Source: people.com
Federal prosecutors used Sean “Diddy” Combs’s own words – and the words of the women they say the rapper sexually abused – against him in federal court this week to help ensure he remains behind bars until his trial on charges of racketeering and sex crimes.
“I’m not a rag doll. I’m someone’s child,” Assistant United States Attorney Emily A. Johnson said, quoting an unnamed woman’s message from a lectern in Manhattan’s federal court Wednesday, Sept. 18.
Combs – who pleaded not guilty to the three-count indictment at his arraignment Tuesday – sat silently between his defense lawyers dressed in a black long-sleeve shirt and striped gray sweatpants during Wednesday’s detention hearing in which he was denied bail for the second time.
“There is a longstanding pattern of abuse here,” Johnson told the judge Wednesday.
Johnson read from messages in which a woman claimed to be “heavily drugged” during a sexual encounter with the singer. Prosecutors alleged in an indictment that multiple women said Combs had used recordings of those encounters as blackmail.
In a message Johnson attributed to Combs, he allegedly directed an associate to “make sure” a woman’s rent was “paid on time” in what Johnson alleged was a pay-off.