The trial of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has culminated in a verdict, after more than seven weeks of intense media scrutiny and testimony about drug-fuelled celebrity sex parties.
On Wednesday, a federal jury in the United States delivered a split decision.
It found Combs guilty of transporting individuals to engage in prostitution, but not guilty of the weightier question of whether he engaged in sex trafficking or racketeering for flying girlfriends and sex workers to the parties he organised.
Prosecutors had described Combs’s activity as a “criminal enterprise” in which he leveraged money, power and physical violence to force former girlfriends into abusive circumstances.
The split ruling has, in turn, divided opinion about what the case means for the beleaguered #MeToo movement, which emerged in the early 2010s to bring accountability to cases of sexual violence.
SOURCE: Aljazeera
