Live Updates: Sean Combs Appears in Court for Sentencing in Prostitution Case

Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul who crafted a business empire around his personal brand, appeared on Friday morning in federal court in Manhattan, where Judge Arun Subramanian will sentence him for his conviction on prostitution-related charges.

The hearing comes after an eight-week trial where the jury delivered a split verdict. Mr. Combs, 55, was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges that could have carried a life sentence. He was convicted of two prostitution-related charges that carry maximum sentences of 10 years each. The defense has asked for no more than 14 months imprisonment, while the prosecution has asked for more than 11 years.

Here is what to know about the hearing today.

• What to expect: Both sides of the case will make arguments to the judge about how long they think Mr. Combs should serve in prison. Mr. Combs’s lawyers indicated he will speak to the judge in open court; on Thursday, he sent a letter to the judge asking for mercy, vowing to “never commit a crime again.” Mr. Combs’s lawyers have said they also will show an 11-minute video at the hearing.

• The charges: Mr. Combs was convicted of two counts of violating the Mann Act, which makes it a crime to transport people across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. The transport included the two women whom the government said were victims of sex trafficking — Casandra Ventura (known as the singer Cassie) and another former girlfriend who testified under the pseudonym Jane — and male escorts, hired by Mr. Combs, who had sex with the women.

• Cassie’s plea: Ms. Ventura wrote a letter to the court imploring the judge to consider “the many lives that Sean Combs has upended with his abuse and control” in deciding the appropriate punishment.

• The judge will decide: Judge Subramanian, who oversaw the trial, was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and has served on the bench for only two and a half years. He is the first judge of South Asian heritage at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

• Mr. Combs’s life in jail: Since his arrest, Mr. Combs has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which has come under criticism from detainees’ advocates for its conditions and for turnover among its staff. The Bureau of Prisons says it has made many improvements to the facility in recent years.

Update from Julia Jacobs

Judge Arun Subramanian immediately addressed a key fight of the sentencing: whether he should factor in the broader scope of evidence of Sean Combs’s conduct, including the many accounts of his violence presented at trial. A rule from the federal sentencing commission that went into effect last year limits judges from considering what is called “acquitted conduct” when calculating sentencing guidelines. But Judge Subramanian said the law allows him to still consider such conduct in fashioning the sentence.

This is a loss for Mr. Combs, whose lawyers tried to get the judge to focus narrowly on the prostitution-related convictions in determining the sentence.

Update from Julia Jacobs

The prosecution said that Mia, a former personal assistant to Sean Combs who accused him of sexually assaulting her, would not speak at the sentencing hearing as planned. That is in part, the prosecution said, because of a letter the defense submitted to the judge seeking to block Mia from speaking, writing that “virtually everything that came out of her mouth” while on the stand during the trial “was a lie.”

Christy Slavik, a prosecutor, said the letter “can only be described as bullying.” Judge Arun Subramanian admonished the defense for the language in the letter, saying “the tone of the defense’s letter was inappropriate.”

Update from Julia Jacobs

The sentencing hearing has begun.

Judge Arun Subramanian, who presided over the eight-week trial this summer, said he intends to start by going over the report that the probation office prepared on Sean Combs, and then going through the various legal arguments that will influence his ultimate sentence.

Update from Ben Sisario

At times during the trial, Sean Combs arrived in court with a broad smile, looking confident. Today his mood appears to be more somber. One lawyer gave him a comforting tap on his back.

Update from Julia Jacobs

Sean Combs just entered the courtroom, hugging and shaking hands with his lawyers. Wearing a light-colored crew-neck sweater and a white-collared shirt, he greeted his family in the gallery, sat down and put his glasses on.

Update from Julia Jacobs

Sean Combs’s mother, Janice Combs, and his six adult children are sitting in the spectators’ gallery. All of them wrote letters of support asking for his release. Noting that she did not excuse her son’s wrongdoing, his mother wrote to the judge, “I appeal to the kindness of your heart to allow my son to be able to sit at a dinner table with his family.”

In jail, Combs has gotten sober and developed a self-help course.

When Sean Combs was arrested in September 2024, he traded a life of mansions and luxury hotels for a bleak, dormitory-style unit lined with bunk beds at a federal jail in Brooklyn.

