Sean “Diddy” Combs’ lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo said in his closing argument that the federal sex trafficking and racketeering case against his client is “badly, badly exaggerated” and “made up.”
Throughout an hours-long argument on Friday (June 27), the lawyer kept coming back to what he called “a tale of two trials”: one “told in the evidence” and one “told from the mouths of the prosecutors.”
He dismissed the sex trafficking and racketeering charges against his client, saying that the mogul’s actions consisted instead of “personal use drugs and threesomes.”
Agnifilo began by paying tribute to Combs’ business acumen.
“He has built wonderful, sophisticated, real businesses that have stood the test of time,” the attorney said. “It was real. It was diversity. He was doing [diversity, equity, and inclusion] as a 24-year-old, by himself.
“The government says his businesses are a racketeering enterprise. Are you kidding me?”
In addition to denying racketeering, Agnifilo was dismissive of the sex trafficking charges, which accuse Combs of using force, threat of force, fraud, or coercion to get a victim to engage in a commercial sex act.
He went right at the government’s theory that Combs agreeing to pay rent for one alleged victim, the pseudonymous Jane, and then continually threatening to withhold payment as a way to force her into sex acts with escorts, was coercion.
“Jane has a beautiful house for her child,” he said. “I don’t know what Jane’s doing today, but I know where she’s doing it — in a house he paid for.”
While Agnifilo said he “owned” the violence his client committed against Cassie Ventura, he said that the singer, who alleged on the stand that she was coerced into hundreds of freak offs, was the “winner” in this case, since she received a $20 million settlement from Combs and a $10 million settlement from the Intercontinental Hotel where Combs assaulted her in 2016.
“Cassie is nobody’s fool,” Agnifilo said early in his speech. “She is sitting somewhere in the world with thirty million dollars… If you had to pick a winner, Cassie flat won. It’s not even close.”
Lead prosecutor Maureen Comey, in her rebuttal that followed Agnifilo’s closing, objected to the suggestion that Cassie was the winner of some sort of prize.
“What prize is that? What was her prize?” she asked. “Black eyes? A gash in her head? Sex for days while you have a UTI? Getting urinated in your mouth?”
Agnifilo described the relationship between Cassie and Combs as “a great modern love story,” and painted their relationship as one built on “love and intensity.”
“She was always free to leave,” he continued. “She chose to stay because she was in love with him and he was in love with her. If racketeering conspiracy had an opposite, it would be their relationship.”
He described Combs and Ventura as “swingers,” and in a turn of phrase that startled some observers, said that Ventura was “keeping it gangsta” by dating Kid Cudi “under [Diddy’s] nose.”
Similar to how prosecutor Christy Slavik walked through evidence on Thursday, Agnifilo talked through a number of crimes his client was accused of by the government, and found serious fault with all of them.
Witness Capricorn Clark, who testified about Diddy kidnapping her on two separate occasions years apart, came under particularly heavy criticism. She was, Agnifilo said, “a little off” and in love with his client.
One colorful moment came as Agnifilo was describing one of the alleged kidnappings, where Clark said an armed Diddy dragged her against her will to Kid Cudi’s house. The attorney vehemently denied that his client was armed, saying Diddy went there simply to square up.
“He’s a fighter,” Agnifilo said. “No weapons. We’re going to fight. One of us is going to punch the other in the nose and get punched in the nose, and we’re going to have a good old-fashioned John Wayne 8:00 in the morning Hollywood Hills fight. That’s who he is.”
When it came to the pseudonymous “Mia,” a former employee who accused Combs of repeated sexual assault and is at the center of one of the forced labor charges, Agnifilo repeated a defense take heard earlier in the trial that the woman’s retiring demeanor on the stand was an act. He also said that any sexual contact between his client and Mia was “a consensual thing or series of things.”
Pivoting back to Cassie, Agnifilo then showed video from Combs’ 2016 assault on her at the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles. He painted the whole incident as being about a phone, saying that he believed Cassie had Diddy’s phone, and he was trying to get it back.
Comey, in her rebuttal, countered by reminding the jury that security guard Israel Florez, who was on the scene, testified that Cassie was saying during the incident that she wanted her phone.
Agnifilo also reiterated a defense theory that the assault was caused by bad drugs. To bolster the argument, he pointed to a text Cassie sent five days after the assault where she wrote, “How would I know if the drugs are going to be bad or that you won’t drink too much?”
“They’re still talking about what happened five days earlier, and I submit to you that that remark of how would I know if the drugs are going to be bad…I think you know we’ve been maintaining that part of what was off is that the drugs were different,” he said. “The drugs were off. The drugs were bad.”
Agnifilo continued countering charges against his client, saying that Cassie lied about Combs raping her in 2018, and instead made the story up to avoid admitting to her now-husband, who she was dating at the time, that she and Combs had consensual sex.
He also said that the mogul’s threats to Cassie and Jane to release their sex tapes, which the government painted as coercion to keep them participating in freak offs, were just hot air.
“[T]here were times [he said] I’m going to release the videos,” the attorney began. “That’s like saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ That’s just, I’m angry. There is no way on God’s green earth Sean Combs is going to release one of these videos.”
When it came to Jane, Agnifilo leaned heavily into her anonymity. The alleged victim admitted during trial that she had a child with someone Combs disliked.
“You guys know who her baby father is,” Agnifilo said to the jury, who were charged by the judge not to read or look up anything about the case while it was going on, or to discuss it with each other until deliberations begin. “You guys know.”
Public discussion of Jane’s identity was a contentious topic during the trial, with Jane’s attorney telling the court at one point that internet posts seeking to reveal her true identity were threatening her safety.
Agnifilo also discussed a time last summer when Combs is accused of beating Jane and then forcing her to have oral sex with an escort. He called her behavior that night “inexplicable,” and wondered if she “prompted” the altercation with Combs because she “has designs on something in the future.”
Toward the end, he circled back to the “two trials” idea.
“The witnesses and the evidence will give you everything you need to know,” he said. “Don’t listen to the other trial, which is the fake trial. Listen to the real trial.”
Maureen Comey followed, reiterating many of the points Christy Slavik made the day before about the evidence against Combs. Comey did take a dramatic moment to respond to Agnifilo’s portrayal of his client as a fist-fighter, and not someone prone to gunplay.
“Mr. Agnifilo said that Sean Combs is a hands-and-fists guy, something like
that,” she said. “Sure, with his girlfriends. But with men, like Suge Knight, you heard from Cassie and David James, he gets guns when he’s dealing with men.”
She also vehemently objected to the idea that Cassie, Mia, or Jane were testifying for any self-serving or monetary reason.
“Cassie’s lawsuit caused a media firestorm targeting the defendant,” Comey said. “So Cassie had money. She had the media on her side. She was already a famous celebrity. If she’d made up a lie to get all of that, then why would she risk it all by perjuring herself at a federal trial?
“If Cassie was just after money, if she made up a story to get paid, she never
would have testified at this trial. She would have cashed her check and ridden the wave of positive press coming her way.”
“Mia is not part of some money grab,” the prosecutor continued. “She’s got no lawsuits, no payday coming. She’s not expecting a single cent from testifying here… [A]nd she’s certainly not doing it for fame or attention. Remember, she asked to testify under a pseudonym for her privacy.
“And same thing with Jane. She’s never sued the defendant. She doesn’t plan to… If the only reason she came here and told you about feeling coerced, if the only reason she wrote that in her text was because she was hoping to get some payday, then where’s the lawsuit?”
The jury in the case will begin deliberations on Monday.