Prosecutors are pushing back hard against Sean Combs’ claims they leaked the bombshell video showing his brutal beating of his ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura in a hotel hallway in March 2016. In a lengthy rebuke filed late Wednesday night, the prosecutors said their copy of the surveillance video is still the one they downloaded from CNN’s broadcast breaking the news last May. In over 39 pages of argument, they said Combs’ recent trio of motions seeking to exclude the video from his upcoming trial, gain early access to the prosecution’s list of victim names, and obtain a gag order over witnesses and their lawyers should all be denied.
Combs, 54, was arrested on his federal indictment on September 16 and is sitting in a federal jail in Brooklyn awaiting trial on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. The onetime billionaire Bad Boy Entertainment founder has pleaded not guilty. His trial in downtown Manhattan is set for May 5, 2025.
“All three of the defendant’s motions should be denied in their entirety,” the prosecutors wrote, saying Combs’ request for an evidentiary hearing and “suppression” of the Ventura video at trial “must be rejected.” They said the video was not protected material when CNN obtained it, and they willingly admitted their own attempts to obtain the video had failed. They said that as of Wednesday, they still had “not obtained the Intercontinental video broadcast by CNN from any source other than the public broadcast.”
“As the defendant is fully aware, the video was not in the government’s possession at the time of CNN’s publication, and the government has never, at any point, obtained the video through grand jury process,” the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York wrote.
“The defendant refuses to acknowledge that multiple individuals other than government agents—
including some of [Combs’] own employees—may have had access to the Intercontinental video,” they continued. “Indeed, the government is continuing to investigate who had access to and may have obtained the video, including, for instance employees of the hotel, the security team contracted by the hotel, and members of the defendant’s staff, who, as discussed on the record, attempted to obtain the video surveillance after the incident in March 2016.”
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With respect to Combs’ demand for victims’ names through something called a “bill of particulars,” meaning a written itemization of claims in a lawsuit, prosecutors said it’s too soon. “Here, all discovery will be produced by December 31, 2024, more than four months before trial, and the government’s rolling productions have intentionally prioritized items like search warrant affidavits—which contextualize the charges in the indictment—as well as other materials requested by the defendant.” They said that if Combs later claims he doesn’t have enough time to prepare for trial, “the appropriate relief” is to ask for a delay of the May trial date he specifically requested. “Due to the defendant’s history, the government has serious concerns about victim safety and the possibility of witness tampering if a list of victim names were provided to the defendant,” they said.
They said Combs’ third motion requesting a witness gag order also should be denied as “extraordinarily overbroad relief.” They described it as “nothing more than another attempt to force the government to prematurely disclose its witness list.”
Combs’ camp did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the government’s filing. When his lawyers filed their motion demanding victim names earlier this month, they said prosecutors were “unfairly” forcing Combs to “play a guessing game” as he prepared his defense. They said Combs’ 14-page indictment lacked “particularity” to the point that they couldn’t determine who the other unidentified alleged victims were — at least beyond the main victim, widely understood to be Ventura.
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“The government is forcing [Combs], unfairly, to play a guessing game,” defense attorneys Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos wrote. “Without clarity from the government, Mr. Combs has no way of knowing which allegations the government is relying on for purposes of the indictment.” The attorneys said Combs’ position was “made all the more challenging by the onslaught of baseless allegations that desperate plaintiffs are lodging at him — for the most part anonymously — in civil suits designed to exact a payoff from Mr. Combs and others.”
A pretrial hearing in the criminal case is set for Dec. 18. In his indictment, Combs is accused of having “abused, threatened, and coerced” multiple unidentified victims “to fulfill his sexual desires.” Prosecutors alleged Combs engaged in a “persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse,” but they were notably vague as to the dates and details regarding individuals other than Ventura, who wasn’t specifically named.
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Speaking with Rolling Stone last month, Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who delivered closing arguments in the government’s successful prosecution of R. Kelly in Brooklyn, described Combs’ racketeering indictment as following a “Glecier format,” meaning a bare-bones styling named after a famous case, United States v. Glecier. She said such a format has the benefit of affording more protection to witnesses. “By proceeding that way, they don’t have to list out every single different predicate racketeering act that they’re planning to prove up at trial. They can just list broad categories of crimes [without] alleging the particular instances, or the particular victims,” Geddes said.
Outside the criminal case, Combs also is facing more than two dozen lawsuits filed by plaintiffs making claims ranging from sexual harassment to rape. The deluge of civil claims started when Ventura filed her graphic sex-trafficking complaint last November. Combs settled with Ventura for an undisclosed sum within 24 hours, but her 35-page complaint, now the heart of the music mogul’s criminal prosecution, opened the floodgates. Combs’ homes were raided in March, and in May, CNN obtained and published the harrowing hotel surveillance video showing Combs throwing, kicking, stomping, and dragging Ventura in the hallway of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. After first denying Ventura’s claims against him, Combs issued a video apology related to the incident, admitting his “behavior on that video is inexcusable.”
