A second judge has refused to grant bail to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, citing the possibility that he will tamper with witnesses.
The hip-hop mogul had returned to federal court in New York on Wednesday to ask a judge to free him on bail, after waking up for the second day behind bars following his arrest on Monday on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Combs was initially denied bail and ordered to jail on Tuesday by a magistrate judge after making his first appearance in court following his arrest and pleading not guilty.
On Wednesday, a different judge was presiding, the official who will oversee the case to trial.
Combs’s lawyers had continued their arguments that he should be allowed to await his sex-trafficking trial at his luxury home on an island near Miami Beach rather than federal jail in Brooklyn.
His lawyers were offering again on Wednesday a $50m bail package in exchange for releasing Combs to home detention with GPS monitoring.
But the second judge also refused to grant bail.
The arrest of Combs, 54, came roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex-trafficking investigation raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami.
The three-count, 14-page indictment alleges racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and transportation to engage in prostitution.
The federal indictment contained graphic details, including that Combs would force sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates of his that he referred to as “freak offs” – sometimes for days at a time – while he recorded video of the encounters and masturbated to them. The encounters were so physically exhausting for him and his victims – whom he would allegedly force to ingest drugs – that all “typically received IV fluids to recover”, the indictment said.
“For decades, SEAN COMBS, a/k/a ‘Puff Daddy,’ a/k/a ‘P Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘PD,’ a/k/a ‘Love,’ the defendant, abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct,” the indictment reads.
Combs’s alleged criminal conspiracy, the indictment says, “relied on employees, resources, and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled – creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in, and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice”.
His lawyers tried unsuccessfully on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep him out of jail. As well as the bond, his lawyers pledged that Combs would turn over his passport and that he was attempting to sell his private jet. They said that “conditions at Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention”.
Prosecutors argued that Combs was “a serious flight risk” and that his net worth was close to $1bn, including more than $1m in personal cash on hand as of last December.
