In Sean Combs case, echoes of approach of other powerful men – DNyuz

While the charges against Sean Combs are shocking and detailed, it seems like a familiar scenario for federal prosecutions of high-profile men accused of a long history of abusing women.

The charges against Combs, made public Tuesday, resemble the prosecution strategy employed in recent years by federal investigators in two other high-profile sexual abuse cases against Keith Raniere, the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, and R. Kelly, the R&B singer.

Both men were convicted of the same charges of same-sex trafficking and extortion that Mr. Combs now faces, but he has pleaded not guilty.

Racketeering charges are attractive to prosecutors pursuing powerful defendants because they are designed to present an “enterprise,” a complex web of individuals who helped the defendants carry out alleged crimes that can go back many years. In Mr. Combs’s case, for example, prosecutors built their racketeering and conspiracy charges by accusing him of crimes dating back to 2008, including arson, kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.

In some cases, federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges allow prosecutors to charge crimes for which a state’s statute of limitations has expired.

And federal laws carry tough penalties: The most severe sex trafficking statute, under which Mr. Combs is charged, carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years. The racketeering charge, which charges defendants with carrying out crimes as part of an “enterprise,” carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

“The law recognizes that individuals become more powerful when they have the support of a group,” said Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won the case against Mr. Kelly in Brooklyn. “The racketeering law is there to give broad prosecutorial powers to bring these people to justice.”

But defense attorneys have fought back vigorously over the years as prosecutors increasingly focus on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, arguing that the federal laws are being used to prosecute less serious conduct than was envisioned when they were passed.

The federal racketeering law — known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — was passed in 1970 to crack down on organized criminal enterprises like the Mafia. And the Sex Trafficking Act, passed by Congress in 2000, has often been used to prosecute prostitution rings and pimps.

The case against Mr. Combs is much less traditional.

The lawsuit accuses the music mogul, also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, of coercing women into elaborate sexual encounters with male prostitutes, called “freak offs,” dosing them with drugs to keep them compliant and threatening them if they refused to participate. The allegations closely resemble those in a civil lawsuit filed by Cassie, Mr. Combs’ former girlfriend of 10 years, who accused him of forcing her to participate in “freak offs.”

During a bail hearing on Tuesday, Combs’ lead attorney, Marc Agnifilo, objected to the government’s portrayal of the encounters as sex trafficking. He argued that for Cassie, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, it was consensual — “part of the way these two adults wanted to be intimate with each other.” He accused the government of “entering this man’s bedroom.”

“Is it sex trafficking?” Mr. Agnifilo said during the hearing. “No, not if everyone wants to be there.”

Mr. Agnifilo made a similar argument as a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, who was convicted in 2019 of racketeering and sex trafficking among other charges and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Women testified at the trial that Mr. Raniere had sexually abused them, and some said they had been branded with his initials in a secret ceremony.

Attorneys see his case as a pivotal moment because it led an appeals court to take a broader view of the type of conduct that could be prosecuted under federal sex trafficking laws.

Mr. Raniere’s lawyers argued that the application of the sex trafficking law in his case went too far and that the law was intended to more narrowly address sexual exploitation for profit.

“It was somewhat twisted to suit the needs of prosecutors to lock up people they feel need to be locked up,” Arthur L. Aidala, a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, said of the federal sex trafficking law, “even though they did not violate the spirit of the law when it was passed.”

However, prosecutors had alleged during the trial that leaders of Mr. Raniere’s organizations had profited from the trafficking of victims because they were given higher status within the group and free labor from recruits known as slaves.

A federal appeals court in New York agreed with the government’s broader definition, giving the green light for more creative approaches to human trafficking prosecutions.

Moira Penza, a former prosecutor who handled the Raniere case, said the trial was a tried-and-true tool for prosecutors who had been wary in the past of bringing complicated cases based on conduct that occurred behind closed doors.

“These crimes so often went unpunished because prosecutors were worried about bringing ‘he said, she said’ cases, especially against powerful people,” Ms. Penza said. “It was one of those first trials after the #MeToo movement that showed that it could actually happen.”

Mr. Kelly’s 2021 trial also relied on racketeering law to provide an overarching framework for the prosecution. Mr. Kelly had long evaded criminal punishment despite allegations that he sexually abused underage girls. In some cases, the statute of limitations had expired on some of the charges. But prosecutors described those as “conditional acts” and part of a pattern of abuse fostered by the criminal “enterprise.”

One of the charges was bribery. Prosecutors convinced the jury that in 1994 the singer paid an Illinois government employee to obtain a fake ID for singer Aaliyah, whom he married when she was just 15.

To weave that act into a larger pattern, prosecutors had to convince the jury that it was just one of many crimes made possible by the existence of a criminal “enterprise.” In Mr. Kelly’s case, prosecutors presented the enterprise as a group of managers, bodyguards, drivers, personal assistants and runners who helped in a decades-long scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex. That involved inviting the women and girls backstage at the singer’s concerts and making them travel to see him.

“Often the reason they were able to escape justice is because this group was looking out for them,” Ms. Geddes, the former prosecutor, said of the typical extortion case.

In the Combs case, the racketeering charge alleges that Mr. Combs’ supervisors, security personnel, housekeepers and other employees participated in organizing the “freak offs,” which included providing large sums of money to pay prostitutes and arranging travel for the women involved. However, only Mr. Combs was named in the indictment.

Mr. Kelly is appealing his conviction in New York; a lawyer representing him, Jennifer Bonjean, has argued, among other things, that the government has expanded the racketeering law “to a range of circumstances that goes far beyond what the Founding Fathers intended, namely to tackle organized crime.”

The third charge Mr. Combs faces — transportation to engage in prostitution — stems from a law called the Mann Act. The older law, used in the R. Kelly case, was passed long before the main sex trafficking law and is a lesser charge, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Julie A. Dahlstrom, a legal scholar who has studied trends in U.S. sex trafficking law, said she believes the broader application of sex trafficking laws by prosecutors is partly driven by an expanded use of the law to bring civil claims during the #MeToo movement.

“We saw victims’ rights advocates trying to use the tools they had,” she said, citing as an example a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein that resulted in a judge recognizing that a promise of potential career advancement in exchange for sex could bolster a sex trafficking claim.

Indeed, Mr. Combs’s criminal case was sparked by a lawsuit filed by his former girlfriend, Ms. Ventura, which cited, among other things, the federal sex trafficking law. Her lawsuit, which Mr. Combs quickly settled, accused him of repeatedly forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes, and said that her career as a singer on Mr. Combs’s label depended on their relationship.

For months, Mr. Combs’s lawyers had expected the civil case to escalate into a criminal case. That possibility began to look more likely on March 25, when federal agents raided Mr. Combs’s homes in Miami Beach and Los Angeles, seizing what the government described as electronics, AR-15-style weapons, narcotics and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant.

“We knew as early as March 25 where this was all going,” said his lawyer, Mr Agnifilo.

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