Aurelia Butler

Sean Combs’s lawyer made a final appeal to the jury at his racketeering and sex trafficking trial in New York on Friday, arguing in often sarcastic tones that the government’s evidence contradicted its case against the hip-hop mogul.The lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, portrayed his client as a deeply flawed man who led a swinger’s lifestyle, had a drug problem and sometimes physically assaulted his girlfriends. But he argued government’s accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or the ringleader of a racketeering organization was “badly exaggerated.”“He did what he did,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “But he’s going to fight to the death to defend himself from what he didn’t do.”Here are some takeaways from the defense’s closing argument.The defense focused on consent, credibility and overreach.Friday’s summation was the most substantive argument made to date by the defense, which called no witnesses during the trial and declined to put Mr. Combs on the stand.Mr. Agnifilo devoted long stretches of his four-hour closing argument to highlighting testimony, texts and video evidence, that he said demonstrated that Casandra Ventura and “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, consensually participated in the marathon sex parties that are central to the government’s claim that the women were sex trafficked.“You want to call it swingers, you want to call it threesomes,” he said, “whatever you want to call it, that is what it is — that’s what the evidence shows.”Mr. Agnifilo cast doubt on the credibility of some of the government’s witnesses, taking particular aim at Capricorn Clark, a former assistant to Mr. Combs who testified that she had been kidnapped twice at his direction. In one of those instances, she said, Mr. Combs was in possession of a gun, a statement that the defense said was not supported by other witnesses.At one point, Mr. Agnifilo suggested that the racketeering charge was an overreach and that Mr. Combs had been targeted by the government because the case began with a lawsuit, not anyone making a report to law enforcement. “He’s indicted by himself,” Mr. Agnifilo said, noting that no witnesses testified to being part of such an enterprise.The prosecution later objected, arguing that Mr. Agnifilo’s suggestion that Mr. Combs had been targeted was improperly made in front of the jury. Judge Arun Subramanian agreed and told jurors that the decision-making of the government or a grand jury on whether to charge a defendant was “none of your concern.”The defense offered an alternative view of the infamous video of a hotel assault.Mr. Agnifilo presented an alternative narrative for a critical piece of evidence in the case: a security-camera video that showed Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura in a hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.The jury has seen this footage numerous times during the seven-week trial, and witnesses described it from multiple angles, as well as what happened before and after the attack. The video also shaped public opinion of the case after CNN aired a version of it last year, prompting Mr. Combs to apologize, calling his behavior “inexcusable.”The government contends the video shows Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura when she tried to leave a marathon sex session with a male prostitute. That would be evidence he had physically compelled her to participate, a key element in proving sex trafficking.One of the sexual encounters took place at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles. Video of Mr. Combs dragging Ms. Ventura down a hallway has been cited as part of the abusive conduct.Hunter Kerhart for The New York TimesBut Mr. Agnifilo characterized the attack as flowing from a quarrel over a phone, not punishment for leaving the “freak-off.” Early in the video, Ms. Ventura is seen walking down a hallway with a phone in her right hand, heading toward an elevator bank. Later, after Mr. Combs attacks her, he appears to retrieve the phone from her and walks back to the room with it.A gap in the time code on the video, Mr. Agnifilo said, suggests that Ms. Ventura went back in their hotel room for three minutes and 42 seconds before a security guard arrived. “The point is,” Mr. Agnifilo said, “the room is not a scary place.”Mr. Combs’s family was a focal point.Mr. Agnifilo pointed out that six of the music mogul’s seven children were in the courtroom to offer support — “the seventh being an infant.” Mr. Combs’s mother, Janice, a frequent presence at the trial, was also in the gallery.“You should know that,” ​M​r. Agnifilo told the jury. “You should know who he is,” he added, “the man takes care of people — that’s what’s in the evidence.”Wrapping his closing statement, Mr. Agnifilo returned to Mr. Combs’s family ties to add stakes to his potential acquittal. “He sits there innocent,” he said of his client. “Return him to his family who have been waiting for him.”Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs and Justin​ Combs, arriving at court in Manhattan on Friday.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesOn Friday morning, one of Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs, released new music under the name King Combs. The seven-song EP includes a track with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, called “Diddy Free.”On it, King Combs, 27, raps about those who “try to play the victim” and states “[expletive] the world, critics and the witness.” Later, he says: “this Bible might come in handy / this rifle might come in handy” and repeats a chorus on which he promises not to sleep “’til we see Diddy free.”​A​nother of Mr. Combs’s sons, Justin​ Combs, arrived at court wearing a shirt that read “Free Sean Combs” ​on Friday, but a court officer quickly tapped him on the shoulder — those kinds of visible messages of support are not allowed. He left the courtroom and the message was not visible when he returned.Mr. Agnifilo’s closing was marked by animated, often sarcastic, statements.Mr. Agnifilo, who opened his closing argument with a warning to the jurors that he likes to pace while he talks, used an energetic delivery to hammer home the defense’s skepticism of the government’s case. Speaking forcefully, gesticulating and pacing, he reacted to the idea that Mr. Combs was in charge of a racketeering enterprise: “Are you kidding me?”His demeanor loosened as he continued, and at one point Mr. Agnifilo made a reference to the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” and its quotable line “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” while poking fun at the investigators in the case: “We need a bigger roll of crime-scene tape!” Regarding the lubricant found in the raids of Mr. Combs’s homes, Mr. Agnifilo also gave a passionate “Whoo!” reminiscent of Al Pacino onscreen.In the first 30 minutes of his summation, Mr. Agnifilo appealed to the jury’s emotions, throwing in personal asides, laugh lines and detailed characterizations of the witnesses in colloquial terms, working to keep them engaged while broadly brushing away the legitimacy of the charges.At other times, his mockery was more direct. In referring to Ms. Ventura’s brief relationship with the rapper Kid Cudi, the defense lawyer became especially animated: “Cassie’s keeping it gangster!” he said, arguing that she was brazenly lying to both men, with no apparent fear of Mr. Combs.“I’m getting myself a burner phone,” Mr. Agnifilo said, imagining Ms. Ventura’s mind-set at the time. “Whooooaaaa — a burner phone!” the lawyer added. “Someone’s got a burner phone!” More

Sean Combs’s lawyer made a final appeal to the jury at his racketeering and sex trafficking trial in New York on Friday, arguing in often sarcastic tones that the government’s evidence contradicted its case against the hip-hop mogul.The lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, portrayed his client as a deeply flawed man who led a swinger’s lifestyle, had a drug problem and sometimes physically assaulted his girlfriends. But he argued government’s accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or the ringleader of a racketeering organization was “badly exaggerated.”“He did what he did,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “But he’s going to fight to the death to defend himself from what he didn’t do.”Here are some takeaways from the defense’s closing argument.The defense focused on consent, credibility and overreach.Friday’s summation was the most substantive argument made to date by the defense, which called no witnesses during the trial and declined to put Mr. Combs on the stand.Mr. Agnifilo devoted long stretches of his four-hour closing argument to highlighting testimony, texts and video evidence, that he said demonstrated that Casandra Ventura and “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, consensually participated in the marathon sex parties that are central to the government’s claim that the women were sex trafficked.“You want to call it swingers, you want to call it threesomes,” he said, “whatever you want to call it, that is what it is — that’s what the evidence shows.”Mr. Agnifilo cast doubt on the credibility of some of the government’s witnesses, taking particular aim at Capricorn Clark, a former assistant to Mr. Combs who testified that she had been kidnapped twice at his direction. In one of those instances, she said, Mr. Combs was in possession of a gun, a statement that the defense said was not supported by other witnesses.At one point, Mr. Agnifilo suggested that the racketeering charge was an overreach and that Mr. Combs had been targeted by the government because the case began with a lawsuit, not anyone making a report to law enforcement. “He’s indicted by himself,” Mr. Agnifilo said, noting that no witnesses testified to being part of such an enterprise.The prosecution later objected, arguing that Mr. Agnifilo’s suggestion that Mr. Combs had been targeted was