For about a year, Mr. Combs has been living on the fourth floor of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where high-profile inmates often coexist with government informants and others who need to be separated from the general jail population.

Held without bail, Mr. Combs has gotten sober, undergone psychological treatment and tutored other inmates on business and personal development, his lawyers have said; he also has worked extensively on his own defense.

The unit where Mr. Combs has been living, known as 4 North, has televisions, table tennis, a microwave and an exercise room with yoga mats and a small basketball hoop. The unit is more lenient than some others at the jail: Inmates are generally free to move around, while more restrictive units may require inmates to remain inside a cell for as many as 23 hours a day.

But 4 North is still regimented. Mr. Combs must present his identification card to guards every two hours so they can check on him, his lawyers said. He has access to a telephone — which he has used to speak with his children and, at least once, the rapper Ye — but he has a limited allotment of minutes. (His lawyers acknowledged that Mr. Combs received a violation for using another inmate’s phone to make calls when his minutes ran out.)

Former occupants of the unit have included Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who was convicted of fraud, and Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

Mr. Combs has no doubt been a subject of interest to his fellow inmates, many of whom signed up for a business management and self-help course he developed while incarcerated called “Free Game With Diddy.”

The course description — which was submitted to the judge presiding over Mr. Combs’s case and sentencing — promises “exclusive insights into the journey of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, tracing his rise from humble beginnings to becoming a globally recognized icon and influential business mogul.”

Raymond Castillo, a fellow inmate, whom Mr. Combs’s lawyers described as one of the men he has befriended while in jail, wrote in a letter that was submitted to the judge that the mogul has become his “personal mentor,” and “has been teaching me things such as how to truly love myself and get closer to God.”

Mr. Combs’s lawyers have portrayed the music executive’s time in jail as beneficial to addressing his problems with substance abuse and violence. (The workbooks that he has completed during psychological treatment have included titles such as “Managing My Emotions” and “Relationships and Personal Responsibility.”)

But the lawyers have also described it as a highly “punitive” environment that the mogul is desperate to leave. Once, he was threatened with a shiv because he was sitting on a chair that another inmate had claimed for himself, his lawyers wrote, and a recent stabbing prompted guards to lock down the facility for several days.

The Brooklyn jail has drawn complaints over the years as a place filled with mold, vermin and neglect, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pledged to address the problems.

Writing that Mr. Combs had not “breathed fresh air in nearly 13 months,” his lawyers told the judge that if freed, “Mr. Combs will not do anything to subject himself to being in M.D.C. again, given the conditions that he now knows he will be subject to.”

Read Cassie’s letter to the judge.

Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, wrote a letter asking the judge to consider “the many lives that Sean Combs has upended with his abuse and control” in deciding the music mogul’s sentence. You can read the full text here.

Read Sean Combs’s letter to the judge.

Sean Combs made a plea for leniency in a letter to a federal judge on Thursday ahead of his sentencing on prostitution-related charges. You can read the full text here.

Update from Ben Sisario

It’s unclear how long today’s hearing could last. Criminal sentencing proceedings sometimes go for just a couple of hours. But the defense team has already indicated a lengthy presentation, with Sean Combs speaking to the judge, addresses by as many as four lawyers and the planned screening of an 11-minute video. Prosecutors will also have their say.

But what really may take up time are anticipated arguments over what information the judge can consider in determining the sentence. The government wants to include evidence of Mr. Combs’s violence from throughout his trial, but the defense argues that anything related to acquitted charges should be disallowed.

Update from Julia Jacobs

Members of Sean Combs’s legal team are beginning to trickle into the courtroom. Several are expected to speak today to try to persuade the judge in the case to hand down a lenient sentence. At the end of the trial, the defense lawyers were jubilant; they had helped their client avoid the possibility of life in prison. Today, the energy is more tense as they face the uncertainty of the judge’s decision.

Meet the judge deciding Combs’s fate: Arun Subramanian.

Arun Subramanian, the judge overseeing Sean Combs’s criminal case, had been on the bench for only about two years when the trial began. But he quickly made himself known as a stickler for efficiency and courtroom rules, as well as a jurist who could still bring some levity to the proceedings.

