Federal prosecutors laid out the charges against the rapper and music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs in a detailed summation on Thursday. The defense will hold its closing argument on Friday, followed by a rebuttal argument from the prosecution. The judge plans to charge the jury on Friday. 

“Up until today, the defendant was able to get away with his crimes because of his money, his power, his influence,” an assistant United States attorney, Christy Slavik, told the jury on Thursday afternoon at the end of her almost five-hour-long closing argument. “That stops now. It’s time to hold him accountable. It’s time for justice. It’s time to find the defendant guilty.”

While Ms. Slavic presented her summation, the music mogul leaned back in his chair and listened with his head lowered. He had moved the chair back from the defense table, his legs stretched out, and appeared relaxed with his hands folded over his lap. But his fingers were moving, tapping, or fiddling nervously. Once in a while he would write a note and pass it to his attorneys.  

The high-profile trial, which included testimony from more than 30 witnesses, began with jury selection on May 5 and now is nearing its end. Mr. Combs, who is charged with racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking, and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on all counts. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.    

The prosecutor spoke with a calm voice, and rather slowly, as she explained the complicated legal aspects of the charges to the jury. 

“Over the last few weeks,” she had begun in the morning, “you’ve learned a lot about Sean Combs. He is the leader of a criminal enterprise.”

The “criminal enterprise” is a key factor in the racketeering conspiracy, a charge that is based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO act, which was passed by Congress in 1970 to facilitate the prosecution of organized criminal organizations such as the mafia. 

In recent years, though, prosecutors have used the racketeering statute to pursue people who have nothing to do with the mafia, the Irish mob, or violent urban gangs. In Mr. Combs’s case, the prosecution is arguing that the sex threesomes (and occasionally foursomes) he held in luxury hotel rooms or in other locations with his girlfriends and male prostitutes were orchestrated by a criminal enterprise designed to sate Mr. Combs’s carnal desires.

Prosecutors were well aware of the need to explain to the jury how the racketeering statute applies to Mr. Combs’s sex sessions. “You may have heard the term ‘racketeering’ before in the context of mafia or organized crime, but the concept is simple. The law recognizes that when someone commits a crime as a part of a group, what the law calls an enterprise, they’re more powerful and more dangerous.” 

Ms. Slavik explained that Mr. Combs, who was a billionaire before the criminal case and dozens of civil lawsuits descended on him last year, “was a very powerful man, but he became more powerful and more dangerous because of the support of his inner circle and his businesses — the enterprise.” 

The enterprise, she said, was not “a complicated or special thing,” it was simply a group of people with “a common purpose.” And the common purpose in this case was “to serve and protect” Mr. Combs and “to promote” his “power and control.” 

His “inner circle,” the people who conspired with him and helped him commit the criminal acts, the prosecutor said, were his chief of staff, his bodyguards, and at times his personal assistants. At some point she called them his “foot soldiers.” 

Ms. Slavik described his chief of staff, Kristina Khorram, who did not testify in the trial and who has not been charged as a co-conspirator, as his “right brain.” Ms. Khorram, she said, “lived in his home in Miami … communicated on his behalf” and was his most “loyal lieutenant.” 

To prove the racketeering conspiracy, the jury needs to find that the defendant and his co-conspirators “agreed to commit two crimes.” She said there were hundreds of crimes but she laid out eight, which she argued in great detail. 

“The brutal crime at the heart of this case,” she went on, is “sex trafficking.”  

“Sex,” she specified, for Mr. Combs’s “own entertainment.” He used, she went on, “power, violence, and fear” to get what he wanted. 

The prosecution alleges that over the course of two decades, between about 2004 and 2024, Mr. Combs forced and coerced two of his then-girlfriends  into having sex with one or sometimes two male prostitutes during “Freak Off” sessions, while he filmed the encounters and watched and pleasured himself, often while wearing nothing but a niqab covering his face. 

The two women are Cassandra Ventura, who testified in the trial and who was in an on-and-off relationship with the rapper between 2007 and 2018, and a woman who testified under the pseudonym Jane, who dated Mr. Combs between 2021 and 2024. 

The defense has argued that the relationships were tumultuous, even toxic at times, especially the relationship with Ms. Ventura, but that the women consented to the sexual activities. The defense has said that the women decided to stay with Mr. Combs proved that they were not coerced but acted with free will.  

