Late in the day before Thanksgiving, a Manhattan federal judge issued a ruling on whether rap mogul Sean Combs would succeed in his third attempt as being released on bail pending trial on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
“DENIED,” Judge Arun Subramanian’s ruling said.
The single word in capital letters announced that Combs would not be spending Thanksgiving with his family in the three-bedroom Manhattan apartment outfitted with camera and 24-hour armed minders that his lawyers had arranged as part of a $50 million bail package.
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Instead, he would remain in the horrid Metropolitan Correctional Center, which serves a midday Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
The judge’s full order makes clear that Combs never really had a chance of making bail.
“No Condition or Combination of Conditions Will Reasonably Assure the Safety of the Community,” the judge declared.
At a bail hearing on Friday, the judge asked the two sides to submit their legal arguments by Monday and said he would issue a decision later this week. He said nothing about this coming Thursday being Thanksgiving, but that must have risen in the minds of the family members in the courtroom at Friday’s hearing. They included Combs’ twin 17-year-old daughters, Jessie and D’Lila.
The twins had been with their father back on Thanksgiving of 2022, when he engaged in a little prescient public relations by going with a current girlfriend to serve turkey dinner to homeless men at The Caring Place in Miami, Florida. His daughters were not likely aware that Thanksgiving of 2022 happened also to be the day that the Adult Survivors Act opened a year-long allowing alleged sex crime victims to seek civil redress for sex crimes otherwise outside the statute of limitations.
At the approach of that deadline saw R&B singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura filed suit against her former boyfriend Combs.
Ventura charged that the rap mogul had raped her and subjected her to a years-long ordeal of sexual and psychic abuse.
Combs settled the suit the day after it was filed. But two other women, Joi Dickerson-Neal and Liza Gardner, filed separate suits against him on Thanksgiving itself. They each alleged that he had raped them at the start of his career; Gardner in 1990 and Dickerson-Neal early on the following year.
Dickerson-Neal’s suit says she had done something subsequent to the alleged January 3, 1991 attack that could have spared numerous others from being similarly assaulted by him. His career might have ended before it really began. But the immediate outcome was one that had become too common in the days before before #MeToo.
“Plaintiff filed police reports in New York and New Jersey and spoke to several prosecutors hoping to press charges,” Dickerson-Neal’s suit reports. “Members of law enforcement told Plaintiff that her allegations would need to be corroborated by witnesses and others who had experienced similar assaults.”
Combs would deny–and continues to deny–that he has ever sexually assaulted anybody. And, having become a billionaire, he could have contested or just quietly settled those cases as well. That might have been, had his behavior with Ventura and others not come to the attention of federal prosecutors in New York this year.
That behavior included “freak-offs” involving paid escorts and drugs. Prosecutors also took note of a surveillance video obtained by CNN that shows Combs kicking and dragging Ventura in a hallway at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in in 2016.
Combs was indicted in September and remanded to the horrid Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. His attorneys twice attempted to get him released pending trial with a multimillion-dollar bail package. He did not help himself by repeatedly violating the MDC’s rules regarding telephones and text messaging.
But Combs’ attorneys decided to give it another try with a bail package only a billionaire could put together. The government contended that approving something so far beyond the means of the less than fabulously wealthy would constitute a “two-tier” system of justice. The government also took the position that Combs had proven too untrustworthy and dangerous for pretrial release, whatever the assurances.
The judge agreed and cited several passages from the indictment, which charges that for decades Combs “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct. To do so, [Combs] relied on the 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.”
The judge further quotes the indictment alleging that Combs “himself carried or brandished firearms to intimidate and threaten others, including victims of and witnesses to his abuse.”
The judge’s order notes that the indictment also says “law enforcement seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers, as well as a drum magazine“ and that Combs “engaged in acts of violence, threats of violence, threats of financial and reputational harm, and verbal abuse. These acts of violence included kidnapping and arson.”
In citing the reasons why he was denying Combs bail, the judge’s order also served as a reminder of the seriousness of the allegations against him. The order quotes a text Venture sent Combs after a 2016 incident in in a hotel hallway where he was he was videoed battering kicking and dragging her:
“I have a black eye and a fat lip. You are sick for thinking it’s OK to do what you’ve done…I still have crazy bruising.”
That is somehow the same guy who smiled so brightly at his twin daughters when he came into the courtroom for Friday’s bail hearing on Friday. Combs will almost certainly remain locked up until trial. And, if he is convicted, he may not be free for many Thanksgivings to come.