During the jury selection process in May, the judge made a comment about a list shown to prospective jurors that contained the names of celebrities that may (and, in many cases, did) come up at trial. “I felt like I was reading an appendix from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” he quipped.

He also took note of dramatic moments in the courtroom. After one particularly devastating cross-examination of a witness who had accused Mr. Combs of lifting her onto the railing of a 17th-floor balcony, the judge — speaking outside the presence of the jury — called out a member of the defense team for “a real Perry Mason moment.”

But he also reprimanded Mr. Combs and his lawyers for the defendant’s reaction to that questioning. “I saw your client looking at the jury and nodding vigorously,” Judge Subramanian said after the witness left the stand, again out of earshot of the jury. “That is absolutely unacceptable.” Mr. Combs’s lawyers said their client would not do it again.

Judge Subramanian was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2022 and confirmed by the Senate in March 2023.

The judge was born in Pittsburgh in 1979 to parents who had emigrated from India in 1970. After attending Case Western Reserve University, he earned his law degree from Columbia in 2004. He began building an impressive legal résumé, with clerkships under two federal judges in New York as well as under Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. In 2007, he joined the law firm Susman Godfrey, and four years later, at age 31, he became its youngest partner.

At Judge Subramanian’s confirmation hearing in late 2022, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, called him a “steadfast consumer protection expert” and said that his cases as a lawyer included defending victims of trafficking and child pornography. Judge Subramanian also developed a specialty in bankruptcy litigation.

In addition to overseeing the Combs criminal case, Judge Subramanian has been assigned the antitrust lawsuit against the concert giant Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. In that case, which was filed last year and has a tentative trial date in 2026, prosecutors have called for a breakup of the company, which is by far the largest power in the live entertainment world. He has also been involved in two cases filed by Liang Wang, an oboist with the New York Philharmonic who was fired after allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment. Mr. Wang’s wrongful dismissal suit is ongoing. A defamation suit he filed stemming from a New York magazine article about him was dismissed.

Judge Subramanian is the first person of South Asian heritage to become a judge in the Southern District of New York. “My father grew up in a small village,” he said at his confirmation hearing. “One generation later, his son is sitting before this honorable committee. That is the American dream.”

Update from Olivia Bensimon

Good morning, we are back at Federal District Court in Manhattan for Sean Combs’s sentencing today. Reporters and members of the public vying for a seat inside the courtroom began lining up a day early. Outside, I overheard many conversations (and live broadcasts on social media) trying to predict the length of Mr. Combs’s sentence.

The convictions stem from a 1910 anti-prostitution law.

Sean Combs will face the judge on Friday who will sentence him for convictions on two counts of the Mann Act, which since 1910 has made it a federal offense to transport people across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

The convictions center on ritualistic sex marathons Mr. Combs called “freak-offs” and “hotel nights,” during which he directed two of his girlfriends to have sex with male escorts while he watched and masturbated. The jury found Mr. Combs guilty of arranging for the travel of the women and the men, who met in locations such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Ibiza, and Turks and Caicos.

The law underlying Mr. Combs’s conviction has had a winding and at times fraught history. Born in an era marked by moral panic over prostitution, it has been amended over the decades and recently has played a role in several major #MeToo-era prosecutions.

Originally enacted as the White Slave Traffic Act, the law emerged from racist and nativist fears over “white slavery” and Progressive-era anxieties that young women in cities were being lured into prostitution, said Jessica R. Pliley, the author of the book “Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the F.B.I.”

The original version of the law also banned transportation across state lines for any “immoral purpose,” a phrase that enabled the government to police many other kinds of sexual conduct, including adultery.

In the mid-20th century, that powerful clause was the foundation for the charges in several celebrity trials, including cases against the comedian Charlie Chaplin, the musician Chuck Berry and the boxer Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, who was pardoned posthumously for what is widely viewed as a racially motivated prosecution.

Over time, the government’s use of the law evolved to focus on the sort of cases more familiar to prosecutors today: trafficking and sex crimes against underage victims. (The “immoral purpose” language was excised and replaced in 1986.)

It is common now for prosecutors to use Mann Act charges as building blocks in assembling a complex sex-trafficking case that relies on a pattern of behavior, legal experts say, as in the federal cases against R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell.

