Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul who has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, was denied bail again on Wednesday after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ third attempt to challenge his detention.
Judge Arun Subramanian wrote in the order that prosecutors had presented evidence of Mr. Combs’s violence and of a serious risk of witness tampering.
The decision orders Mr. Combs to remain at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking federal facility on the Brooklyn waterfront, until his trial, which is scheduled for May. Mr. Combs, 55, has been detained since his arrest in September after a nearly 10-month federal investigation.
After Mr. Combs’s arrest, his lawyers offered a robust bail package that they argued was more than sufficient to assuage the court’s concerns about the risks of his release. They offered a $50 million bond, secured by Mr. Combs’s Florida mansion — as well as his mother’s house there — and said that Mr. Combs would pay for round-the-clock security, with visitors restricted to family. Apart from contact with his lawyers, he would have no access to phones or the internet.
Prosecutors asserted that there was no way the government could trust that private security guards, paid for by Mr. Combs, could be depended on to prevent efforts toward obstructing justice, which, they argued, he had been engaging in before and after his indictment.
The first two judges who considered the bail issue were persuaded by the government’s arguments that Mr. Combs posed a danger to the safety of others, relying largely on the leaked hotel footage from 2016 of Mr. Combs abusing his girlfriend, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, which was broadcast in May by CNN. Ms. Ventura, who filed a bombshell civil suit a year ago, is the center of the government’s case, though she is identified only as “Victim-1” in its indictment.
That indictment charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution and describes him as the boss of a yearslong criminal enterprise that threatened and abused women. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The video of Cassie had been a focal point of the detention efforts with Andrew L. Carter Jr., the district court judge first assigned to the case, calling it “disturbing” during a September bail hearing. Judge Carter later recused himself because of a professional and social relationship with a new lawyer hired by Mr. Combs’s team.
In their third attempt at securing bail, Mr. Combs’s lawyers sought to undercut the impact of that video by arguing that the government had not presented the footage in good faith, accusing prosecutors of omitting key scenes and presenting events out of order.
At a bail hearing on Friday, Christy Slavik, one of the prosecutors, said there was no mistaking Mr. Combs’s violent conduct on the video, which involved striking, kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura.
Prosecutors have worked to keep Mr. Combs in jail by arguing that he has engaged in efforts to obstruct the prosecution, both before and after he was indicted in September.
They have accused Mr. Combs of contacting witnesses, paying a potential witness to make a public statement in his favor and using a three-way phone call from inside jail to contact an alleged co-conspirator.
Mr. Combs’s lawyers argued that their defendant’s contacts with witnesses have been entirely innocuous and simply intended to help build up his defense for trial. They underscored that the government had pointed to no threatening communications.
In recent days, Mr. Combs’s legal team has railed against prosecutors for using evidence collected in a government sweep of the jail where Mr. Combs resides to try to argue that he should remain incarcerated.
Last week, Judge Subramanian ordered that prosecutors delete their records of handwritten notes that were found in Mr. Combs’s jail cell while he reviews whether the prosecution should have been in possession of those documents in the first place. The government has highlighted two excerpts from those notes as evidence of obstruction efforts, including one that was related to Mr. Combs directing someone to find “dirt” on alleged victims.
At the hearing last week, Judge Subramanian questioned prosecutors on Mr. Combs’s treatment by the government compared to another defendant charged with sex trafficking: Michael S. Jeffries, the former longtime chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch. The government accused Mr. Jeffries last month of luring dozens of men to events around the world, where they were sexually exploited by him and his romantic partner.
In that case, prosecutors agreed to Mr. Jeffries’s release on a $10 million bond, with home detention and electronic monitoring. Mr. Combs’s lawyers pointed to the case as an example of the government permitting less restrictive treatment of a similar defendant.
Prosecutors countered that the two high-profile cases were different because unlike the charges against Mr. Jeffries, Mr. Combs is facing a racketeering conspiracy charge, which includes accusations of repeated acts of violence by Mr. Combs and his associates. They also noted that when the authorities raided Mr. Combs’s residences in March, they discovered firearms and ammunition, including defaced AR-15s.
The grand jury has continued to meet since Mr. Combs was charged and prosecutors have said that their investigation is continuing.
Mr. Combs may continue to challenge his detention. Last month, he filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has been put on pause while his lawyers pursued the most recent appeal at the district level.
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