improperly made in front of the jury. Judge Arun Subramanian agreed and told jurors that the decision-making of the government or a grand jury on whether to charge a defendant was “none of your concern.”The defense offered an alternative view of the infamous video of a hotel assault.Mr. Agnifilo presented an alternative narrative for a critical piece of evidence in the case: a security-camera video that showed Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura in a hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.The jury has seen this footage numerous times during the seven-week trial, and witnesses described it from multiple angles, as well as what happened before and after the attack. The video also shaped public opinion of the case after CNN aired a version of it last year, prompting Mr. Combs to apologize, calling his behavior “inexcusable.”The government contends the video shows Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura when she tried to leave a marathon sex session with a male prostitute. That would be evidence he had physically compelled her to participate, a key element in proving sex trafficking.One of the sexual encounters took place at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles. Video of Mr. Combs dragging Ms. Ventura down a hallway has been cited as part of the abusive conduct.Hunter Kerhart for The New York TimesBut Mr. Agnifilo characterized the attack as flowing from a quarrel over a phone, not punishment for leaving the “freak-off.” Early in the video, Ms. Ventura is seen walking down a hallway with a phone in her right hand, heading toward an elevator bank. Later, after Mr. Combs attacks her, he appears to retrieve the phone from her and walks back to the room with it.A gap in the time code on the video, Mr. Agnifilo said, suggests that Ms. Ventura went back in their hotel room for three minutes and 42 seconds before a security guard arrived. “The point is,” Mr. Agnifilo said, “the room is not a scary place.”Mr. Combs’s family was a focal point.Mr. Agnifilo pointed out that six of the music mogul’s seven children were in the courtroom to offer support — “the seventh being an infant.” Mr. Combs’s mother, Janice, a frequent presence at the trial, was also in the gallery.“You should know that,” ​M​r. Agnifilo told the jury. “You should know who he is,” he added, “the man takes care of people — that’s what’s in the evidence.”Wrapping his closing statement, Mr. Agnifilo returned to Mr. Combs’s family ties to add stakes to his potential acquittal. “He sits there innocent,” he said of his client. “Return him to his family who have been waiting for him.”Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs and Justin​ Combs, arriving at court in Manhattan on Friday.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesOn Friday morning, one of Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs, released new music under the name King Combs. The seven-song EP includes a track with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, called “Diddy Free.”On it, King Combs, 27, raps about those who “try to play the victim” and states “[expletive] the world, critics and the witness.” Later, he says: “this Bible might come in handy / this rifle might come in handy” and repeats a chorus on which he promises not to sleep “’til we see Diddy free.”​A​nother of Mr. Combs’s sons, Justin​ Combs, arrived at court wearing a shirt that read “Free Sean Combs” ​on Friday, but a court officer quickly tapped him on the shoulder — those kinds of visible messages of support are not allowed. He left the courtroom and the message was not visible when he returned.Mr. Agnifilo’s closing was marked by animated, often sarcastic, statements.Mr. Agnifilo, who opened his closing argument with a warning to the jurors that he likes to pace while he talks, used an energetic delivery to hammer home the defense’s skepticism of the government’s case. Speaking forcefully, gesticulating and pacing, he reacted to the idea that Mr. Combs was in charge of a racketeering enterprise: “Are you kidding me?”His demeanor loosened as he continued, and at one point Mr. Agnifilo made a reference to the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” and its quotable line “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” while poking fun at the investigators in the case: “We need a bigger roll of crime-scene tape!” Regarding the lubricant found in the raids of Mr. Combs’s homes, Mr. Agnifilo also gave a passionate “Whoo!” reminiscent of Al Pacino onscreen.In the first 30 minutes of his summation, Mr. Agnifilo appealed to the jury’s emotions, throwing in personal asides, laugh lines and detailed characterizations of the witnesses in colloquial terms, working to keep them engaged while broadly brushing away the legitimacy of the charges.At other times, his mockery was more direct. In referring to Ms. Ventura’s brief relationship with the rapper Kid Cudi, the defense lawyer became especially animated: “Cassie’s keeping it gangster!” he said, arguing that she was brazenly lying to both men, with no apparent fear of Mr. Combs.“I’m getting myself a burner phone,” Mr. Agnifilo said, imagining Ms. Ventura’s mind-set at the time. “Whooooaaaa — a burner phone!” the lawyer added. “Someone’s got a burner phone!” More

