Hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs will have to await trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges in a Brooklyn jail instead of his luxurious Miami Beach mansion after a second judge refused to grant a $50m bail package offered by his lawyers.
On Wednesday, US district judge Andrew L Carter Jr denied Combs’s request to be released to home detention with GPS monitoring, pointing to the possibility that Combs may tamper with witnesses.
Carter’s denial marks the second refusal to grant Combs the hefty bail package, which included the $50m bond, as well as the passports of his children and mother.
The 54-year-old was initially denied bail and ordered to jail on Tuesday after he was federally charged with sex trafficking and racketeering. Combs has pleaded not guilty.
The arrest of Combs came roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex-trafficking investigation raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami.
The three-count, 14-page indictment alleges racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution.
The federal indictment contained graphic details, including that Combs would force sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates of his in what he referred to as “freak offs” – sometimes for days at a time – while he recorded video of the encounters and masturbated to them. The encounters were so physically exhausting for him and his victims – whom he would allegedly force to ingest drugs – that all “typically received IV fluids to recover”, the indictment said.
“For decades, SEAN COMBS, a/k/a ‘Puff Daddy,’ a/k/a ‘P Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘PD,’ a/k/a ‘Love,’ the defendant, abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct,” the indictment reads.
It added that during the raids on Combs’s Miami and Los Angeles homes earlier this year, investigators seized drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, as well as three AR-15s guns with defaced serial numbers.
The indictment also alleges that Combs subjected victims to various forms of abuse, in addition to having maintained control over them through “physical violence, promises of career opportunities, granting and threatening to withhold financial support, and by other coercive means, including tracking their whereabouts, dictating the victims’ appearance, monitoring their medical records, controlling their housing, and supplying them with controlled substances”.
Combs’s alleged criminal conspiracy, the indictment says, “relied on employees, resources, and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled – creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in, and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice”.
His lawyers tried unsuccessfully on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep him out of jail. In addition to offering the bond, his lawyers pledged that Combs would turn over his passport and said he was attempting to sell his private jet. They said that “conditions at Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention”.
Prosecutors argued that Combs was “a serious flight risk” and that his net worth was close to $1bn, including more than $1m in personal cash on hand as of last December.
With Combs set to face jail time in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan detention center, he will be joining a string of other high-profile detainees who have spent time there including R Kelly, Ghislaine Maxwell, Michael Cohen and Sam Bankman-Fried.
