Diddy: An abuser who escaped justice?

During a two-month trial in Manhattan, federal prosecutors successfully exposed Sean "Diddy" Combs as "a vile pervert," said Dana Bazelon in Slate. Yet the hip-hop mogul "(mostly) beat the rap." Jurors last week acquitted Combs of racketeering and sex trafficking, charges that carried a potential life sentence, and instead found him guilty of two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Prosecutors had sought to portray Combs, 55, as the kingpin of a criminal enterprise. The evidence against him included graphic testimony from two former girlfriends, who detailed a pattern of brutal coercion dating back to 2008. He pressured the women to have sex with male prostitutes during drug-fueled "freak-off" parties, "extorted them with the videos he made of them doing it, and beat them when they tried to leave." Yet the jury didn't buy the prosecution's claim that Diddy was a mob boss. Instead, they saw him as something "far more pedestrian": a domestic abuser.

"The prosecution massively overcharged Diddy," said Haley Strack in National Review. Because the statute of limitations had expired on more direct charges of sexual assault or battery, they reached for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—typically used against organized crime. But as the shirt of one Diddy supporter outside the courthouse declared, "A freako is not a RICO." The rapper will likely be sentenced to several years in prison on the prostitution charges. Still, after weeks of testimony by women who "were beaten, choked, drugged, emotionally abused, and assaulted by Diddy, it feels as though the music mogul escaped justice." This is another "gruesome marker of a post-#MeToo era," said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. After a fleeting moment when powerful men like Harvey Weinstein were held accountable, there's been a "triumphant restoration of the status quo ante."

Many people still can't grasp how "a powerful man can coerce and control a woman," said Rachel Louise Snyder in The New York Times. Jurors were shown 2016 surveillance footage of Combs kicking and dragging his girlfriend Casandra Ventura down the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, and heard testimony from a former Diddy employee who watched his boss beat her. Yet the jury seemingly accepted the defense's argument that Ventura voluntarily took part in Diddy's freak-offs. If such searing evidence of violent coercion can't secure a conviction in our justice system, "then perhaps we ought to rethink that system."

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