Singer Cassie Ventura’s lawsuit against Sean Combs, which makes disturbing allegations of human trafficking and physical abuse spanning a decade, rocked the music industry last November and sparked a wave of legal claims against the mogul.
It also sparked one of the highest-profile federal sex crime investigations in recent memory. And on Sept. 17, prosecutors detailed what they had uncovered: a vast criminal enterprise through which Combs, also known as “Diddy,” had been trafficking women with the help of his business empire since at least 2008. He pleaded not guilty to the charges the following day.
If convicted, Combs, 54, faces 15 years to life in prison. The Bad Boy Entertainment founder, who is widely regarded as one of the biggest movers and shakers in the commercialization of hip-hop and has an estimated net worth of $1 billion, has turned to Marc Agnifilo, a do-it-all defense attorney with extensive experience in complex racketeering lawsuits involving criminal enterprises like the one Combs is facing.
Agnifilo, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and a former supervisor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office who served for two years as head of the violent crimes unit that prosecuted gangs, is known for spending nearly two decades working for Combs’ longtime attorney, Ben Brafman, on his boss’s most high-profile cases: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Martin Shkreli, Harvey Weinstein.
Ben Brafman, Combs' longtime attorney.
Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images
Brafman, now 70, has represented Combs for decades. (His client nicknamed him “Uncle Benny.”) He successfully defended the mogul in a criminal case that arose from a 1999 New York nightclub shooting and continued to handle headline-making civil cases for Combs in the years since, including one for allegedly assaulting a partygoer and another for allegedly threatening a longtime choreographer during the filming of his reality show. Creating the bandBrafman also represented Combs when Ventura, a former girlfriend who was once signed to his label, filed the lawsuit that triggered the criminal investigation.
Earlier this year, Agnifilo and two colleagues set out on their own to form a criminal law firm. He and another of the departing lawyers who now leads Combs’ defense, Teya Geragos, have a history of defending high-profile figures accused of serious crimes, including former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Ng and NXIVM founder Keith Raniere, a convicted sex trafficker. That legal team has assembled a who’s who of criminal defense lawyers known for their aggressive approaches to representing men accused of violent sex crimes, including Arthur Aidala (Weinstein) and Jennifer Bonjean (R. Kelly, Bill Cosby).
“I specialize in high-profile, sensitive matters,” he said of his practice, much of which has involved prosecutions brought out of the Southern District of New York, including cases involving the black market website Silk Road and the international prostitution ring linked to the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer. The same U.S. attorney’s office has also indicted Combs.
The duo was hired by Combs in March to coordinate his defense in the federal indictment, Agnifilo said at a Sept. 17 court hearing. Almost immediately, they began an investigation into what they imagined the government’s indictment would look like. They have interviewed multiple witnesses over the past six months.
Expect Agnifilo to go on the offensive: The women and prostitutes who had sex with Combs did so consensually for personal reasons, whether it was money, career advancement or romantic interest in the megastar.
“We are not simply making a general denial of guilt,” he wrote in a Sept. 18 letter to the court regarding Combs's denial of bail. “Rather, we are advancing detailed and specific facts that undermine the Government's case at its core.”
By his reasoning, the sex trafficking case centers on a single accuser, Combs’s ex-girlfriend, Ventura. And while their decades-long relationship was toxic, there were no sexual offenses, Agnifilo said. Using the same playbook as many celebrities accused of sexual assault, he is expected to paint Ventura as a scorned ex-girlfriend who sought a quick buck by threatening to sue Combs and publish a tell-all book about her time with him.
“We are now in a position where the one person who was allegedly the victim extorted Combs (on audiotape) and made millions of dollars out of him,” the attorney wrote in the same filing. “We have innumerable written communications that tend to deny any lack of consent and any coercion.”
The court will determine at a later date whether the lawsuit and settlement will be admitted to trial. Combs will argue that they are relevant to Ventura's credibility, while prosecutors will argue that they will negatively influence the jury.
Consent will likely be a battleground at trial. Agnifilo said the government has not alleged that Ventura never agreed to bring a third partner into their sexual encounters. When interviewed, six of the men denied seeing red flags, including coercion, someone being excessively intoxicated and lack of consent, according to the attorney.
“Does everyone experience intimacy in this way? No,” Agnifilo said at a Sept. 17 hearing. “Is it sex trafficking? No, not if everyone wants to be there.”
Undermining this theory is Ventura's account of her relationship with Combs, which will presumably come into the trial through her testimony. In her lawsuit, she claimed she was “entrapped by [Combs] in a cycle of abuse, violence and sex trafficking,” citing multiple incidents in which he allegedly “hit, beat, kicked and stomped” her as a means of control. The mogul would ask Ventura to perform sexual acts with other men, she alleged. “At times, Mr. Combs would pay to have male sex workers flown to his location, including in different cities in the United States and abroad,” the complaint said, which helped form the basis of prosecutors’ racketeering charge alleging that Combs would require “his staff to assist him in making these arrangements.”
Cassie Ventura and Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2018.
Frazer Harrison/FilmMagic
When she tried to leave, the lawsuit claims Combs used his “extensive network of affiliated companies and entities” to track her down and convince her to return. According to the lawsuit, in a 2011 altercation he lunged at her with a corkscrew and repeatedly punched her after Combs’ “enforcer network” followed her to Kid Cudi’s home, where she stayed when she tried to escape (the rapper’s car was allegedly torched with a Molotov cocktail in retaliation). Another incident involved Bad Boy management telling her her single wouldn’t be released unless she returned Combs’s phone calls.
The racketeering charge, about which Agnifilo has written and lectured extensively, will likely prove to be a more substantial challenge to overcome than sex trafficking. It is a method of prosecuting a crime rather than justifying a particular crime. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) has been used to prosecute murder, insider trading, and sex trafficking, among other types of charges. All prosecutors will have to prove is a pattern of racketeering activity involving at least two criminal acts within a certain time frame, knowledge of the conspiracy by the defendant, and that it extended beyond the defendant.
Speaking about the alleged conspiracy in connection with the weapons seized from Combs' homes, Agnifilo said the weapons belonged to security personnel.
“How they did it, whether they did it right, whether they did it wrong, whether they should have an AR-15 with no serial number, you know what, that’s not for us to say,” he said at the Sept. 17 hearing. “That’s not his gun.”
Backing Agnifilo is Geragos, another Brafman alum. She is the daughter of high-profile Los Angeles lawyer Mark Geragos, who has had a long history with Brafman. (They teamed up during the Michael Jackson child molestation saga, and in more recent years, Geragos represented Brafman when he reportedly became an unindicted co-conspirator in Michael Avenatti’s Nike extortion case.) Agnifilo’s wife, Karen Friedman-Agnifilo, a former deputy chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s office who had to recuse herself because of her work on the Strauss-Kahn and Weinstein cases, also has ties to Geragos’s firm: She co-hosts a Trump-critical podcast with her business partner Ben Meiselas.
Geragos, who touts his experience defending those accused of sexual assault, will likely take on the delicate task of cross-examining female witnesses about their claims against Combs. (Defense teams often assume that juries might be sensitive to men questioning women in court about alleged sexual assault, which is why female lawyers are often called upon for such probing. Exhibit A: Attorney Donna Rotunno’s work during the Weinstein trial, which followed the departure of Brafman and Agnifilo from her defense team.)
With Combs denied bail, he will have to present his defense at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where an inmate was murdered while awaiting trial this summer and is known for its unsafe and squalid conditions. His legal team is working to move him to a more secure facility.