New York – Sean “Diddy” combs, the hip-hop entrepreneur whose successful successful career has been dotted with accusations of violence, will be taken to a New York court on Monday to be tried for the positions that he used the influence and resources of his commercial empire to sexually abuse women. The jury selection is scheduled to start in the morning and potentially takes several days. The opening statements of the lawyers and the beginning of the testimony are expected next week.
The 17 -page accusation against the combs is read as an accusation document presented against a leader of the Mafia or the head of a drug gang, accusing him of participating in sexual trafficking and presiding over an extortion conspiracy.
The accusation says that with the help of people in their entourage and employees of their business network, ComBs participated in a two -decades abusive behavior pattern against women and other people.
Women were manipulated to participate in drugs fed with drugs with male sex workers called “Fonsffs,” prosecutors say.
To keep women online, prosecutors say the combs used a mixture of influence and violence: they offered to boost their entertainment careers if they did what he asked, or interrupted them if they did not.
And when I was not obtaining what I wanted, the accusation says that combs and its associates resorted to violent acts, including powers, kidnappings and fires caused. Once, he alleges the accusation, he even hung someone from a balcony.
Com combs and his lawyers say he is innocent.
Any group sex was consensual, they say. There were no efforts to force people to the things they did not want to do, and nothing that happened was equivalent to a criminal racket, they said.
The trial is expected to take at least eight weeks.
Combs, 55, has recognized an episode of violence It is likely to appear in the trial. In 2016, a security camera recorded him by hitting his ex -girlfriend, the RANDB Cassie singer, in the hall of a Los Angeles hotel. Chestnut filed a lawsuit At the end of 2023, saying that combs had submitted it to years of abuse, including balls and violations.
Associated Press does not usually name the people who say they have been sexually abused unless they are publicly presented, as Cassie did, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura.
The lawyer of combs, Marc Agnifilo, said that combs “was not a perfect person” and that there had been consumption of drugs and toxic relationships, but said that all sexual activity between combs, Cassie and other people was consensual.
The trial is the last and most serious in a long series of legal problems for combs.
In 1999 he was accused of breaking into the offices of an Interscope Records executive with his bodyguards and hitting him with a bottle of champagne and a chair. The executive, Steve Stoute, then asked the prosecutors to be easy with the combs, who declared themselves guilty of a minor position and took a kind of anger management.
Later that same year, Comink was arrested by the police after he and his girlfriend, Jennifer López, fled a nightclub where three people were injured by shots. Comps was acquitted of all charges related to the incident in a 2001 trial, but a rapper in his entourage, Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, was sentenced in the shooting and turned almost nine years in prison.
Then, in 2015, Comps was accused of assaulting someone with a kettlebell of the weight room at the University of California, Los Angeles, where one of his children played football. Combs said they were defending themselves and the prosecutors left the case.
Now, combs faces its most serious case so far.
If it is declared guilty, it faces the possibility of decades in prison.
