Pointe of Adrenaline Tuesday at the trial of the Hip-Hop P. Diddy magnate magnate, where the jury agreed on a verdict for accusations of sexual traffic, but not for that of criminal association, the most important because liable to life prison.
Faced with this impasse, and at the request of the accusation and the defense, the judge Arun Subramanian ordered the jurors to continue their deliberations on the accusation chief still litigious before announcing their decision for the four chiefs of sexual traffic and transport of persons involved in prostitution, liable to maximum sentences ranging from 10 to 15 years.
And as the jury in this hypermediatal trial is not isolated and deliberates, since the day before, during the day, the jurors indicated that they were going to go home and resume their exchanges on Wednesday morning leaving the suspense on this case which fascinates the United States and beyond.
Tuesday, members of the family of the founder of the Bad Boy Records label, including his son King and his mother Janice, were also present at the Manhattan Criminal Court awaiting a verdict.
During the seven weeks of trial, the twelve jurors heard 34 witnesses, peeled thousands of pages of transcription of telephone conversations or SMS exchanges to try to decide on the fate of the star of hip-hop.
P.DIDDY, whose real name is Sean Combs, is accused of having forced women – including her girlfriend from 2007 to 2018, the singer Cassie, and a former more recent companion who testified under the pseudonym “Jane” – to engage in sexual marathons with prostituted men while he masturbated or filmed. And also to have implemented a criminal network, of which he was at the head, to organize these marathons called “freak-offs”.
“It was absolutely no free choice,” had repeated in its indictment the prosecutor Christy Slavik, specifying that the alleged victims “were drug addicts, brushed with oil, exhausted and had badly”.
“She (Cassie) has always been free to leave. She had chosen to stay because she was in love with her and that she was in love with her (…), she loves sex and great good,” replied Marc Agnifilo, the rapper’s lawyer.
Lifestyle?
P.DIDDY pleaded not guilty to these accusations and chose not to testify, a current defense strategy in the United States. His lawyers do not have to prove the innocence of their client, but rather to sow a reasonable doubt among the members of the jury regarding the accusations of the prosecutors.
During the trial, his lawyers did everything to discredit the control witnesses with a muscular counter-perspective and attempted to show that their customer had a “polyamatrous” lifestyle which does not fall under criminal law.
Cassie was thus subjected to a rolling fire of questions, aimed at making her conceded that she participated of her own free will in these sexual acts with other men.
“I am still ready” for a “freak-off”, she wrote to her companion in 2009. The singer did not dispute, while explaining that she was under the influence of the founder of the Bad Boy Records label whose fortune had been evaluated in 2019 at $ 700 million by Forbes magazine.
Cassie and “Jane” admitted that their respective relationship involved love, but that they were at the same time subject to threats linked to their reputation, their financial situation and their physical integrity.
“He (p.diddy) had so far exceeded the limits that he could not even see them anymore,” said another prosecutor, Maurene Comey, saying that the rapper felt “untouchable”. “But the accused is not God,” she said to the jurors hoping for a condemnation.
This article was published automatically. Sources: ATS / AFP
