Thomas Tracy
New York Daily News
(TNS)
NEW YORK — Embattled hip hop mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ was denied ball Wednesday in Manhattan Federal Court on NY federal sex trafficking charges and will stay at the Brooklyn MDC lockup.
His attorneys returned to court in a bid to spring the embattled hip hop mogul from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, the notorious lockup repeatedly criticized for violence, untimely deaths, suicides, and poor living conditions.
On Tuesday, hid lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, proposed Combs be released on $50 million bond. But Manhattan Federal Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky was more swayed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson’s claims that the Bad Boy Records founder if freed might threaten and intimidate witnesses poised to testify against him.
Combs was hit with federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges on Tuesday, accusing him of flying sex workers across state lines and forcing women he dated to have sex with male prostitutes during wild and sometimes dangerous Caligula-like sex parties he called Freak Offs.
If they didn’t want to join in, he would verbally and physically abuse and harass them until they would, then “used the embarrassing and sensitive recordings as collateral against the victims,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams told reporters Tuesday.
Tarnofsky ordered Combs to be housed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. On Tuesday night he was held there at the Special Housing Unit for inmates who require additional protection and need to be kept separate from the general population.
At his new digs, Combs follows in the footsteps of R. Kelly, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, where Combs could have been housed, has been closed since 2021 after the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein two years earlier.
In his appeal filed Wednesday, Agnifilo cited all the problems with Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
“Several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention,” he wrote. “Just earlier this summer, an inmate was murdered. At least four inmates have died by suicide there in the past three years. Numerous Courts in this district have raised concerns with the horrific conditions of detention there.”
In his appeal, Agnifilo reiterated that he and Combs had been working with prosecutors from the beginning.
As they investigated the allegations against the rap star, Agnifilo alerted the feds to all of Combs’ movements. He hasn’t left the country in months and is in the process of “selling his plane,” the attorney indicated.
The Brooklyn jail has been plagued for years by gross understaffing, medical mistreatment, atrocious conditions and violence. Federal judges routinely reduce prison sentences for defendants who have had to endure horrific conditions there while being held pretrial.
While the vast majority of inmates there are being held before trial, prisoners sentenced to less than a year sometimes do their terms there — until now.
The federal Bureau of Prisons last month changed policy and will no longer have inmates serve any sentences at the troubled facility, the Daily News reported earlier this week.
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