The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: “freak-off.”According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, a freak-off was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism.’” They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. “Copious amounts of drugs,” including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watched and recorded the events on a phone while he masturbated.Freak-offs have become a central part of the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. (Other witnesses have referred to the events as “hotel nights,” “debauchery” or “wild king nights.”) Mr. Combs pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.In testimony last month, Ms. Ventura described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating detail. The first one happened when she was 22, she said, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a “sex store” She and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex while Mr. Combs watched, she said.Freak-offs soon became nearly weekly occurrences, Ms. Ventura testified. They took place in homes and hotels across the United States and in international locales like the Spanish island of Ibiza. Mr. Combs had his employees make travel arrangements for the men to come to him and Ms. Ventura — a key point in the government’s case for sex trafficking. The events also became more elaborately staged, with candles and studio-style lighting, and Ms. Ventura said she would sometimes take an entire day to prepare herself for them. Mr. Combs controlled that process too, she said, down to the color of her nails.She testified that she took part in the sex partly because she wanted to make Mr. Combs happy. “When you’re in love with someone you don’t want to disappoint them,” she said.But she also said she feared he would beat her if she refused and recounted episodes of him assaulting her. When Mr. Combs became angry, she said, his eyes would “go black” and “the version of him that I was in love with was no longer there.”The sexual marathons drained her, she said, and it sometimes took days to recover: “The freak-offs became a job where there was no space to do anything else but to recover and just try to feel normal again.”The videos Mr. Combs made, she said, became “blackmail materials” that were used to pressure her to agree to continue participating, she testified. She feared the videos might be released on the internet.Fueled by drugs, the freak-offs could last from 36 hours to four days, Ms. Ventura testified. They also became more “humiliating,” she said: Mr. Combs would direct her and the men on sexual positions, and he would order them to continually apply baby oil to keep themselves “glistening.” Blood was sometimes left on bedding because Ms. Ventura was compelled to perform while menstruating, she said. There was also urine, as Mr. Combs sometimes ordered the men to urinate into her mouth while she lay on the floor.In her testimony, Ms. Ventura said that a freak-off was underway in March 2016 at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles, where a hallway security camera captured her trying to take the elevator before Mr. Combs assaulted her and dragged her away.The freak-offs, she said, continued until she finally left Mr. Combs in 2018.When Jane, another former girlfriend who dated Mr. Combs from 2021 until his arrest last year, took the stand, she described similar events and said her love affair with the music mogul turned into a pattern of unwanted sex with male prostitutes that she struggled to end: “It was a door that I was unable to shut for the remainder of the relationship.”Describing herself as a single mother who made her living as a social media influencer, Jane said she became financially dependent on Mr. Combs after he began sending her thousands of dollars and paying her rent.She described one night when she had sex with two men, then retreated to a bathroom and vomited. Mr. Combs said the vomiting would make her feel better, Jane testified, and then he told her a third prostitute was ready for her. “Let’s go,” he said. She complied and had sex with the third man.Jane also read aloud a private note from her phone that she wrote about Mr. Combs in 2022: “I don’t want to do drugs for days and days and have you use me to fulfill your freaky, wild desires in hotel rooms.” She said she suffered from urinary tract and yeast infections as a result of frequent sex with other men.After news about Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit broke, Jane said she recognized that Ms. Ventura’s account mirrored her own “sexual trauma.”“I almost fainted,” Jane testified. “In fact I think I did.”“There was a whole other woman feeling the same thing,” she added. More