What it was like inside the courtroom during the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial

Sean “Diddy” Combs dropped to his knees, placed his hands together, and bowed his head moments after the jury found him not guilty of the most serious criminal charges he faced, giving him a second chance at life.

Sean “Diddy” Combs dropped to his knees, placed his hands together, and bowed his head moments after the jury found him not guilty of the most serious criminal charges he faced, giving him a second chance at life. He also turned to the jury box with his palms in the prayer-like position and nodded his head in gratitude to the 12 for their decision. As the hip-hop mogul was led out of the courtroom on the 26th floor of the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, two rows filled with supporters including his mother, sister, six adult children and friends erupted into applause. The verdict was a rejection of the prosecution’s theory: that Combs ran a corrupt criminal enterprise designed to promote him and his sexual desires, including drugging women, physically abusing them and forcing them to have sex with male prostitutes. Combs was convicted of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, felonies with maximum sentences of 10 years each in prison. But the jury of eight men and four women acquitted him of crimes that carried a maximum sentence of life in prison: racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking of two former girlfriends, Cassie Ventura and a woman who testified under the pseudonym Jane. The sex trafficking charges also have a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years. The jury returned the verdict after 13 hours of deliberating, following more than six weeks of testimony, hundreds of text messages, and nearly an hour of sexually explicit videos. The trial delved into complexities of relationships and questions of consent and coercion.