Judge denies bail for Sean 'Diddy' Combs before October sentencing
Aug. 4 (UPI) -- Sean "Diddy" Combs will remain in jail for sentencing on Oct. 3 after a federal judge denied the hip-hop mogul bail Monday.
In Manhattan, District Judge Arun Subramanian said Combs, 55, is a flight risk and a danger to the community. The judge noted the violence he exhibited on 2016 hotel surveillance footage that shows him kicking and dragging Cassie Ventura.
"Combs fails to satisfy his burden to demonstrate an entitlement to release," Subramanian wrote in his opinion.
Combs has been incarcerated at the jail in Brooklyn since his arrest after a home raid in March last year.
On July 2, a jury found him guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution after a two-month trial. Each of those counts carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. The judge denied bail then.
The prosecution, in a letter to the judge, recommends at least 51 to 63 months in prison. They also didn't want bail.
Defense proposed $50 million bail, he would reside at his Miami home and travel would be limited to the Southern District of New York for legal briefings.
His defense lawyers, in a 62-page motion, said their client should be released because he wasn't convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking. Also, they said typically the Mann Act of prostitution applies to pimps or sexual crimes involving minors.
"There has literally never been a case, like this one," the defense said. "Where a person and his girlfriend arranged for adult men to have consensual sexual relations with the adult, long-term girlfriend as part of a demonstrated swingers lifestyle, and has been prosecuted and incarcerated under the Mann Act."
They said he was only having male escorts make "amateur porn" and not running a prostitution business. He transported male escorts not for profit or under duress in joining the "swingers lifestyle," they said.
He paid them over two decades.
The judge said the record shows there was not only evidence of violence but coercion or subjugation.
"While Combs may contend at sentencing that this evidence should be discounted and that what happened was nothing more than a case of willing 'swingers' utilizing the voluntary services of escorts for their mutual pleasure, the Government takes the opposite view: that Cassie Ventura and Jane were beaten, coerced, threatened, lied to, and victimized by Combs as part of their participation in these events," the judge wrote.
Combs' attorneys also argued for release on bail because of the squalid conditions and danger among inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
The judge noted staff "has been able to keep him safe," even amid threatened violence from an inmate.
Combs has been held in a separate area of the jail that typically houses high-profile inmates and government informants.
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