New York — Hip-hop mogul’s lawyers Sean “Diddy” Combs He urged a federal appeals court in New York late Tuesday to order his immediate release from prison and vacate his conviction on prostitution charges or direct his trial judge to reduce his prison sentence by four years.
The lawyers said in a memorandum filed with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that Combs was treated harshly at sentencing by a federal judge who allowed evidence surrounding the charges he was wrongfully acquitted of to influence his sentence.
Combs, 56, who is in federal prison in New Jersey and scheduled for release in May 2028, was acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges in a trial that ended in July. Combs was convicted under Mann’s lawwhich prohibits the transportation of persons across state lines for any sex crime.
Combs’ lawyers said Judge Arun Subramanian acted like a “13th juror” in October when he sentenced Combs to four years and two months in prison. They said he erred in letting the evidence surrounding the acquitted charges influence the sentence he imposed.
They noted that Combs was convicted of two lesser charges, prostitution offenses that do 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.
“Defendants typically receive fewer than 15 months in prison for these crimes — even when coercion is involved, which the jury did not find here,” the attorneys wrote.
“The judge challenged the jury’s verdict and found Combs ‘coerced’, ‘exploited’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings overcame the verdict and resulted in the highest sentence ever for any similar defendant,” the lawyers wrote.
In handing down the sentence, Subramanian said that when calculating prison time, 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, and sometimes masturbated.
At trial, his ex-girlfriend Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura She testified that Combs ordered her to have “disgusting” sex with strangers hundreds of times during their decade-long relationship that ended in 2018. Jurors watched a video of him pulling her down and hitting her in a Los Angeles hotel hallway after a “freak out” that lasted several days.
The second ex-girlfriend who testified under a false name” JaneShe said she was pressured to have sex with male workers during what Combs called “hotel nights,” drug-fueled sexual encounters from 2021 to 2024 that could also last for days.
At sentencing, Subramanian said he “rejects the defense’s attempt to characterize what happened here as merely consensual intimate experiences, or merely 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 declared you loved so dearly. You abused them physically, emotionally and psychologically. You used this abuse to get your own way, especially when it came to whims and hotel nights.”