Yet the prosecutor told the jury that the sex-trafficking charge only required the proof of a single encounter during which the women did not want to participate, even if they may have cheerfully participated, or, as she said, “pretended” to cheerfully participate, in other freak offs for years. 

For Jane, Ms. Slavik said, though there were numerous times she preferred not to perform in a Freak Off, the most harmful incident took place in June 2024 at her residency in Los Angeles.  

Jane testified that she got into a fight with Mr. Combs at her house, because she was jealous of another woman whom she thought he was seeing. The fight escalated and Mr. Combs ended up beating her, Jane testified. After the brutal beating, she did not want to have sex, the alleged victim said, but he insisted that she should not “ruin his night,” told her to cover her injuries with makeup, gave her drugs, called a male escort, and, according to her testimony, forced her to have sex with the escort. 

These freak offs, the prosecutor said, “were not about what Jane wanted but about what the defendant wanted.”   

“The fact that she consented once doesn’t mean she consented all the time,” the prosecutor went on to argue. That incident alone, she continued, was an act of sex trafficking. But she listed more, citing text messages where Jane expressed that she had no other choice than to perform the sex for him, because he was also paying her rent. 

Mr. Combs, the prosecution alleges, threatened Jane that he would stop paying her rent or release the sex tapes he filmed during the freak offs and show them to her family.   

“It’s dark, sleazy and makes me feel disgusted with myself. I feel it’s the only reason you have me around and why you pay for the house,” Jane wrote. “I don’t want to feel obligated to perform these nights with you in fear of losing the roof over my head.”   

Paying for Jane’s rent, Ms. Slavik said, was “financial coercion” and made her feel “obligated” to partake in these sex sessions, even though she wished to be Mr. Combs’s girlfriend and have “an old-fashioned relationship,” as Jane testified.       

The jury also again saw the infamous video, which CNN aired last year, showing Mr. Combs kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura through the hallway of the InterContinental hotel at Los Angeles.

The prosecutor said that Ms. Ventura had tried to run away from a freak off session with Mr. Combs and a male escort by the name of Jules that was taking place inside a hotel room. But Mr. Combs did not want Ms. Ventura to leave; he wanted the freak off to continue, and so he ran after her, kicked her and hit her, allegedly forcing her to come back. 

The video of that encounter, leaked to CNN not long before Mr. Combs was arrested and charged in September of last year, destroyed his reputation and career. During the trial, jurors heard testimony about how Mr. Combs bribed hotel security guards and obtained what the guards falsely told him was the only copy of the tape.

Another coercion tactic used by Mr. Combs, the prosecutor alleged, was feeding the women drugs, and this “distribution of drugs” is also one of the racketeering crimes. 

Importantly, she noted, the quantity of drugs did not matter; what mattered was that he purchased drugs, such as cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, and others, and gave them to the women, who both testified that they needed the drugs to disassociate themselves from the fact that they were having sex with strangers. 

Prosecutors showed the jury a slide with 26 different male escorts that Ms. Ventura had sex with over the course of her 11-year relationship with Mr. Combs.         

Mr. Combs, the prosecutor said, “was abusive” and enganged in “physical, emotional, psychological, sexual abuse.” She referred to an argument the defense had made in its opening statement, saying it doesn’t “deny the abuse. They just want you to call it ‘domestic violence’ and to believe that it has nothing to do with the crimes charged here.”

But the abuse was another coercion tactic, she said, and his employees helped him hide it. One example she gave was when Ms. Ventura was staying at the house of one of his security guards, D Rock, after a fight with Mr. Combs, during which he had beaten her so badly that her face was swollen and bruised. The prosecutor showed text messages between the security guard and Mr. Combs, where he told his boss that Ms. Ventura was icing the bruises, and Mr. Combs texted him to keep an eye on her. Hence, he was helping the defendant commit a criminal act, the prosecutor said, with the “common purpose” of protecting his boss instead of calling the police on him. 

The two counts of transportation for the purpose to engage in prostitution, the prosecutor said, referred to Mr. Combs flying male escorts across state lines, and on occasion even to the sybaritic Spanish Island of Ibiza. During the trial, the jury had seen bank and travel records, which clearly showed that Mr. Combs had paid for these flights. 

The defense will make its closing statement on Friday morning, followed by a rebuttal from the prosecution. The jury could receive the charges on Friday afternoon, if the arguments don’t run too long.