Originally published by The 19th

A raucous scene unfolded outside the New York City courthouse where a jury Wednesday acquitted Sean “Diddy” Combs of the most serious charges — sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy — against him during a six-week trial in which witnesses painted the rap mogul as a monster who preyed on vulnerable women in his orbit and took vengeance on anyone who stood in his way.

Overjoyed that the jury returned a mixed verdict, including convictions on two prostitution counts that carried lighter penalties, supporters of Combs jumped up and down and squirted baby oil at each other outside the U.S. District Court for the Southern District in Lower Manhattan. That emollient was used routinely during the hundreds of “freak-offs” — the extended sexual performances with male escorts — that Combs’ former partner Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura and others said he made them participate in through force, threats and coercion.

For many survivors of sexual violence, particularly people of color, both the verdict and the behavior of fans outside the courthouse in hip-hop’s first major #MeToo trial made a mockery of their trauma and underscored what many Black and Brown women who come forward as victims know all too well: The justice system rarely believes them. 

“Here is somebody whose attorneys admit he is violent, where the jury was shown videos and, yet, he was found innocent on the more serious charges regarding trafficking, so this feeling of dejectedness makes perfect sense because, once again, we were not believed,” said Angela Neal-Barnett, a professor in Kent State University’s Department of Psychological Sciences and director of its Program for Research on Anxiety Disorders among African Americans.

The 19th reached out to Black women lawyers, scholars, cultural critics and psychologists about the verdict and the emotions that women of color are experiencing in the wake of it. While some acknowledged that they weren’t surprised Combs avoided conviction on more complicated charges like racketeering, they said they understood why the case’s outcome feels like a blow to survivors. Others disclosed feeling dejected themselves, arguing that the public needs to refine their understanding of consent and interpersonal violence. 

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“I was very convinced that the prosecution had reached too far when they charged Diddy with RICO [racketeering conspiracy] because that’s typically something that you would charge for organized crime like a mafia,” said Yodit Tewolde, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor. “You have one person here who has been charged. There’s no co-conspirators that have been charged, and so to believe that he had this whole big enterprise in order to commit crimes with multiple people seemed a little bit of a stretch.”

Still, as the trial progressed, Tewolde thought the prosecution presented a compelling case for racketeering but was not surprised when the jury ultimately acquitted him of that charge. She did, however, expect to see him convicted on at least one count of sex trafficking due to a surveillance video showing Combs kicking and dragging Ventura in a Los Angeles hotel hallway in March 2016 — an incident that the singer, who is best known for the 2006 hit “Me & U,” said occurred after she tried to flee a freak-off.

“That video showed not only did he assault Cassie, but he was also dragging her back to wherever she was running from,” Tewolde said. “So, she’s leaving that freak-off, and he pulled her back, and what the prosecution argued in their closing argument is, ‘Listen, we’re not saying that every single encounter that they had with these [sex workers] wasn’t voluntary. We’re saying here are a couple where they weren’t, and if you find that she was coerced on at least one occasion, then that is guilty on sex trafficking.’”

That the jury did not believe Ventura was ever forced into a freak-off shocked Tewolde. She pointed out how Ventura’s mother testified that she wired $20,000 to Diddy to keep him quiet after he threatened to release footage of the freak-offs to the public. “All that evidence, and I just can’t believe that they didn’t find one instance where she was trafficked,” she said.

Tewolde can’t help but to feel for Cassie and a woman identified only as “Jane” who testified that Combs forced her to participate in freak-offs as well. Speaking up about their experiences was “the hardest thing for them to do,” Tewolde said. “Cassie putting all of that out there — oh, my God, it’s going to be in articles and transcripts forever, and to still be rejected, is a lot to endure.”

Areva Martin, a civil rights attorney and legal commentator, said the verdict and the public reaction to it indicates that the public’s awareness of sex trafficking may need to be refined. All too often, people envision a sex-trafficked woman as one who was abducted from her small town and forced to have sex with strangers, Martin said. But sex trafficking doesn’t always look like that.

“This was an 11-year relationship with Cassie and a three-year relationship with Jane,” she said. “So much about this case doesn’t follow conventional norms. I think lawyers can disagree about whether Combs was overcharged or not, but clearly at the end of the day, the jurors had to weigh the facts, had to weigh the credibility of the witnesses, and the prosecution didn’t get conviction on all charges, but the headline coming out of this is Sean Combs is now a two-time felon.”

