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After a New York City jury delivered a mixed verdict in the case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin shared her take on why the music mogul may have avoided conviction on the most serious charges.
On Wednesday, jurors acquitted Combs of three counts: one count of racketeering and two counts of sex trafficking. But found him guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
“I think this was a messy and complicated case,” Rubin said on MSNBC shortly after the verdict was announced. “Many sexual assault cases start with two people who are strangers, or at least strangers before the incident in question … These are women who are involved in yearslong relationships with Sean Combs that, at times, or even for most of the time, appeared consensual to the naked eye.”
“We as a society still have a lot of trouble understanding these ‘both/and’ kind of situations,” she added. (Combs has denied allegations of sexual abuse.)
Despite testimony on Combs' alleged violence toward Casandra "Cassie" Ventura and a woman identified by the pseudonym “Jane,” Rubin said that, in the end, the jury didn't seem to “buy” the prosecution's narrative that the women were forced to participate because Combs had made them afraid for their lives.
“That could have been because of text messages showing that they were willing participants, or seeming as if they were willing participants,” Rubin suggested.
The former litigator also noted there was “another unknown factor” at play that may have had a part in the jury's final decision. Although the public has never witnessed the so-called freak offs at the center of this case — Combs’ sometimes dayslong drug-fueled sexual encounters with hired escorts — the jurors were shown several videos of them.
According to Rubin, those videos may have been a key factor in the jurors’ final decision: “Forgive me for saying this, but if it looks on video like somebody is having a good time, that may be a conceptual barrier that the jurors could not just get over, with respect to believing that these women were forced or coerced or defrauded into the sex acts that were at the center of the prosecution’s case.”
You can watch Rubin’s full analysis of the verdict in the clip below.