federal judge has denied Sean “Diddy” Combs’ efforts to delay the start of his upcoming sex trafficking trial. The music mogul appeared in court today. His legal team wanted to push the start date by two months, saying they needed more time to prepare because of new charges filed this month. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all federal counts, including racketeering. His trial is set to begin May 5th.
why did the judge deny Combs’ bid to delay the trial and what else happened in court?
The judge denied this immediately when we got into court today. What he said to Combs’ attorneys is, for one, this request came very last minute. This trial is supposed to start in weeks, we’re supposed to begin jury selection soon, and that he thinks that they have sufficient time to prepare.
He even made the point, Lindsay, that it’s unclear to him why Combs can’t prepare when he has four different law firms working on his case.
A few other things that the judge said today is he’s going to allow in drafts of a memoir that was written by one of the victims, however the defense had also wanted her diaries and bank statements. The judge is not going to allow that. He’s also going to allow in outtakes from a documentary called “The Fall of Diddy” of potential witnesses in this case.
And then a lot of today’s discussion, Lindsay, was about victim anonymity. There are three alleged victims who the government wants to testify and they want them to testify under pseudonyms. The subject has said the three victims will testify anonymously.
The other thing they discussed for quite a while was expert testimony. There are experts that the government and defense want to bring in to speak to what can happen when a victim has allegedly been sexually abused, and the judge thought the key point was that you can’t infer just because someone stayed in a relationship or didn’t talk about abuse sooner that it didn’t occur.
Source: raialkhalij + aljazeera