Diddy lost his bid to toss out federal sex trafficking charges in New York after a judge ruled there was no proof prosecutors targeted him because he’s Black.
The Hip-Hop mogul argued that the government’s use of the Mann Act—a law with racist roots dating back to 1910—was racially motivated.
His legal team claimed the charges were part of a pattern of selective prosecution against Black men and pointed to white public figures like Eliot Spitzer and Jerry Falwell Jr., who were not charged under the same statute despite allegedly similar behavior.
In a February filing, Diddy’s attorneys wrote, “no white person has ever been the subject of a federal Mann Act prosecution for conduct remotely similar to the allegations here.”
However, the U.S. District Judge rejected that argument, saying Diddy failed to meet the high legal bar required to prove selective prosecution.
The court said Diddy needed to show both that similarly situated individuals of other races were not prosecuted and that the government acted with racial bias.
He did neither.
“Combs doesn’t point to any evidence that racial bias played a role in the Government’s actions, that the prosecution team was responsible for any leaks to the press, or that the way Combs’s homes were searched bespeaks a discriminatory purpose,” Judge Arun Subramanian said.
The judge found that the examples Diddy cited were not comparable, noting that those individuals were not accused of the same combination of sex trafficking, racketeering, and transporting alleged victims, not just sex workers, across state lines.
Federal prosecutors also pointed to other non-Black defendants, including Peter Nygard and Ghislaine Maxwell, who were charged under the same statute for similar conduct.
As for claims that the government’s press releases, search warrants and refusal to allow Diddy to voluntarily surrender were racially motivated, the court dismissed them as “mere assertions” without supporting evidence.
The judge also rejected Diddy’s argument that the Mann Act’s historical use against Black men should invalidate its modern application. The court ruled that “current enforcement” matters, and that the law is now applied in a race-neutral way.
Because Diddy failed to show “some evidence” of both discriminatory effect and intent, the court denied his request for further discovery into the government’s motivations.
The motion to dismiss was formally denied in a ruling issued this week.
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