The Real Reason Diddy (Mostly) Beat the Rap

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Diddy’s acquittal on Wednesday on the three most serious charges he faced—one count of RICO and two counts of sex trafficking—shocked many casual observers of his trial. After seven long weeks of trial, it was suddenly clear that the jury never believed the prosecutors’ narrative, which painted Diddy as a kingpin, sitting atop of a sex-trafficking enterprise. What the jury saw instead was far more pedestrian, if no less disturbing: a pattern of serious and prolonged domestic violence. A man who derived pleasure, sexual and otherwise, by making his lovers suffer. This was always the ugly core of Diddy’s story: He is an abuser of women. The “freak-offs,” the drugs, and the entourage were just his preferred tools of cruelty. This truth explains the verdict as much as anything else.

The evidence against Diddy included searing testimony from his two longtime girlfriends, who described a pattern of abuse and coercion dating back to 2008. Diddy controlled these women—their careers, their homes, and their sex lives. He coerced them into sex with other men, extorted them with the videos he made of them doing it, and beat them when they tried to leave. But what prosecutors failed to prove is what they had alleged in the indictment: that Diddy ran a sex-trafficking enterprise. Instead, all that remained of the United State v. Sean Combs on Wednesday were two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution—relating to the “freak-offs” where Diddy and his entourage brought in male prostitutes to have sex with his girlfriends. Diddy, who has been in jail since his arrest in September, was once again denied bail after the verdict and may serve a bit more jail time—his sentencing guidelines call for between 15 and 21 months—but it is a certainty that beating the three top charges spared him decades in prison.

The thing that may have saved Diddy is that these were tricky-to-prove federal charges instead of more straightforward state charges. The shape that Diddy’s prosecution took—a RICO indictment in federal court instead of a state court prosecution for sexual assault and battery—was largely a function of timing. By the time Diddy’s former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, went public with her allegations of Diddy’s abuse in 2023, most of his criminal conduct was outside of the statute of limitations. The federal RICO statute appeared to solve this problem: because the RICO statute demands that the government prove a pattern of continuous criminal conduct, prosecutors could introduce evidence of Diddy’s abusive acts from more than 15 years ago, which the jury otherwise would never have seen.

RICO, which stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, targets members of corrupt organizations, allowing the government to try them together for seemingly unrelated crimes. Prosecutors must prove that defendants were a part of a criminal enterprise with a structure and a purpose (often illegal) that worked together to commit at least two predicate crimes. Those crimes can involve drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping, fraud, bribery, money laundering, or sex trafficking. All of this makes RICO a defense attorney’s worst nightmare. It allows prosecutors to tell a sweeping story of a defendant’s criminality, weaving together different incidents, some of which would not otherwise be relevant.

First passed in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act, the law was designed as a tool against the mafia, but its vague definitions of what constitutes a criminal enterprise have made it federal prosecutors’ go-to in all sorts of conspiracy prosecutions. Provided prosecutors can show that certain acts further the goals of a “criminal enterprise,” they can present them to the jury, even if the acts are uncharged, or outside the statute of limitations. RICO also carries its own set of hefty criminal penalties, so that a defendant can be sentenced for the underlying conduct, and for RICO conspiracy, consecutively.

RICO is such a powerful prosecutorial tool that its reach has continued to expand. More than 50 years later, the statute (or state-law versions of it) has been used to try to prosecute everyone from the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to Donald Trump. In the past decade, prosecutors have successfully expanded its reach once again to prosecute a series of high-profile sex crimes including Nxivm sex cult leaders and even R. Kelly.

But in the case of Nxivm and R. Kelly, prosecutors had more to work with than they did in the Diddy case. Both R. Kelly and Keith Raniere, Nxivm’s founder, had built organizations around them in a way that Diddy had not. Both were charged with other defendants, whereas Diddy was charged alone. And both had groomed and had sex with minors, so that, unlike in Diddy’s case, their lawyers could not claim that the sex was consensual. R. Kelly had secretly made child pornography with the underage girls he raped, and then disseminated it. Raniere had created a complex system of hierarchical sexual slavery where women were branded with his initials.

By contrast, Diddy’s crimes were focused around his two consecutive longtime girlfriends, and the relationships were complicated, as relationships involving domestic abuse always are. Trying to parse out when these women had consented and when they had truly been coerced proved difficult for the jury. Convicting Diddy of sex trafficking was a bridge too far, even with all the supporting evidence that the RICO charge allowed the prosecutors to introduce. To the jury, Diddy’s entourage didn’t seem like a criminal enterprise effecting state commerce, so much as a group of enablers whose job was to get him drugs, supply him with endless amounts of baby oil, and clean up his messes. The “freak-offs” didn’t seem like “a pattern of racketeering activity” so much as a series of drug-fueled orgies designed to titillate Diddy and humiliate his girlfriends. And Diddy himself didn’t seem like a mob boss, just a vile pervert.

The criminal law is a blunt and inflexible tool, particularly when it comes to adjudicating domestic violence: Human relationships are often too complicated for jurors to feel confident drawing a line between what is consensual and what is coerced. As frustrating as it may be to prosecutors, not every crime can be punished. The lesson that prosecutors should take from Diddy’s (mostly) failed prosecution is that there are limits to the government’s ability to punish wrongdoers, and even the most flexible statutes can be stretched past the point of credulity.