Attorneys for Sean “Diddy” Combs say they will keep fighting to have their client freed from the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., where other high profile defendants have also stayed.
“I’m not going to let him sit in that jail a day longer than he has to,” said defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo outside a New York federal courtroom Wednesday.
His team wanted Combs to be placed on house arrest with a $50-million bond, but their request was denied.
U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter said Wednesday that a bail package that would have kept the hip-hop mogul under house arrest in his Star Island mansion in Miami — with security and no access to cellphones, internet or women apart from his family — was insufficient to release him pending trial.
The facility, which has housed inmates including R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, has a history of violence and squalid conditions.
In a letter to the court, Combs lawyers said that comparing him to Kelly and Maxwell — both of whom served time in the Brooklyn federal lockup while awaiting trial for sex trafficking — were not fair.
“Sean Combs has never evaded, avoided, eluded, or run from a challenge in his life. He will not start now,” Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, Combs’ lawyers, said in a letter to Carter on Wednesday.
The lawyers said there were major differences between Combs’ case and the others because Combs is not accused of trafficking minors.
Since March, he has even kept prosecutors informed of all his domestic flights and on Sept. 5, he moved into a Manhattan hotel knowing an indictment was likely coming.
Citing past killings and suicides at the facility, Combs’ attorneys argued he should not be kept there.
The courts “have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Facility in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention,” Combs attorneys argued in court documents.
In a ruling in August, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown said that allegations about the federal lockup involving “inadequate supervision, unbridled assaults and lack of sufficient medical care are supported by an increasing body of evidence, with certain instances that are irrefutable.” He continued, “Each of the five months preceding this opinion was marred by instances of catastrophic violence at MDC, including two apparent homicides, two gruesome stabbings and an assault so severe that it resulted in a fractured eye socket for the victim.”
The detention center houses about 1,800 inmates.
Prosecutors have alleged that MDC was the scene of sexual assaults by guards on female inmates, according to the Associated Press. A federal magistrate in 2016 was reluctant to send a woman there, citing a report that said there was an “absence of fresh, clean air, the complete absence of sunlight, and the absence of ANY outdoor time and activities.”
Combs has been the subject of a sweeping federal probe since at least the beginning of the year and was arrested in New York on Monday.
Prosecutors unsealed their indictment against Combs on Tuesday, charging him with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. He pleaded not guilty and was denied bail during that hearing as well.
The indictment alleges that Combs and his associates lured female victims, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Combs then allegedly used force, threats of force, coercion and controlled substances to get them to engage in sex acts with male prostitutes in what Combs referred to as “freak offs.” Combs is accused of giving the women ketamine, ecstasy and GHB to “keep them obedient and compliant” during the performances.
The encounters, which prosecutors said sometimes lasted for days, were elaborate productions that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during and often recorded, according to the indictment. Prosecutors allege in a detention memo filed in court that the sex performances occurred regularly from at least 2009 through this year and that the hotel rooms where they were staged often sustained significant damage.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.