In the Sean Combs Case, Echoes of the Tack Taken Against Other Powerful Men

Federal authorities are prosecuting Mr. Combs under sex trafficking and racketeering laws, which were used to successfully prosecute R. Kelly and Keith Raniere in earlier abuse cases.

Though graphic and startling in its details, the indictment of Sean Combs reflects a familiar playbook for federal prosecutions against high-profile men accused of a long-running history of abuse against women.

The Combs indictment, which was unsealed on Tuesday, resembles the prosecution strategy employed in two other major sexual abuse cases brought by federal investigators in recent years against Keith Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, and R. Kelly, the R&B singer.

Both of those men were convicted on some of the same sex trafficking and racketeering charges now facing Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty.

Racketeering charges are attractive to prosecutors pursuing powerful defendants because they are designed to present an “enterprise,” a complex web of individuals who helped the defendants carry out alleged crimes that can date back many years. In Mr. Combs’s case, for example, prosecutors have assembled their racketeering conspiracy charge by accusing him of crimes dating as far back as 2008, including arson, kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.

In some instances, the federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges allow prosecutors to cite crimes for which a state’s statute of limitations has expired.

And the federal laws carry stiff punishments: The most severe sex trafficking law that Mr. Combs has been charged under carries a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. The racketeering conspiracy charge, which accuses defendants of carrying out crimes as part of an “enterprise,” carries up to life in prison.

“The law recognizes that individuals become more powerful when they’re backed by a group,” said Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won the case against Mr. Kelly in Brooklyn. “The racketeering statute exists to give broad prosecutorial powers to bring those people to justice.”

But defense lawyers have pushed back forcefully over the years as prosecutors increasingly turn to racketeering and sex trafficking charges. They have argued that the federal laws are being deployed to charge less serious conduct than was envisioned when they were adopted.

The federal racketeering law — known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — was passed in 1970 to fight organized criminal enterprises such as the Mafia. And the sex trafficking law, passed by Congress in 2000, has been commonly used to pursue prostitution rings and pimps.

The case against Mr. Combs is far less traditional.

The indictment accuses the music mogul, also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, of coercing women into elaborate sexual encounters with male prostitutes called “freak offs,” plying them with drugs to keep them compliant and threatening them if they refused to engage. The allegations closely resemble those cited in a civil suit by Cassie, Mr. Combs’s former girlfriend of 10 years, who accused him of coercing her into participating in “freak offs.”

In a bail hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, objected to the government painting the encounters as sex trafficking, arguing that with Cassie, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, it was consensual — “part of the way that these two adults wanted to be intimate together.” He accused the government of “coming into this man’s bedroom.”

“Is it sex trafficking?” Mr. Agnifilo said at the hearing. “No, not if everybody wants to be there.”

Mr. Agnifilo made a similar argument as a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, who was convicted in 2019 of racketeering and sex trafficking, among other charges, and was sentenced to 120 years in prison. Women at trial testified that Mr. Raniere had sexually abused them, and some said they were branded with his initials in a secret ceremony.

Lawyers point to his case as a pivotal moment because it led an appeals court to embrace a more expansive view of what sort of conduct could be prosecuted under federal sex trafficking laws.

Mr. Raniere’s lawyers had argued that applying the sex trafficking statute in his case was a stretch, and that the law had been intended to more narrowly address sexual exploitation for profit.

“It was being somewhat bastardized to fit the needs of prosecutors to incarcerate people they believe need to be incarcerated,” Arthur L. Aidala, a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, said of the federal sex trafficking statute, “even if they weren’t violating the spirit of the law when it was enacted.”

But prosecutors had asserted at trial that leaders in Mr. Raniere’s organizations had profited from the trafficking of victims because they received increased status within the group and free labor from recruits known as slaves.

A federal appeals court in New York sided with the government’s more expansive definition, offering something of a green light to more creative approaches to sex trafficking prosecutions.

Moira Penza, a former prosecutor who handled the Raniere case, said the trial provided a tested tool for prosecutors who had historically been wary of bringing complicated cases based on conduct that took place behind closed doors.

“These crimes so often went unprosecuted because prosecutors were concerned about putting on ‘he said, she said’ cases, especially against powerful individuals,” Ms. Penza said. “It was one of those first trials following the #MeToo movement that showed it really could be done.”

The 2021 trial of Mr. Kelly also relied on the racketeering statute to provide an overarching framework for the prosecution. Mr. Kelly had long evaded criminal punishment despite accusations that he sexually abused underage girls. In some instances, the statute of limitations for some charges had expired. But prosecutors cited those as “predicate acts,” and part of the pattern of abuse fostered by the criminal “enterprise.”

One predicate act was bribery, and prosecutors convinced a jury that in 1994, the singer paid an Illinois government employee to obtain a fake ID for the singer Aaliyah, whom he married when she was only 15.

To knit that act into a larger pattern, prosecutors needed to convince jurors that it was just one of several crimes that had been enabled by the existence of a criminal “enterprise.” In Mr. Kelly’s case, the prosecutors presented the enterprise as a group of managers, bodyguards, drivers, personal assistants and runners who assisted in a decades-long scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex. That involved inviting women and girls backstage at the singer’s concerts and arranging for their travel to see him.

“Oftentimes the reason why they’ve been able to evade justice is because they had this group looking out for them,” Ms. Geddes, the former prosecutor, said of the typical racketeering case.

In the Combs case, the racketeering conspiracy charge involves the participation of Mr. Combs’s supervisors, security staff, household staff and other employees in organizing the “freak offs,” including delivering large amounts of cash to pay prostitutes and arranging travel for the women involved. Only Mr. Combs was named in the indictment, however.

Mr. Kelly is appealing his conviction in New York; a lawyer representing him, Jennifer Bonjean, has argued, in part, that the government extended the racketeering statute “to a set of circumstances that is so beyond what the framers intended, which was to get at organized crime.”

The third charge that Mr. Combs is facing — transportation to engage in prostitution — stems from a law called the Mann Act. The older statute, used in the R. Kelly case, was enacted long before the main sex trafficking law and is a less severe charge, carrying up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

Julie A. Dahlstrom, a legal scholar who has studied trends in American sex trafficking law, said she believed that the broader application of sex trafficking law by prosecutors had been driven, in part, by a more expansive use of the statute to bring civil claims during the #MeToo movement.

“We saw victims’ rights attorneys try to use the tools that they had,” she said, citing as an example a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein that led a judge to acknowledge that a promise of possible career advancement in exchange for sex could help bolster a sex trafficking claim.

Indeed, the Combs criminal case was incited by a lawsuit filed by his former girlfriend, Ms. Ventura, which cited the federal sex trafficking law, among other grounds. Her lawsuit, which Mr. Combs quickly settled, accused him of repeatedly forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes, and said that her career as a singer on Mr. Combs’s label was dependent on their relationship.

For months, Mr. Combs’s lawyers were expecting that the civil case could turn into a criminal one. That possibility began to look more likely on March 25, when federal agents descended on Mr. Combs’s homes in Miami Beach and Los Angeles and seized what the government has described as electronics, AR-15-style weapons, narcotics and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant.

“We knew on March 25 where all this was headed,” his lawyer, Mr. Agnifilo, said.