Sean Combs’ reported plan to get out of federal custody and counsel home violence abusers is hanging a nerve along with his accusers.
“That is completely preposterous,” Douglas Wigdor, the victims’ rights legal professional who represents Combs’ ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura tells Rolling Stone.
“How are you going to counsel another person if you haven’t finished the work on your self? That is manipulation at its greatest,” one supply who alleges they had been bodily assaulted by Combs within the 2010s, whose story has been corroborated by Rolling Stone, provides.
“It’s [making] a mockery of the system. It’s a mockery of everybody he’s harmed,” one other alleged sufferer now pursing litigation in opposition to Combs says. “He wants intensive remedy.”
The refrain of criticism adopted considered one of Combs’ trial attorneys, Alexandra Shapiro, telling Enterprise Insider the Dangerous Boy Data founder hopes to change into an anti-domestic violence counselor “to assist in no matter methods he can to type of encourage different folks not to do that and actually to assist in optimistic methods sooner or later.”
Shapiro reportedly stated Combs’ protection group plans to incorporate his meant pursuit of counseling work in court docket filings requesting a sentence of time-served for his latest conviction on two counts of transportation to interact in prostitution.
“The concept is that he would work with applications and be capable of go in and speak to folks, speak to youth, speak to others in regards to the concern in a proactive means and be an advocate for this,” Shapiro reportedly stated. “And generally, folks like him could be the most effective spokesperson to attempt to assist.”
Gloria Allred, a lawyer representing two plaintiffs with lawsuits pending in opposition to Combs, says the convicted mogul has a protracted highway forward of him earlier than he’s able to even think about counseling. (She additionally represents different alleged victims who spoke to regulation enforcement and had been on the potential witness listing on the legal trial however weren’t known as to the stand, she says.)
“At this level, his acknowledged objective doesn’t go the snigger check,” Allred tells Rolling Stone. As soon as he’s launched, she says, his first cease ought to be a therapy program for anger administration. “After that, he ought to take duty for any flawed that he has inflicted on any of his many alleged victims and compensate them for the damages, which exist on account of his conduct,” she says. “Lastly, he ought to ask the people he has victimized for forgiveness for the wrongs that he has inflicted on them. Then and solely then, he ought to enter a coaching program to learn to be a counselor in opposition to sexual or another sort of bodily violence.”
Combs, 55, was discovered responsible of the 2 prostitution-related Mann Act violations final month after an eight-week trial. Jurors acquitted him of the extra severe costs of racketeering conspiracy and intercourse trafficking. Prosecutors had alleged Combs coerced Ventura and a more moderen girlfriend who testified beneath the pseudonym “Jane” into drug-fueled threesomes with male escorts. They stated Combs choreographed the “freak offs” whereas masturbating and taking movies.
Shortly after Ventura filed the bombshell sex-trafficking lawsuit that alleged intensive bodily abuse in opposition to him in November 2023, which led to his arrest on legal sex-trafficking costs final September, Combs denied any wrongdoing by way of his lawyer. However in Might 2024, CNN obtained video exhibiting Combs kicking and dragging Ventura in a hallway of the InterContinental Lodge in Los Angeles in 2016. Combs took “full duty” for the beat down in an apology video, saying he was “actually sorry.”
At trial, he and his attorneys admitted he was violent with Ventura on a number of events, however they repeatedly argued “home violence just isn’t intercourse trafficking.” They claimed the resort surveillance video was a home dispute brought on by romantic jealousy. Ventura testified that she was fleeing a freak-off that had turned violent.
Over 4 days of harrowing testimony, Ventura described how Combs’ “eyes went black” throughout one horrific assault inside an Escalade in January 2009, close to the beginning of their relationship. Combs allegedly stomped on her face along with his sneakers on for 10 minutes. She stated the bodily abuse continued till they broke up for good in fall 2018. She claimed Combs additionally threatened to launch her intimate movies if she didn’t meet his freak-off calls for.
When it was time to cross-examine Ventura, the protection didn’t problem her home violence claims. “We personal them,” Agnifilo stated. “If he was charged with home violence, we wouldn’t all be right here having a trial as a result of he would have pled responsible — as a result of he did that,” the lawyer stated in his closing argument. It proved to be a successful technique with the jury.
How U.S. District Choose Arun Subramanian will view Combs’ aspirations to counsel different abusers just isn’t clear. At a detention listening to the day Combs was convicted, the decide famous that Combs had “conceded” his violence in his private relationships, so he was sufficient of a hazard to the neighborhood to warrant maintaining him in custody pending sentencing.
“This sort of violence, which occurs behind closed doorways in private relationships, sparked by unpredictable bouts of anger, is not possible to police with circumstances,” the decide stated. He famous that even after the March 2024 searches of Combs’ properties, when he was “conscious he was beneath investigation for intercourse trafficking,” he nonetheless battered Jane at her dwelling. This was “at a time when he ought to have recognized that he wanted to remain clear,” the decide stated.
Combs’ sentencing is about for Oct. 3.
