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The Sean Combs verdict

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I haven’t followed either this case or the trial at all, so this thread is for people who want to discuss it. I did find this Vox explainer both interesting and disturbing

“There’s so much physical violence in this case, and I think it’s easy to extrapolate how fear of physical violence could coerce somebody into making choices,” Courtney Cross, who runs a law clinic for abuse and IPV survivors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told me. “But coercive control itself as a dynamic is way less about the physical violence and so much more about that web of nonphysical tactics of abuse.”

Since testimony in the case kicked off May 12, we’ve already heard plenty of evidence pointing to physical coercion or the threat of it. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when 2016 surveillance footage surfaced in 2023 showing Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway.

Ventura testified over several days on the witness stand that during their 11-year relationship, Combs frequently physically assaulted her, threatened her with violence, and dangled the possibility of leaking filmed sex footage of her to the public (which might be considered “revenge porn” or a form of image-based abuse). Multiple witnesses have corroborated Ventura’s testimony with their own accounts of having seen or heard Combs abuse Ventura. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura’s, testified that Combs once threatened her in Ventura’s 17th-story apartment by hoisting her to the balcony ledge. After yelling at her, he allegedly threw her into the balcony furniture, causing wounds and bruises to her legs.

What’s perhaps even more striking, however, is the bigger picture that emerges from all of this witness testimony: an environment, in both Combs’s working relationships and his intimate ones, of fear, paranoia, and unpredictable outbursts of temper.

One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that Combs issued a death threat to her on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point kidnapped her, forcing her to come with him to track down Ventura’s boyfriend. (The boyfriend was musician Kid Cudi, whose Porsche Combs is also accused of firebombing.) She as well as another former staffer have each testified to having been required to take polygraph tests by Combs to keep their jobs.

Another former staffer, testifying under the pseudonym Mia, recounted being pressured to reside mainly with Combs at his residences, where she said she was then not permitted to lock her bedroom door or leave the property. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him.

The physical abuses that Combs allegedly inflicted are covered in the trial and are on their own horrific enough. But what’s left unexplained is the mental and emotional anguish that a pattern of coercive control creates. Having rules about where and how to live, the implicit invasion of privacy that comes with a forced polygraph test or not being allowed to lock a door; these things could add up to a sense that a person does not have agency over their own life.

All of these moments arguably create a pattern of abuse and manipulation by Combs — the hallmarks of coercive control that the witnesses seem to have lived with and experienced, even if they can’t refer to it by name in the courtroom.

My understanding is that the charges on which Combs was convicted are likely to lead to a sentence of time served (he was denied bail and has been in jail since his arrest in September). ETA: People who know something about federal criminal sentencing, i.e., not me, are saying that a few more months or even a year or multiple years are well within the range of sentencing possibilities, to go along with the nine months he’s already served. . . . Which brings up a real possibility, if he gets hit with a significant sentence, that Trump will pardon him (these are federal convictions), to shore up his support with Those People for 2028.

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