Give up? Not Diddy! Lawyers for Sean Combs urged a federal appeals court in New York late Tuesday (Dec.23) to order his immediate release from prison. The latest appeal also asked the court to reverse his conviction on prostitution-related charges or direct his trial judge to lighten his four-year sentence.
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Diddy Takes Aim At Trial Judge In Appeal
Diddy’s lawyers stated in a filing with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that his trial judge, Arun Subramanian, treated him harshly at sentencing. The paperwork claims Judge Subramanian allowed evidence related to his acquitted charges to unjustly influence the punishment.
Sean Combs is locked up at a federal prison in New Jersey and scheduled for release in May 2028. He was acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking at a trial that ended in July. A jury convicted Diddy under the Mann Act, which bans transporting people across state lines for any sexual crime.
Lawyers for Combs said Judge Arun Subramanian acted like a “thirteenth juror” in October when he sentenced Combs to four years and two months in prison. They said the judge slipped by letting evidence surrounding the acquitted charges influence the sentence he imposed.
What Is Combs Seeking?
Additionally, the lawyers noted that Diddy was convicted of two lesser counts, prostitution offenses that didn’t require force, fraud, or coercion. They asked the appeals court, which has not yet heard oral arguments, to acquit Sean Combs, order his immediate release from prison or direct Subramanian to reduce his sentence.
“Defendants typically get sentenced to less than 15 months for these offenses — even when coercion, which the jury didn’t find here, is involved,” the lawyers wrote.
Furthermore, the lawyers wrote: “The judge defied the jury’s verdict and found Combs ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings trumped the verdict and led to the highest sentence ever imposed for any remotely similar defendant.”
What Did Judge Arun Subramanian Say At Sentencing?
At sentencing, Judge Subramanian said that when calculating the prison term, he considered Diddy’s treatment of two former girlfriends. The women testified that the Bad Boy Records founder beat them and coerced them into having sex with male sex workers while he watched and filmed the encounters, sometimes masturbating.
To recap, at the trial, former girlfriend Cassie testified that Combs ordered her to have “disgusting” sex with strangers hundreds of times during their decade-long relationship that ended in 2018. Jurors saw video of him dragging and beating her in a Los Angeles hotel hallway after one such multi-day “freak-off.”
The second former girlfriend testified under the pseudonym Jane. She said she was pressured into sex with male workers during what Combs called “hotel nights.” Those nights included drug-fueled sexual encounters from 2021 to 2024 that also could last days.
At sentencing, Subramanian said he “rejects the defense’s attempt to characterize what happened here as merely intimate, consensual experiences, or just a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll story.” He added:
“You abused the power and control that you had over the lives of women you professed to love dearly. You abused them physically, emotionally, and psychologically. And you used that abuse to get your way, especially when it came to freak-offs and hotel nights.”
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Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak and Larry Neumeister contributed to this report via AP Newsroom.
