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3 weeks ago
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The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has just delivered multiple mic drops on the incarcerated Sean Combs.
As well as rejecting efforts by the Bad Boy Records founder’s defense team to name names when it comes to Combs’ multiple accusers, the prosecutors are back with a federal grand jury this week.
As one would expect, no one from U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ office is talking today about what may or may not be going on behind closed doors. When contacted by Deadline, a spokesperson for the prosecutors declined comment on the latest gesticulation in the Combs case.
However, according to sources, the grand jury will be hearing new evidence today in Combs’ criminal case. As a part of that, there will be new testimony from a male witness, I’m told.
To that end, new charges or a revamping of the charges of racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution could be in the cards.
Just hours before the grand jury reconvened in the increasingly sordid Combs’ case, the prosecution filed a long and detailed response Wednesday night addressing the defense’s desire to have the names of Combs’ accusers made public.
In a 56-page documents childing the Marc Agnifilo- and Teny Geragos-led defense, the feds again swatted aside the idea that they leaked the 2016 hotel security footage that showed Combs beating then-girlfriend and future short-lived litigant Cassie Ventura. “As the defendant is fully aware, the video was not in the Government’s possession at the time of CNN’s publication and the Government has never, at any point, obtained the video through grand jury process,” the filing by Williams states.
“The defendant also complains about purported ‘law enforcement sources’ leaking other alleged grand jury material to the media in several news articles cited in his papers and set forth in the attached table (the “Cited Articles”),” the response document goes on to say, noting a Deadline story among the said Cited Articles the defense claims are making it hard for their much accused client to get a fair trial next year. “Here, too, the defendant is grasping at straws. Because the defendant cannot show that the information in the Cited Articles is grand jury material, and because he cannot show that Government agents with access to grand jury material leaked the information, he cannot make the prima facie showing required for the relief he seeks.”
This comes against the backdrop of the dozens of women and men over the past year who have accused Combs of drugging, beating and threatening them, forcing them to participate in his so-called “freak offs,” and raping them. In a pattern of new filings ever week, the civil cases are running parallel to some extent to the criminal case and Combs’ appeal on being denied pre-trial release. In fact, Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee promises that he has over 100 more Combs victims soon to come forward with lawsuits of their own.
Among those victims are the criminal case’s “Victim-1” aka Ventura, who in lawsuit last November accused Combs of years of abuse and assaults; the $30 million suit was quickly settled. More recently, there is Buzbee-represented John Doe who alleges that when he was 10 years old, Combs sexually assaulted him in a Manhattan hotel room with promises of a career in the music biz.
Arrested on September 15 by the feds in the lobby of another NYC hotel, Combs is incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He faces life behind bars if found guilty at a trial set to start on May 5, 2025.
Heading towards that trial before U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, the government pushed back especially hard Wednesday on the defense’s wish to unmask the accusers and potential witnesses at the trial.
As they wrote in their submission to the court:
The Victim Gag Motion should be denied as an attempt to backdoor the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to compel the Government to prematurely disclose its witness list. Indeed, by seeking a preemptive gag order under Local Criminal Rule 23.1 preventing potential witnesses in the criminal case and their counsel from making extrajudicial statements, the defendant is essentially asking for either a blanket order that would apply indiscriminately to any individuals with claims against Combs and their lawyers, or for a more limited order that would require the Government to identify its witnesses six months before trial. Not only would such relief be unprecedented, but the defendant should not be permitted to use a local criminal rule as a sword to gag civil claimants whether or not their statements were connected to this criminal proceeding, or to evade established case law in this Circuit.
What Subramanian will decide remains to be seen. However, today the court received a “letter from the Government supplementing the Government’s October 30, 2024 filing.” Clearly that letter wasn’t your run-of-the-mill correspondence. “Having considered the Government’s stated justifications for sealing the letter and considering it ex parte, the Court finds that it is appropriate to accept this letter ex parte and under seal,” Subramanian wrote today.
What was in the letter and why it was sealed remains unknown, with neither the defense nor the feds commenting.
