Prosecutors take final aim at Combs

Music mogul’s fate rests on damning testimony

Sean “Diddy” Combs’s lawyer aimed Friday to skewer the credibility of the music mogul’s accusers, saying in closing arguments they were out for money while rejecting any notion he led a criminal ring, reports AFP.

But in their rebuttal — the trial’s final stage before jurors are tasked with deciding the verdict — prosecutors tore into the defence, saying Combs’s team had “contorted the facts endlessly.”

Prosecutor Maurene Comey told jurors that by the time Combs – once among the most powerful people in music — had committed his clearest-cut offences, “he was so far past the line he couldn’t even see it.”

“In his mind he was untouchable,” she told the court. “The defendant never thought that the women he abused would have the courage to speak out loud what he had done to them.”

“That ends in this courtroom,” she said. “The defendant is not a god.”

For most of Friday’s hearing defense attorney Marc Agnifilo picked apart, and even made light of, the testimony of women who were in long-term relationships with Combs, and who said he had coerced them into drug-fuelled sex parties with paid escorts.

Agnifilo scoffed at the picture painted by prosecutors of a violent, domineering man who used his employees, wealth and power to foster “a climate of fear” that allowed him to act with impunity.

Combs, 55, is a “self-made, successful Black entrepreneur” who had romantic relationships that were “complicated” but consensual, Agnifilo said.

In his freewheeling, nearly four-hour-long argument, Agnifilo aimed to confuse the methodic narrative US attorney Christy Slavik provided one day prior.

She had spent nearly five hours meticulously walking the jury through the charges and their legal basis, summarising thousands of phone, financial, travel and audiovisual records along with nearly seven weeks of testimony from 34 witnesses.

Central to their case is the claim that Combs led a criminal enterprise of senior employees — including his chief-of-staff and security guards — who “existed to serve his needs.”

But Agnifilo underscored that none of those individuals testified against Combs, nor were they named as co-conspirators.

“This is supposed to be simple,” the defence counsel told jurors. “If you find that you’re in the weeds of this great complexity, maybe it’s because it just isn’t there.”

If convicted, Combs faces upwards of life in prison.

‘Brazen’