Federal prosecutors called their final two witnesses in the sex trafficking trial of the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs on Friday. A young man, who worked as an assistant to the defendant, Brendan Paul, testified under immunity about getting arrested for possession of cocaine, which he says belonged to Mr. Combs. Under cross-examination by the defense, however, Mr. Paul told the jury that he never viewed any of Mr. Combs’ activities as being anything criminal.
“My charges have been dropped because I have a really good lawyer,” Mr. Paul told an assistant U.S. attorney, Christy Slavik, who is prosecuting the case on behalf of the Southern District of New York.
On March 25, 2024, Mr. Paul was arrested by Miami-Dade police officers at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport, where he had met Mr. Combs to join him and others on a family trip to the Bahamas. Law enforcement officers found 0.7 grams of cocaine on Mr. Paul, inside of a men’s Goyard bag.
“It was in my Goyard bag for personal assistant duties,” Mr. Paul testified under an immunity order after he had invoked his Fifth Amendment right, meaning he could not be criminally charged for his testimony.
He told the jury that he had taken the cocaine from Mr. Combs’ hotel room and had forgotten that he was carrying it with him. “I was sweeping his room early that morning and put it in my bag to put it elsewhere and forgot about it while I was packing,” the witness said.
“Did you tell law enforcement that it wasn’t your cocaine?” Ms. Slavik asked her witness.
“No.” Mr. Paul replied.
“Why not?” Ms. Slavik pressed.
“Loyalty,” he answered.
“Who’s cocaine was it?” The prosecutor went on.
“Mr. Combs’,’” the witness testified.
Mr. Paul’s arrest at the executive airport was part of a surprise, coordinated series of law enforcement actions against Mr. Combs that Memorial Day weekend, as the legal vice tightened on the hip hop mogul. A few hours before Mr. Paul was arrested, special agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided Mr. Combs’ estates in Miami and Los Angeles, where they seized, among other items, weapons, supplies for his sex parties and 1,000 bottles of baby oil.
On Thursday, while court was not in session due to the Juneteenth holiday, prosecutors released evidence photos of items that the agents seized at Mr. Combs’ Los Angeles mansion, which is located in Holmby Hills (pictures of the Miami raids were shown in court last week).
One of the released images shows a cupboard with shelves of baby oil bottles, neatly lined up like in a drug store. Another image shows a bag packed with more bottles of baby oil and the sexual lubricant Astroglide, and yet another image depicts stacked up boxes of astroglide.
Other images showed seized weapons, which included pistols, long guns and rifles, bullets, body armour-piercing ammo and a high-volume ammunition magazine.
Agents also found drugs, which were visible in yet another photograph, containing white and brown powders, later identified as MDMA and ketamine.
According to media reports, on the day of the raids, Mr. Combs’ private plane, a black Gulfstream 5 known as LoveAir LLC, was seen flying from Los Angeles to Antigua without the defendant on board. Instead, Mr. Combs had rented a private jet in Miami and was on his way to the Bahamas to spend time with his then 17 year-old identical twin daughters, Jessie and D’Lila.
In court, prosecutors showed the jury a photograph of Mr. Combs, his chief of staff, Kristina Khorram, and Mr. Paul inside the private jet in Miami.
“This is Mr. Combs, Kristina and I boarding a private jet to go on a vacation to the Bahamas,” Mr. Paul testified on Friday as he told the jury who was depicted in the photograph.
“Whose private jet were you on?” The prosecutor asked.
“It’s not his (Mr. Combs’). It was rented,” Mr. Paul replied.
It’s unclear if Mr. Combs ever ended up going to the Bahamas after his employee was arrested at the airport. TMZ published a video, showing Mr. Combs pacing up and down outside a customs office at the airport in sweatpants.
Mr. Combs was not arrested that day, but federal prosecutors were closing in. He was arrested six months later, in September 2024, in the lobby of the luxury Park Hyatt Hotel in New York City. He has been incarcerated at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since that day. The judge denied three bail applications by his attorneys, reasoning that Mr. Combs was a flight risk and that there were concerns he could tamper with witnesses.
Mr. Paul, however, posted bail and was released the next day. So far he is the only employee of Mr. Combs who has been arrested. He told the court on Friday that he pleaded guilty to the charges and agreed to participate in a “pretrial diversion program where I took over 20 drug classes and a bunch of random drug testing.”
Before Mr. Paul began working for Mr. Combs he played basketball for Syracuse University. After he graduated in 2022, he testified, he built a music studio in his parents’ basement to “pursue music production.” Shortly after that, he met a man, who used to work for Mr. Combs, Elie Maroun, who told him about the open personal assistant position.
Mr. Maroun, the witness said, gave him some advice before taking the job.
“He told me to get in to get out,” Mr. Paul said. “‘If you have a girlfriend, break up with her, and you’re never going to see your family.’”
