NEW YORK — Hip-hop mogul's lawyers Sean “Diddy” Combs called on a federal appeals court in New York late Tuesday to order his immediate release from prison and overturn his conviction on prostitution-related charges or direct the judge to reduce his four-year sentence.
In a filing with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, lawyers said Combs was mistreated at sentencing by a federal judge who allowed evidence related to charges on which he was wrongfully acquitted to influence his punishment.
Combs, 56, who was incarcerated in a federal prison in New Jersey and released in May 2028, was acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking in a trial that ended in July. Combs was convicted under Art. Mann's Lawwhich prohibits the transportation of people across state lines for any sexual offenses.
Combs' lawyers said Judge Arun Subramanian acted as the “thirteenth juror” in October when he sentenced Combs to four years and two months in prison. They said he erred by allowing evidence related to the acquitted charges to influence his sentence.
They noted that Combs was found guilty of two lesser counts: prostitution-related offenses that did not require force, fraud or coercion. They asked the appeals court, which has not yet heard oral arguments, to acquit Combs, order his immediate release from prison or direct Subramanian to commute his sentence.
“For such crimes, defendants are routinely sentenced to less than 15 months in prison—even when coercion is involved, which the jury did not find here,” the lawyers wrote.
“The judge disregarded the jury's verdict and found that Combs 'coerced,' 'exploited,' and 'forced' his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings exceeded the verdict and resulted in the harshest sentence ever imposed for any remotely similar defendant,” the lawyers wrote.
At sentencing, Subramanian said that in calculating the prison term, he took into account Combs' treatment of two former girlfriends who testified that the Bad Boy Records founder beat them and forced them to have sex with male sex workers while he watched and filmed the encounters, sometimes masturbating.
Ex-girlfriend at trial Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura testified that Combs ordered her to have “disgusting” sex with strangers hundreds of times during their decade-long relationship, which ended in 2018. Jurors saw video of him dragging and beating her in a Los Angeles hotel hallway after one such multi-day “freak.”
The second ex-girlfriend who testified under a pseudonym “ Jane” said she was forced to have sex with male employees during what Combs called “hotel nights” – drug-fuelled sexual encounters from 2021 to 2024 that also could last several days.
At sentencing, Subramanian said he “rejects the defense's attempt to characterize what happened here as simply a consensual intimate experience or simply a story of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.”
He added: “You abused the power and control you had over the lives of the women you claimed to love dearly. You abused them physically, emotionally and psychologically. And you used that abuse to get your way, especially when it came to escapades and hotel nights.”