“To charge someone with the Mann Act today is not at all the same as having done so in the early 20th century,” said Mary Graw Leary, a former federal prosecutor and human trafficking scholar. “We live in a different world.”

The law is often deployed in tandem with more severe sex-trafficking charges because the charges are significantly easier to prove and serve as something of a backstop in challenging cases.

The Combs case shows the usefulness of that strategy for prosecutors: While a jury acquitted him of sex trafficking, they found him guilty of Mann Act violations.

Mr. Combs’s lawyers have railed against the Mann Act as a statute with an “odious” history that, they argue, is being used in this case to punish sex between consenting adults.

“It’s unclear why this conduct should be criminal in 2025,” Alexandra Shapiro, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, said in court last month.

Judge Arun Subramanian, who has overseen the Combs case, rejected the argument that Mr. Combs was being unfairly prosecuted with the Mann Act based on his race, writing that “whatever the troubling history” of the law, “its present-day enforcement appears on its face race-neutral in this district, reaching across race and gender.”

The defense’s objections to the use of the law are expected to factor into a likely appeal of Mr. Combs’s convictions.

Who is Sean Combs?

Before he was convicted on sex-trafficking charges, Sean Combs — also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy — was one of the most successful producers and entrepreneurs in contemporary music. He played a key role in making hip-hop a global cultural force, and helped turn rap and R&B artists like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige into household names.

Rising from middle-class origins in Harlem and suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., Mr. Combs, 55, willed himself into the music business from a young age. While still a teenager, he appeared as a backup dancer in music videos for Fine Young Cannibals and other acts, and he got an internship at Uptown Records, the label at the forefront of new jack swing and the blending of R&B with rap. He soon became an executive there and showed a rare talent for not only producing hit songs but conceptualizing the overall look and attitude of his acts. By putting himself in their high-budget videos, he made himself recognizable to fans too.

Mr. Combs quickly became a star in his own right, with his own label: Bad Boy. As Puff Daddy, he went to No. 1 in 1997 with “I’ll Be Missing You,” which sampled the 1980s band the Police; on MTV’s hit reality show “Making the Band” he played the role — perhaps only slightly exaggerated from real life — of the foul-mouthed, short-tempered label boss who demanded the best from everyone in his circle. At the same time, Mr. Combs was becoming a fixture in the tabloid celebrity media through his bacchanalian White Parties at his Hamptons estate and elsewhere, and, at one point, by dating Jennifer Lopez. At his peak, he made fame itself a form of performance art.

Yet he had also been trailed by various accusations of violence, misconduct and negligence. In 1991, at the very beginning of his career, he promoted a charity basketball game in Harlem where nine young people were crushed to death in a stampede. Five years later, he threatened a photographer with a gun. In 1999 he and his bodyguards beat a rival music executive; later that year, Mr. Combs was arrested after a shooting at a New York nightclub where three people were injured. Still, Mr. Combs largely escaped major consequences. He was acquitted at trial for the nightclub shooting and paid about $750,000 of the $3.8 million in settlements for the wrongful death suits over the basketball stampede.

Those controversies and accusations had little effect on his fame or success in his many business enterprises, which included a popular fashion line and a lucrative deal promoting liquor brands. As recently as two years ago, Mr. Combs was being feted as an industry visionary and a philanthropist.

That reputation began to crumble in late 2023, after a former girlfriend, the singer Cassie, accused him of sexual assault, rape and years of physical abuse. In a bombshell lawsuit, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said that Mr. Combs had coerced her into participating in drug-fueled sexual marathons that he called “freak-offs.”

Cassie’s suit was settled in just one day, for $20 million, she testified. But her case led to a federal criminal investigation that resulted in Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024 on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Ms. Ventura was the government’s star witness in the case.

Mr. Combs pleaded not guilty and has strenuously denied the accusations against him. His legal team argued his accusers were former long-term girlfriends, who were involved in consensual relationships with him. They also argued that his efforts to arrange sexual marathons involving his girlfriends and male escorts, which involved members of his coterie and staff, did not amount to racketeering.

After an eight-week trial, Mr. Combs was found guilty of transporting people across state lines for the purpose of prostitution but acquitted of the more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering charges.