Sean “Diddy” Combs’ lawyers are due to ask a US appeals court on Thursday to overturn both his conviction and sentence.
The hip-hop mogul, 56, is serving a 50-month prison term after being found guilty by a jury in New York last year on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Combs is asking the Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn both the conviction and the sentence imposed on him in October 2025.
His seven-week trial in Manhattan federal court centred on drug-fuelled, days-long sexual encounters involving two former girlfriends and male sex workers.
Jurors found Combs guilty on the prostitution-related charges, but acquitted him on more serious sex trafficking and racketeering charges linked to allegations that he forced two former partners, singer Casandra Ventura and a woman who testified under the pseudonym Jane, to take part in the encounters.
At Thursday’s hearing, defence lawyer Alexandra Shapiro is expected to argue that the conviction should be overturned because Combs was accused of watching the encounters, rather than taking part in them himself.
She is also expected to argue that US District Judge Arun Subramanian wrongly took account of conduct linked to the charges on which Combs was acquitted when sentencing him to 50 months in prison.
In court filings, Shapiro said the judge should not have considered evidence that Combs threatened to release an explicit video of Ventura and threatened to stop paying Jane’s rent.
“It was unlawful, unconstitutional and a perversion of justice to sentence Combs as if the jury had found him guilty of sex trafficking and RICO,” Shapiro wrote, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Prosecutor Christy Slavik rejected that argument in a court filing, saying the judge was entitled to consider evidence of threats and abuse because it was relevant to the prostitution offences.
“According to Combs, the District Court should have closed its eyes to how he carried out his Mann Act offenses and abused his victims,” Slavik wrote, referring to the federal law that criminalises transporting people for prostitution.
Combs has acknowledged abusing former girlfriends, but has said incidents he described as domestic violence were separate from the sexual encounters at the centre of the case, which he said were consensual.
He is currently serving his sentence at a low-security federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Bureau of Prisons records list his release date as 15 April 2028.
Source: Reuters