Inside the Hellhole NYC Prison That Will House Diddy Until His Sex Trafficking Trial

Sean “Diddy” Combs was remanded back into federal custody on Tuesday afternoon after a judge denied him bail as his sex abuse case proceeds to trial.

The hip-hop tycoon has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and will be will be housed in pretrial detention at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The MDC holds around 1,600 inmates, all but a few dozen awaiting trial. It has been New York City’s primary federal detention center since 2021, when the Bureau of Prisons shuttered Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center—where Jeffrey Epstein died—over the appalling conditions inside.

Its sister across the East River is a similarly notorious facility, plagued by chronic understaffing, constant lockdowns, outbreaks of violence, delayed access to medical care, and a rash of suicides and deaths.

Combs’ lawyers acknowledged as much in a motion for bail filed earlier on Tuesday, noting that “several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention.

“Just earlier this summer, an inmate was murdered,” they wrote. “At least four inmates have died by suicide there in the past three years.”

On June 7, a man named Uriel Whyte, who’d been awaiting trial on gun charges for more than two years, was stabbed to death inside the MDC. Just over a month later, a second man, Edwin Cordero, died after being injured in a jail fight.

“It’s very violent,” an inmate named Eli told Spectrum News NY1 after Whyte’s death. “There’s stabbings, there’s stabbings at least a couple times a week.”

Cordero’s lawyer called the “senseless and completely preventable,” adding that the jail was “hell on earth,” according to The New York Times.

Combs’ lawyers, Marc Agnifilo and Teny R. Geragos, went on in their filing to cite a number of recent legal cases in which conditions at the MDC were variously described as “dreadful,” “longstanding,” “dirty,” “inhuman,” and an “ongoing tragedy.”

In early August, Judge Gary Brown referenced its “dangerous, barbaric conditions” in threatening to vacate an elderly man’s nine-month sentence should he be sent to the MDC. (At least three other judges have refused to order defendants to the jail in recent years for the same reason.)

Over the weekend, the New York Daily News reported that the MDC had stopped accepting inmates serving out their sentences, with no formal explanation given. But “I think it’s kind of [obviously] in response to what Judge Brown did,” a law enforcement source commented to the newspaper.

In his decision, Brown referenced both Whyte and Cordero’s deaths, writing that they “demonstrate a woeful lack of supervision over the facility, a breakdown of order and an environment of lawlessness within its confines that constitute unacceptable, reprehensible and deadly mismanagement.”

In January 2019, the MDC was vaulted into the national spotlight after a weeklong blackout left inmates stranded and shivering in single-digit temperatures. A class action lawsuit over the outage was settled for roughly $10 million last year.

But conditions deteriorated during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon bemoaning in 2021 her “complete and utter inability to do anything meaningful” about the situation inside New York jails like the MDC, which she said were “run by morons.”

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The “morons” at the MDC have been tasked with playing host to a number of celebrity clientele over the years, including the disgraced rapper R. Kelly; Epstein’s henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell; the fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried; ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli; and (briefly) the convicted FyreFest fraudster Billy McFarland.

Infamously, Maxwell bellyached loudly and repeatedly about her time at the MDC. She complained that correctional officers were physically abusing her, holding her in “de facto solitary confinement,” keeping her up with their flashlights, and subjecting her to constant humiliating searches. Her lawyers said that she was underfed, losing her hair, and living among cockroaches and rodents.

After her 2022 conviction, she was moved to a low-level federal prison in Florida known for yoga and its inmate talent show to begin serving out her 20-year sentence, according to the Associated Press.

The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General last inspected the MDC in 2020, according to a list of its published reports. (The inspection was conducted remotely. The last in-person inspection was in 2019.)

“They know this place should be shut down, and it is impossible, nearly impossible, for you to fight a case from MDC Brooklyn,” Eli told Spectrum News NY1 in June. “Forget about your constitutional rights. Human rights here are a problem.”

In their Tuesday motion, Agnifilo and Geragos urged the judge to greenlight a $50 million bail for Combs, a bond tied to his Miami residence. They argued that the 54-year-old rapper’s “extraordinary” decision to fly to New York ahead of his arrest was proof of his “trustworthiness and lack of flight risk.”

But prosecutors argued that Combs remains a threat to his victims and witnesses, with one characterizing him as a “serial abuser and a serial obstructer,” according to the Times.

Prosecutors also pointed out that after Dawn Richard, Combs’ 10th and most recent accuser, sued him earlier this month, he contacted a former bandmate 128 times—including calling her 58 times in four days—until she put out a statement supporting him, Rolling Stone reported.

Judge Robyn Tarnofsky eventually denied Combs’ request for bond, citing his flight risk, anger issues, and substance abuse.

The disgraced mogul was arrested late Monday in Manhattan’s Park Hyatt Hotel after a grand jury issued an indictment. It was the culmination of nearly a year of mounting allegations of sexual misconduct, kickstarted by a lawsuit filed by ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura last November.

Combs settled privately with Ventura a day after her explosive claims went public, but seven more women and two men would subsequently come forward with harrowing stories of their own.

In March, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations raided Combs’ properties in Miami and Los Angeles. According to the indictment, there they confiscated narcotics and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, items used in Combs’ “freak offs,” orgies that prosecutors described as “elaborate and produced sex performances” born of his coercion and force.

Standing outside the courthouse after Tuesday’s hearing, Agnifilo told reporters that they would appeal Combs’ bond denial. “We believe in him wholeheartedly,” he said.