Prosecutors are pushing back hard Sean Combs‘ claims they leaked the bombshell video showing his the brutal beating of his ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura in a hotel lobby in March 2016. In a lengthy rebuttal filed late Wednesday, prosecutors said their copy of the surveillance video is still the one they downloaded it from. The CNN show breaking the news last May. In more than 39 pages of arguments, they said Combs’ recent trio of motions seeking to exclude the video from his upcoming trial, gain quick access to the indictment’s list of victims’ names and obtain a gag order on witnesses and their lawyers should be denied. .

Combs, 54, was arrested on his federal indictment on Sept. 16 and he is in a federal prison in Brooklyn pending trial for racketeering and sex trafficking. The one-time billionaire founder of Bad Boy Entertainment has pleaded not guilty. His trial in midtown Manhattan is set for May 5, 2025.

“All three of defendant’s motions should be denied in their entirety,” prosecutors wrote, saying Combs’ request for an evidentiary hearing and “suppression” of the Ventura video at trial “must be denied.” They said the video was not protected material when CNN obtained it, and they willingly acknowledged that their own attempts to obtain the video had failed. They said that as of Wednesday, they still “have not obtained the Intercontinental video broadcast by CNN from any source other than the public broadcast.”

“As the defendant is fully aware, the video was not in the government’s possession at the time of CNN’s publication, and the government never obtained the video through the grand jury process,” Southern District Attorneys New. York wrote.

“Defendant refuses to acknowledge that several persons other than government agents . . .
including some of (Combs’) own employees — may have had access to the Intercontinental video,” they continued. “Indeed, the government continues to investigate who had access to and may have obtained the video, including, for example, employees of the hotel, the security team contracted by the hotel, and members of the defendant’s staff, who, as discussed on the record, attempted to obtain video surveillance after the March 2016 incident.”

As for Combs’ request for the names of victims through something called a “bill of particulars,” which is a written description of the claims in a lawsuit, prosecutors said it was too early. “Here, all discovery will be done by December 31, 2024, more than four months before trial, and the government’s productions intentionally prioritized such items as the search warrant affidavits — which contextualize the allegations in the indictment — as and other materials requested by the defendant.” They said that if Combs later claims he doesn’t have enough time to prepare for trial, the “appropriate whisper” is to ask for a postponement of the May trial date he specifically requested. “Due to the defendant’s history, the government has serious concerns about the victim’s safety and the potential for witness tampering if the defendant were provided with a list of victims’ names,” they said.

They said Combs’ third motion seeking a gag order on witnesses should also be denied as “extraordinarily broad relief.” They described it as “nothing more than another attempt to force the government to prematurely reveal its witness list.”

Combs’ camp did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the government’s filing. When his lawyers they filed their motion asking for the names of the victims Earlier this month, they said prosecutors “unfairly” forced Combs to “play a guessing game” as he prepared his defense. They said Combs’ 14-page indictment lacked “particularity” to the point that they could not determine who the other unidentified alleged victims were — at least beyond the main victim, widely understood to be Ventura.

“The government is unfairly forcing (Combs) into a guessing game,” defense attorneys Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos wrote. “Without clarity from the government, Mr. Combs has no way of knowing what allegations the government is relying on for purposes of the indictment.” The attorneys said Combs’ position was “made all the more difficult by the onslaught of baseless allegations that desperate plaintiffs are making — mostly anonymously — in civil suits designed to extract a payoff from Mr. Combs and others.” .

A preliminary hearing in the criminal case is set for December 18. In his indictmentCombs is accused of “abusing, threatening and coercing” multiple unidentified victims “to fulfill his sexual desires.” Prosecutors alleged that Combs engaged in a “persistent and pervasive pattern of abuse,” but were particularly vague on dates and details regarding individuals other than Ventura, who was not specifically named.

Talking to Rolling Stone Last month, Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who made closing arguments in the government’s successful prosecution of R. Kelly in Brooklyn, described Combs’ racketeering prosecution as following a “Glacier format,” meaning a simple style called after a famous case. , United States v. Glacier. She said such a format has the advantage of providing more protection for witnesses. “By doing so, they do not have to list every racketeering act they intend to prove at trial. They can just list broad categories of crimes (without) charging specific cases or specific victims,” Geddes said.

Outside of the criminal case, Combs also faces more than two dozen lawsuits filed by plaintiffs who have made claims ranging from sexual harassment to rape. The flood of civil claims began when Ventura filed his explicit complaint of sex trafficking last november Combs settled with Ventura for an undisclosed amount within 24 hours, but her 35-page complaint, now the heart of the music mogul’s criminal prosecution, opened the floodgates. Combs’ homes were raided in March, and in May, CNN has obtained and released gruesome hotel surveillance video showing Combs throwing, kicking, stomping and dragging Ventura in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles. After first denying Ventura’s claims against him, Combs issued a video apology regarding the incident, admitting that “his behavior in that video is inexcusable.”