The music mogul’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss a sex-trafficking charge, saying that the law involved has “racist origins.”
Lawyers for Sean Combs filed a motion on Tuesday night seeking the dismissal of one of the sex trafficking charges he is facing, arguing that the hip-hop mogul is being unfairly prosecuted based on his race.
Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail, was indicted on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges — the most serious of which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
His lawyers’ filing focuses on a lesser sex trafficking charge, which stems from a federal law known as the Mann Act. The law makes it illegal to transport a person “with intent that such individual engage in prostitution.”
Mr. Combs’s lawyers contend that the law has “racist origins” and that it is being deployed against a “prominent Black man” for allegedly using an escort service to transport male escorts across state lines to have sex with his girlfriends.
“The use of escorts, male or female, is common and indeed widely accepted in American culture today,” they write. To emphasize what it depicted as the noncriminal nature of the conduct, the filing notes that the chief executive of the escort service that Mr. Combs is said to have used has been interviewed in the media and was featured in a Showtime reality series.
The lawyers questioned whether any white person had been charged under the law based on similar allegations.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