Martin believes there was persuasive evidence that Combs coerced Ventura and Jane into freak-offs but said that society has a hard time grasping that someone in a relationship can be coerced into sexual acts by a partner. 

“I think the nuance of that perhaps was lost on this jury,” Martin said. “I believe there was ample evidence of times when both of these women felt coerced because of physical violence, felt coerced because of the threat of having sex tapes released of them, coerced in the case of Jane, in particular, because of having financial resources withdrawn or withheld, but the jurors ultimately didn’t see that level of coercion.”

As a civil rights lawyer with more than two decades of experience, Martin said that she knows how painful it is for women to come forward about sexual violence. She said it’s commonplace for women to be maligned or vilified for speaking up about such experiences and that is particularly true for women of color.

“Women of color have been marginalized in our criminal justice system and are often made out to be liars, gold diggers and painted with racist and misogynistic stereotypes,” Martin said. “I just hope that victims don’t see this case as a complete loss. Again, there are two felony convictions. It does send a message that the judge has denied him bail. I think that is a pretty good indicator that this judge is not likely to just give him time served and let him go on his merry way.”

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She urged survivors to keep fighting and speaking up and for allies to keep supporting them when they do come forward. “But I can completely understand why victims, particularly Black victims of sexual assault and sexual violence, feel deflated by this outcome,” she said.

Asked if the makeup of the jury, which included eight men and four women, influenced the verdict, Martin and Tewolde said that wasn’t immediately clear. But Martin said that misogyny and patriarchy are typically factors in these cases. The fact that the prosecution team was made up exclusively of White women could have also played a role in the jury’s decision, Martin said. 

Tewolde argued that the gender imbalance on the jury may not have affected the outcome, pointing out research revealing that women jurors tend to be harder on other women during trials. This gender bias comes, in part, from the idea that women in situations like Ventura’s have a choice, Neal-Barnett said. 

“Who among us has not loved badly?” she asked. But people continue to question why victims remain in abusive relationships. However, if someone is threatening to harm a person’s loved ones or release explicit videos of them, it’s a powerful deterrent to keep them from leaving, Neal-Barnett contends. “It’s complicated, and we don’t like complications,” she said. Instead, people victim-blame by insisting they would never tolerate abuse in their own lives, whether or not they’re privy to all the facts about a victim’s circumstances.

She said the images outside the courthouse of jubilant Diddy fans dousing themselves with baby oil “rub salt into the wounds” that survivors are reliving. She encouraged survivors to avoid social media and self-isolation. Rather, they should find safe spaces where they can express themselves and be heard. Talk to a therapist, contact a support group or dial a helpline. 

“Your feelings are valid because, as women of color, not only does [the verdict] underscore that we are not believed, it makes us feel abandoned again, as if there’s no one there to stand up for us, to protect us,” Neal-Barnett said.

Jamilah Lemieux, a writer, cultural critic and commentator who appeared in the 2019 docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” about the R&B singer’s sexual misconduct involving underage girls, said that the verdict has left her feeling “demoralized” and “disappointed,” but she hasn’t lost all optimism.  

“I’m still hopeful that Diddy may serve substantial time because he could be sentenced to up to 20 years,” she said. “But I think a lot of us really wanted justice for Cassie, in particular, and for the other women over the years that have reportedly been harmed by Diddy. We wanted to see him seriously punished.”

She struggles with the idea that the jury did not view Combs’ conduct toward Ventura as criminal. As for those individuals who are rejoicing that the Bad Boy Records founder was cleared of the most serious charges against him, Lemieux said some members of the Black community have unhealthy parasocial relationships with celebrity men. 

“There’s an attachment that we have to successful heterosexual Black men, and we project a lot onto them,” she said. “We see their success as our own success, and we become invested in a way where we’re not always able to hold them accountable. This was the case for so many years with R. Kelly that there had to be such a damning amount of evidence and a six-hour miniseries before his victims were taken seriously.”

Lemieux suspects that Combs’ days in the spotlight are now behind him. Hip-hop, she said, was overdue for a reckoning regarding the abuse of women, the history of which she covered last year in Vanity Fair. This trial, she said, should not mark the end of accountability for men in the genre but the beginning of it. And, no matter how he’s sentenced, Combs will not be able to move on from the violence and depravity he’s now associated with because of the trial. 

“He may have escaped the biggest charges, but I do think he’s largely done,” Lemieux said. “I don’t think Diddy rebounds from people seeing him batter Cassie the way he did. That’s a stain on him that he won’t be able to remove. I think the world has largely moved past Diddy.”