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.