Lawyers for Sean Combs filed a motion on Tuesday night seeking the dismissal of one of the sex trafficking charges he is facing, arguing that the hip-hop mogul is being unfairly prosecuted based on his race.
Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail, was indicted on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges — the most serious of which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
His lawyers’ filing focuses on a lesser sex trafficking charge, which stems from a federal law known as the Mann Act. The law makes it illegal to transport a person “with intent that such individual engage in prostitution.”
Mr. Combs’s lawyers contend that the law has “racist origins” and that it is being deployed against a “prominent Black man” for allegedly using an escort service to transport male escorts across state lines to have sex with his girlfriends.
“The use of escorts, male or female, is common and indeed widely accepted in American culture today,” they write. To emphasize what it depicted as the noncriminal nature of the conduct, the filing notes that the chief executive of the escort service that Mr. Combs is said to have used has been interviewed in the media and was featured in a Showtime reality series.
The lawyers questioned whether any white person had been charged under the law based on similar allegations.
The prosecutors overseeing the case at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have asserted that Mr. Combs’s conduct was far less innocuous. They have said that Mr. Combs wielded his power and fame to coerce women to engage in “extended sex acts” with prostitutes, sometimes known as “freak-offs.” Prosecutors have said that he directed those encounters, masturbated during them and often electronically recorded them, writing in court papers that he sometimes threatened victims with the recordings of the encounter as “collateral.”
Prosecutors have objected before to the suggestion that the case is racially motivated. After one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, Marc Agnifilo, said in an interview with TMZ that the investigation was a “takedown of a successful Black man,” one of the prosecutors responded in court, saying that Mr. Agnifilo had “baselessly accused the government of engaging in a racist prosecution.” The top U.S. attorney who brought the case was Damian Williams, the first Black person to lead the office. (Mr. Williams resigned shortly before President Trump took office — a standard move ahead of a new administration.)
In seeking the dismissal of the charge, Mr. Combs’s lawyers point to the history of the Mann Act, which was passed in 1910 as an anti-prostitution law. They argue that it has been used to target “Black male sexuality,” citing as an example the prosecution of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, who was convicted under the law for transporting a white woman across state lines. (He was pardoned by President Trump in 2018.)
Initially called the White-Slave Traffic Act, the law was passed at a time of growing fears around the prevalence of prostitution and anxieties that young girls were being lured into brothels, wrote Jessica R. Pliley, a historian, in a book about the Mann Act that was cited in Mr. Combs’s legal brief.
“The law has been enforced in various ways since it has been passed in 1910,” she said in an interview, noting that white celebrities — including Charlie Chaplin — had also been prosecuted under the law. “The one consistency is it has always been about criminalizing commercial sex.”
Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won the first successful criminal case against R. Kelly, said that in present-day prosecutions, the Mann Act is regularly used in cases in which individuals have been charged with more serious crimes. Mr. Kelly was convicted of racketeering as well as Mann Act violations. (The Mann Act charges against Mr. Kelly were different in substance, involving unlawful sex that included coercion of a minor.)
The indictment of Mr. Combs includes a more serious sex trafficking charge, one that requires a jury to find that he used “force, fraud or coercion” to cause someone to engage in a commercial sex act. That charge centers on the allegations of Casandra Ventura, who accused Mr. Combs in a lawsuit of forcing her to engage in sex with male prostitutes throughout their yearslong relationship.
The Mann Act charge is more straightforward, requiring a jury to find that Mr. Combs “willfully caused” the transportation of individuals with the intent that they engage in prostitution.
“No doubt it is far easier to prove,” Ms. Geddes said.
If convicted of only the Mann Act charge, Mr. Combs would face a maximum of 10 years in prison. The indictment alleges that in addition to Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs violated the act with respect to two other female victims whose identities have been concealed. Mr. Combs’s lawyers have disputed the government’s classification of them as “victims,” asserting that they were his girlfriends.
