Federal prosecutors urged a judge on Tuesday to sentence Sean “Diddy” Combs to 11 years and three months in prison after he was found guilty this summer on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
The sentencing recommendation was filed shortly after midnight early on Tuesday, and just several days ahead of Combs’s sentencing, which is scheduled for Friday.
In July, Combs was convicted by a federal jury of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, which each carry a maximum sentence of 10 years. The jury acquitted him of the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.
Combs had pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.
In their sentencing memo on Tuesday, prosecutors urged judge Arun Subramanian to impose a prison term of no less than 135 months and a $500,000 fine.
“His crimes of conviction are serious and have warranted sentences over 10 years in multiple cases for defendants who, like Sean Combs, engaged in violence and put others in fear,” the prosecutors wrote.
“A substantial term of imprisonment is also needed in this case because the defendant is unrepentant,” they added.
During the trial, federal prosecutors accused Combs of using his power, fame, wealth and influence, as well as violence and threats of blackmail, to coerce two of his former girlfriends into taking part in what were described as drug-fueled sexual encounters with male escorts, referred to as “freak-offs” or “hotel nights”, which they said Combs orchestrated, watched, masturbated to and sometimes filmed.
Throughout the trial, the defense acknowledged past instances of domestic violence, but denied that any coercion or sex trafficking took place and maintained that all sexual activity was consensual and part of a “swingers lifestyle”.
Combs has been held in a Brooklyn federal jail since his arrest in September 2024. Last week, his lawyers asked the court to sentence Combs to no more than 14 months in prison. Due to time already served, the sentence put forward by his legal team would enable him to be freed in a matter of months.
The defense described Combs’s 13 months behind bars as “life-changing” and “productive” and stated that he has undergone rehabilitation, including “getting clean of all substances”.
“It is time for Mr Combs to go home to his family,” they wrote. Alongside their filing, the defense also submitted more than 60 letters of support for Combs, including from members of his family.
According to CNN, the US probation department has recommended a sentence ranging between five and seven years in prison.
In Tuesday’s filing, the federal prosecutors said: “Incredibly, while the defendant conceded his acts of violence and abuse throughout trial, he now argues that his victims should shoulder the blame.
“The defendant tries to recast decades of abuse as simply the function of mutually toxic relationships,” they wrote. “But there is nothing mutual about a relationship where one person holds all the power and the other ends up bloodied and bruised.”
Later in the document, they said that Combs “is not the victim”, adding: “The Court should focus on the very real effects that the defendant’s conduct had on the lives of the actual victims, his victims.”
Along with their sentencing recommendation, the prosecutors also submitted letters to the court on Tuesday from two of Combs’s accusers and several of Combs’s former associates.
Among them was one from singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, one of Combs’s former girlfriends who was the prosecution’s star witness in this case.
During the trial, Ventura testified about their decade-long relationship, which she said was marked by physical and emotional abuse. She told the court that she was coerced and blackmailed into taking part in the so-called “freak-offs”, and during the trial jurors were shown the 2016 hotel surveillance footage of Combs attacking Ventura in a hotel hallway.
In her letter to the judge on Tuesday, Ventura wrote: “While the jury did not seem to understand or believe that I engaged in freak-offs because of the force and coercion the defendant used against me, I know that is the truth, and his sentence should reflect the reality of the evidence and my lived experience as a victim.”
She said that she still has “nightmares and flashbacks on a regular, everyday basis, and continue to require psychological care to cope with my past”.
“My worries that Sean Combs or his associates will come after me and my family is my reality,” she wrote to the court. “I am so scared that if he walks free, his first actions will be swift retribution towards me and others who spoke up about his abuse at trial.
“If there is one thing I have learned from this experience, it is that victims and survivors will never be safe,” she wrote. “I hope that your decision considers the truths at hand that the jury failed to see.”
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