a criminal organization. He doesn’t accept rejection. You are now aware of the numerous crimes he perpetrated with his business associates.
She said that evidence that Combs kidnapped one of his employees, engaged in forced labor, bribed a security guard, committed arson by attempting to blow up a car, and committed other heinous crimes over a two-decade period supported the charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
Speaking from a lectern placed between jurors and the tables where prosecutors and defense attorneys sat, Slavik claimed that Combs repeatedly coerced, threatened, and manipulated ex-girlfriends Casandra Cassie Ventura and an ex-girlfriend who testified under the alias Jane into having sex with escorts for his own amusement.
She said that in order to achieve his goals, the defendant resorted to violence, power, and terror. He believed that he was above the law because of his notoriety, fortune, and influence.
Combs, according to Slavik, relied on shame and quiet to allow and continue his torture. She claimed that he harmed women and covered it up with a small army of workers, including bodyguards and personal helpers.
According to Slavik, the idea behind racketeering law is that criminals who operate in groups are more potent and dangerous. The defendant was already a strong guy, but his inner circle and economic ventures made him even more dangerous.
According to her, Combs and his inner circle engaged in hundreds of racketeering activities.
Jurors seen pictures of important Combs orbit members as Slavik talked, along with slides to classify evidence and quotes from relevant testimony in the trial transcript.
Prosecutors claim that drug distribution, abduction, arson, and witness tampering are among the acts mentioned on one slide as being part of the racketeering conspiracy. Another slide had a list of narcotics that Combs aides claimed to have obtained for him or that federal officials claimed to have discovered during raids on Combs’ residences last year, including cocaine, meth, ketamine, oxycodone, and MDMA.
As Slavik spoke, Combs sat with his head lowered, his chair set back a few feet from the defense table. He was dressed in khakis, a white button-down shirt, and a light-colored sweater.
Prosecutors claim that Comb coerced and mistreated women for years after his arrest at a hotel in Manhattan in September. He did this by using his fame and authority as a musician to recruit a network of colleagues and staff to assist him in silencing victims through violence and blackmail.
The proprietor of Bad Boy Records allegedly coerced female victims into participating in elaborately staged, drugged-up sex acts with male sex workers at gatherings known as Freak-Offs.
Combs was involved in domestic abuse, but he did not conduct any federal offenses, according to defense attorneys.
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They used extensive cross-examinations of the majority of the 34 government witnesses to support their acquittal argument. Some witnesses made it plain to the jury that they didn’t want to be there and only testified in reaction to subpoenas.
Since none of Combs’ employees consented to participate in any conspiracy, his attorneys argue that there was no racketeering conspiracy.
Slavik concluded, however, by claiming that staff members had frequently consented to carry out crimes for Combs, including supplying cocaine, going with him to abduct his personal secretary, Capricorn Clark, and locking his fiancée in a hotel room after he stomped on her face.
Judge Arun Subramanian informed the jury that they would hear a closing argument from a defense attorney on Friday and a rebuttal from a prosecution before he gave them legal instruction and permitted them to start deliberating as early as late afternoon, prior to Slavik starting her closing.