“What did you understand him to mean when he said ‘get in to get out?’” The prosecutor asked.
“Build a Rolodex of, you know, clientele and get out,” Mr. Paul explained.
Like other employees, who testified previously in the trial, which is now on its 20th day of testimony, Mr. Paul said that Mr. Combs expected perfection and long, arduous working hours from his staff. “He used to say that he wants us to move like SEAL Team Six,” Mr. Paul testified, a reference to the elite U.S. Navy SEAL unit that took down Osama bin Laden.
“What was your understanding of what he meant by moving like SEAL Team Six?” The prosecutor inquired.
“Just being militant, get things done without him asking, nothing taken by surprise,” Mr. Paul said, adding that in the course of his 18 months long employment, he was fired three times. One time, he said, he was fired because he had forgotten to bring a Lululemon fanny pack when Mr. Combs wanted to go on a walk.
Mr. Paul remembered his former boss telling him that “’I don’t want to see your face, and you’re fired.’”
He got the fanny pack, gave it to an assistant and just “laid low” until he eventually proceeded to continue his work. He typically worked between 80 and 100 hours a week, he said, between four to six days a week, but he always had to be on call. His starting salary was $75,000 a year, he later got a raise to $100,000.
Mr. Paul’s personal assistant duties included coordinating meals, packing bags, and setting up and cleaning up the rooms, where Mr. Combs’ would host his “freak off” parties, his drug-fueled sexcapades, to which he would invite male prostitutes, who would have sex with women Mr. Combs was dating at the time, while the defendant watched and pleasured himself.
Mr. Paul referred to these “freak offs” by another name, he called them “wild king nights.”
“So what exactly did setting up a hotel or residence for a wild king night entail?” The prosecutor asked.
“You would go before he (Mr. Combs) got there. You would call room service, have them bring up extra sheets, extra towels, water, fruit plates. And then myself would bring lights, Astroglide, baby oil, liquor, champagne, small toiletries, toothbrush, toothpaste, cologne, that sort of thing,” Mr. Paul detailed.
“How did assistants know what to bring during a wild king night?” The prosecutor wanted to know.
“We created a running list. We had a lot of lists,” Mr. Paul answered.
He also said that he would sometimes purchase the items with his own money and later asked to get reimbursed from Mr. Combs’ company, which sometimes “took a long time.”
Mr. Combs is charged with racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of transportation for the purpose of prostitution. He faces life in prison if convicted on all five counts, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The racketeering conspiracy charge requires federal prosecutors to establish that the defendant was leading a “criminal enterprise” through which he was committing “criminal acts.”
In their attempt to prove that Mr. Combs used his business enterprise, Bad Boy Entertainment, which at one point included a record company, a fashion label, a television station, and a liquor sales, prosecutors specifically asked Mr. Paul about Mr. Combs’ chief of staff, Ms. Khorram.
Mr. Paul testified that Ms. Khorram “basically ran the (Bad Boy) enterprise,” and she communicated with Mr. Combs “all day, every day,” and that she had “full access” to his business phone.
For reasons unknown to the public, Ms. Khorram, who has been referred to as a co-conspirator in the case, has not been charged and will not testify in the case.
During cross-examination, a defense attorney, Brian Steel, addressed the “criminal enterprise” allegation.
“Now, you’re not saying a criminal enterprise, are you?” Mr. Steel specified.
“No,” The witness said.
“You’re saying because the title of the company you got paid for was Combs Enterprises, right?” Mr. Steel clarified.
“Yes,” Mr. Paul confirmed.
“And you would not work for a criminal, would you?” The defense attorney doubled down.
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Paul said.
It will be up to the jury to decide whether they considered the enterprise to be criminal or not. Prosecutors presented hundreds of text messages sent by Ms. Khorram and other employees, which showed that the chief of staff, and others, were well aware of, and assisted with setting up the freak off parties, and furthermore often helped Mr. Combs cover up the alleged violent attacks on his long-time girlfriend Cassandra Ventura and a woman he dated afterwards, who testified under pseudonym Jane.
Besides these numerous messages, other witnesses have testified at length about Ms. Khorram’s involvement and knowledge of what prosecutors alleged to be criminal activities and what the defense describes were mere consensual sexual encounters.
If the jury accepts the argument that Mr. Combs led a “criminal enterprise,” they will have to consider the criminal acts listed in the indictment (though the defendant only needs to be convicted of two such acts), which include bribery, arson, kidnapping, and “possession with the intent to distribute or distribution of narcotics, and controlled substances,” such as cocaine, oxycodone, ketamine and other drugs.
Ms. Slavik also asked the witness if he knew about K-Pops.
“It’s just ketamine in a lollipop form,” Mr. Paul explained.
“How many times did you buy these types of drugs for Mr. Combs?” The prosecutor asked.
