If We Valued Sex Workers, the Outcome of the Diddy Trial Would Have Been Different

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After eight months of pre-trial incarceration, endless speculation, and millions of dollars spent on attorneys, the United States of America v. Sean Combs trial came to an unsatisfying conclusion earlier this month. Combs, a hip-hop mogul with endless access to fame, wealth, and power, was facing a life sentence if convicted of the five counts charged by the Southern District of New York. Despite compelling testimony from several of his victims, including his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura, the jury ultimately acquitted him of three of the most serious charges, including sex trafficking, and convicted him on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.

Combs is now facing 20 years, with legal experts estimating that he will likely be sentenced to less than five years and will have that time reduced by 13 months because he was denied both pre-trial and post-trial bail. It is certainly a disappointing outcome, especially for those of us—me included—who perceived this as the proverbial first domino in the long overdue reckoning owed to Black women in hip-hop.  

Hip-hop is undoubtedly the single greatest cultural movement in the history of the world. And, as many of us who love the culture know, the movement has also devoured women, destroyed them, and then discarded them. There’s no shortage of men in hip-hop who have treated women as if they’re disposable. Hip-hop titans ranging from Dr. Dre and Nas to Flavor Flav and Tupac have been accused of and, in the case of Tupac, convicted, of harming women emotionally, physically, and sexually. Russell Simmons, the cofounder of Def Jam Records, was even the subject of On the Record, a powerful documentary chronicling his alleged sexual abuse of multiple women in his orbit.

Combs, who has been at the forefront of the culture for nearly three decades, has become synonymous with its abusive impulses. Few things captured his propensity for violence more than a leaked surveillance video that showed Combs chasing Ventura down the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, physically attacking her while she lay helpless on the ground, and then dragging her back to their shared hotel room. But now, as Combs stares down his inevitable freedom, after which he will likely be welcomed back into the music industry’s orbit, there is a shared sense of hopelessness. Once again, an abuser has been insulated from accountability. Once again, victims of emotional, sexual, and physical violence were disbelieved by the very systems that claim to protect them. 

I understand the hopelessness. I even understand the fear. However, as we sort through the wreckage of this trial, another possibility emerges. The jury acquitted Combs on two counts of sex trafficking for a number of reasons, including the fact that the SDNY overreached with the charges. But as I followed the trial, it became abundantly clear that the prosecution was committed to presenting Ventura and the witness known as “Jane” as victims who were forced to participate in sex acts. However, the defense team was able to split those hairs, lean into the sexist idea that these women were willing to compromise themselves for access to Combs’ wealth and fame, and ultimately convince the jury that they were willing participants in their own abuse. 

But between those two legal extremes, there is another option here, one that could signal new protections for women who are publicly regarded as girlfriends to powerful, wealthy men but are privately treated as sex workers existing at the beck and call of their primary client. If the movement to decriminalize sex work were successful, there might be an avenue for those like Ventura and the anonymized Jane to seek recourse when they are abused in the act of providing of service without facing the possibility of being criminalized or prosecuted for participating in sex work. If these women were regarded as workers instead of the gold diggers Combs’ defense team depicted them as, then there might even be space in our cultural imagination to debunk the notion that these women were willing to compromise their “moral integrity” in exchange for access to wealth, power, and fame. 

In their indictment, the SDNY alleged that Combs “relied on the employees, resources and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled—creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in, and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice.” 

At the heart of the case itself was the allegation that Combs used his businesses and those employed by them to coerce multiple women, including Ventura and Jane, to participate in carefully orchestrated sexual productions known as “freak offs.” Throughout the trial, the prosecution showed that Combs’ employees—and sometimes the women themselves—would hire commercial male sex workers and fly them to different locations. The employees would then rent hotel rooms where the male sex workers would be intimate with Combs’ female partners over the course of several days while he videotaped the encounters. 

When the women resisted participating in the freak offs or expressed disinterest, Combs allegedly used violence and blackmail to coerce them into participating. “Combs ensured participation from the women by, among other things, obtaining and distributing narcotics to them, controlling their careers, leveraging his financial support and threatening to cut off the same, and using intimidation and violence,” the indictment reads. “Physical abuse by Combs … was recurrent and widely known. On numerous occasions from at least in or about 2009 and continuing for years, Combs assaulted women by, among other things, striking, punching, dragging, throwing objects at, and kicking them.”

Now, to be clear, Ventura repeatedly said throughout the trial that she was in a relationship with Combs, she loved him, and she wanted to satisfy him, which is the sole reason she agreed to participate in the freak offs. However, during her testimony, Ventura also said that the freaks off happened so regularly that it “became a job.” If Combs convinced Ventura that the only way to “make him happy” was to hire sex workers, fly them to various cities and countries, and participate in coordinated amateur pornography, I would argue that “freak offs” were not only a job; they were also an act of sex work, one that deserves to be protected as all labor should be. 

A 2020 report from the ACLU found that the criminalization of sex work “increases the risk of violence and threatens the safety of sex workers.” When sex workers are afraid of being judged and arrested, it decreases their willingness to report violence from their clients. However, when sex work is decriminalized and afforded labor protections, violence decreases because workers are able to more effectively screen their clients and negotiate fees and activities while the industry itself is able to establish “greater oversight, regulated negotiation systems, [and] greater peer support from social networks.” The ACLU study notes that when Rhode Island inadvertently decriminalized “indoor prostitution” from 1980 through 2009, there was a 30% decrease in reported rapes against sex workers. 

In 2023, the United Nations’ working group on discrimination against women and girls published a guidance document that argued that it is essential for human rights groups to advocate for decriminalizing sex work so that sex workers can be protected from discrimination, marginalization, and stigmatization. The researchers consulted with sex workers in several geographic regions, including those who have been abused and exploited, and the overwhelming consensus was that full decriminalization rather than legalization is the best path forward because it is the most preserving of human dignity and autonomy.

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“Unlike the legalization model, which implies the adoption of sex work-specific laws, decriminalization removes all sex work-specific provisions,” the working group notes. “However, it does not entail an absence of any regulation. Instead, regulations are put in place that are aimed at ensuring respect and protection for sex workers’ human and labor rights, including occupational health and safety standards, in accordance with the existing regulations that are applied to other, similar businesses.”

Imagine this: Instead of the jury in the U.S. v. Combs trial having to decide between whether Ventura willingly agreed to participate in “freak offs” in exchange for a lavish lifestyle or Ventura being an abuse victim, what if this were treated as a labor dispute? You can’t coerce employees. You can’t harass them. You can’t abuse them. There are laws protecting workers from experiencing that in their workplaces. Ventura, Jane, and the other women who testified during the Combs trial could have been afforded those protections and had more recourse. 

Now, that is not to say that it would have made any difference in the outcome. We still societally treat sex work as a moral failure rather than as a job that allows for autonomy and flexibility, as a 2021 study published in Sex Res Social Policy found. Sex workers are still underpaid and forced to do their work underground to evade criminalization. But, if we shift our cultural understanding of sex work to be less about the act itself and more about affording labor protections to an industry, then we might be able to hold violators like Combs accountable for mistreating the women they have contracted for their services. 

In the meantime, Combs is returning to an insular world where he has been given the greenlight to continue acting with impunity. It is a scary time for those who understand what he is capable of. It is also the perfect time to imagine a different world, one where sex workers are not forced to endure poor treatment because there is no recourse. Instead, in this imagined world, sex workers are cared for, protected, and respected—as all workers deserve to be. 

This piece was edited by Nicole Froio and copy edited by s.e. smith.

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