If this is too insider-baseball for you, just ignore me, but is anyone else disturbed by some major outlets running sympathetic and humanizing stories about Sean Combs? I don’t actually care if Combs’ family supports him, nor do I think we should center his food concerns while he’s locked up. The man has been accused of rape, abuse and human trafficking. Keep your eye on the ball. Combs was arrested by federal agents less than a month ago, and he’s been denied bail twice. On Thursday, Combs was brought to court again, this time for some pre-trial motions and to hear when his trial is scheduled. His trial will be in May 2025, and his lawyers want the video of Combs assaulting Cassie to be thrown out.
Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, is scheduled to stand trial next May in New York, a federal judge said at a hearing on Thursday. Judge Arun Subramanian of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, who was recently assigned to the case, set May 5 as the start of Mr. Combs’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.
Mr. Combs, 54, has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn for the past three weeks after being arrested at a New York hotel and then twice denied bail. He will remain in jail until the trial, pending another appeal that his lawyers filed this week. Mr. Combs was present at the hearing on Thursday. Wearing tan jail clothes, he walked into the courtroom waving and smiling at his family assembled in the gallery, including his mother and six of his children, and he embraced some of his lawyers.
The hearing had been set as a routine scheduling matter. But it came one day after Mr. Combs’s lawyers filed a motion in which they accused government agents of leaking footage of Mr. Combs assaulting his former girlfriend Cassie to CNN. Without citing direct evidence, the lawyers theorized in court papers that the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that raided Mr. Combs’s homes in March, had been behind the leak. They said they might ask for the video to be barred as evidence at the trial.
Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, commented briefly at the hearing about the defense’s accusation of leaks, saying, “The government believes the motion is baseless and it is simply a means to exclude a damning piece of evidence.” She said the government would be filing a response to the defense’s motion.
In an email to Mr. Combs’s lawyers that prosecutors submitted in a court filing on Wednesday, Ms. Johnson denied that the government was behind the leak, writing that it “possessed no surveillance video at all from the InterContinental prior to CNN’s public broadcast,” referring to the hotel where the encounter was filmed.
That’s interesting, that the prosecution is saying that they didn’t have the 2016 hotel video before CNN aired it. How did CNN get it? Who sent it to them? Wasn’t the story that Cassie didn’t have the video in her possession because Combs and his people paid off the hotel for the video? It feels like they’re trying to say someone in Combs’ organization leaked it? Meanwhile, the prosecution also wants Combs’ lawyer to shut the hell up – the prosecutor and the court are not happy about Combs’ defense team giving interviews to TMZ about how Combs is only being prosecuted because he’s a successful Black man.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.