“Less than ten, more than five,” Mr. Paul said, adding that he would consider it “personal use, one to two grams at a time,” and that he paid between $300 and $500 dollars. He testified that he and other assistants had contacts for several drug dealers, such as for “Guido, One Stop, Baby Girl” and “Ovi.”
“After you obtained drugs for Mr. Combs, what typically did you do with them?” The prosecutor asked.
“Either gave them directly to him or put them in his Gucci pouch,” Mr. Paul testified, and explained that the Gucci pouch was the “place where we would keep drugs.”
One time, Mr. Paul testified, during the music festival Coachella, Mr. Combs asked him to try a drug called C2 to “see if it’s good.” When the prosecutor asked him if that was something he wanted to do, he said he wanted “to prove” his loyalty to his boss.
The defense attempted to downplay Mr. Paul’s role as a drug dealer.
“You made it clear to the jury, and you’ve always made it clear, you are not some drug mule, right?” Mr. Steel asked.
“Absolutely not.” Mr. Paul answered.
In a civil lawsuit filed against Mr. Combs by the music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who accused Mr. Combs of sexually harassing, drugging and threatening him for more than a year, Mr. Jones claimed that Mr. Paul “acquired” and “distributed” “drugs and guns” for the rapper, and called him Mr. Combs’ “drug mule.”
“What’s your understanding of what a drug mule is?” Mr. Steel asked.
“Someone who traffics kilos and kilos of drugs across the world,” the witness said.
“Out of 18 months of working next to Sean Combs for sometimes 10, 12, 14 hours a day, you’re talking about a minuscule amount of times dealing with drugs, true?” The defense attorney pressed.
“Me personally handling them, yes.” The witness agreed.
Then Mr. Steel asked about Jane’s participation in the freak offs, which prosecutors alleged she was coerced into. He wanted to know if Mr. Paul had ever noticed her to be “hesitant” and “apprehensive” about her participation. The witness said he had not.
“And did you ever notice anything that would cause you (to) pause to think that she was not a willing participant?”
“Absolutely not.” Mr. Paul said.
The witness also testified that he considered these sex parties to be “like an escape” for Mr. Combs, like his “alone time.”
On redirect the prosecutor empathized that Mr. Paul was not inside the rooms during the “wild king nights” and thus could not have known if they included any criminal activity. She reminded the jury that in one instance Mr. Paul had personally delivered $5000 in cash to one of the hotels, and asked if other assistants would purchase drugs for Mr. Combs, which Mr. Paul confirmed though he did not know how many times.
Finally the prosecutor asked how his employment at Mr. Combs’ enterprise ended.
“I was arrested,” the witness said.
“Sitting here today, how do you feel about Mr. Combs?” Ms. Slavik asked.
“It’s complicated,” Paul said.
After Mr. Paul left the witness stand, prosecutors read more text messages into the record.
In one exchange between Ms. Ventura and Mr. Combs from 2017, Ms. Ventura wrote to her ex boyfriend, “I was scared of your rage.”
“Physicalities take it somewhere else.. That’s not love that’s possession. I have bleeding cuts.” Ms. Ventura wrote.
But Mr. Combs, it appeared, was upset that she didn’t appreciate the night he had set up for her.
“I’m not gonna let someone sh–t on me when all I’ve done is be nice.”
Mr. Combs wrote, “Any other woman in the world would’ve been so happy,” and “you’re wack for not keeping it real. When I and everyone knows you were acting like a b–tch.”
The jury saw another message written to Mr. Combs from Ms. Ventura, who released an album before she met Mr. Combs, but never published another album again, “You’re at a point in your life where you want to party and have a good time, and I’m at a point where I have to focus or I’ll never become anything… I knew if I said no to it in New York, it would have been a problem… You treat me like a hooker, to be honest… This hooker has been here for ten years… I love our FO’s (freak offs)… when we both want it.”
As their final witness prosecutors called a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations, Joseph Cerciello, who was not involved in the case.
Mr. Cerciello had reviewed thousands of pages of text messages, phones and financial records, he said, to see if the information listed in charts of evidence compiled by the prosecutors corresponded with the exhibits.
The jury learned that after Ms. Ventura filed her explosive lawsuit in November of 2023, in which alleged years of physical and sexual abuse and which has been credited for laying the groundworks for the criminal case, Mr. Combs stopped using hotel rooms for his “wild king nights” and began hosting them at his or his girlfriend’s residences.
Prosecutors pulled up more messages that detailed payments to male escorts, in one message Mr. Combs asked Jane to send $1,100 to an escort service, Cowboys for Angels, for flights and an “overnight rate.”
Mr. Cerciello will resume his testimony on Monday, and after that prosecutors will rest their case. Lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told the judge on Friday that his case could be shorter than expected and possibly last one to two days.
Closing arguments could be held as early as next week.