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Around 4:15 p.m. on July 1, Sean “Diddy” Combs and his lawyers huddled together in the courtroom where his sex trafficking and racketeering trial has played out over the past nine weeks. They were discussing a note that jurors had submitted to the court moments prior, and their faces were grave. Diddy sat down during this discussion and top lawyer Marc Agnifilo placed his hand on his shoulder. Teny Geragos, who’s also leading Diddy’s defense, put her arm around another lawyer on the team. Diddy lowered his head. Just after 4:30 p.m., thunder rumbled outside the courtroom, which rises 26 stories above the ground in Downtown Manhattan. Judge Arun Subramanian returned to the bench moments later and read aloud the jury’s note stating they were deadlocked on the top count, racketeering conspiracy.
“We have reached a verdict on counts two, three, four, five,” the jurors said in the 4:05 p.m. note, referring to charges of sex trafficking by force or fraud and transportation to engage in prostitution. “We are unable to reach a verdict on count one.” The jury note said that there are jurors who had “unpersuadable opinions on both sides.”
Subramananian asked both sides how they wanted to respond to the jury’s note and both sides wanted the jury to keep weighing the case. Subramanian called the jury back into court at 5:16 p.m. “I ask at this time that you keep deliberating,” he responded to the note. The jury will return on the morning of July 2. The jurors’ verdict on the four counts will not be public until deliberations conclude and it’s officially revealed in court.
Earlier in the day, Diddy understandably seemed to be in far better spirits. He had kind words for his mother as jury deliberations in his Manhattan federal court sex-trafficking trial entered a second day on Tuesday. “I love [your] outfit,” he told her as he left the courtroom to await deliberations in a holding cell. Right before complimenting his mom’s attire, which featured cream-and-hunter-green stripes similar to a zebra pattern, he told her to “relax.” Combs also bid farewell to his mother and a handful of supporters with a hands-on-mouth kissing gesture that he has employed as a greeting and farewell throughout the trial.
Before this exchange, lawyers on the case and Judge Arun Subramanian discussed how to answer a jury note from 4:30 p.m. on Monday that asked whether drug distribution — one of the underlying offenses in the racketeering conspiracy count — included giving someone drugs if they asked for them. Subramanian appeared to grow annoyed with Combs’s defense team during this discussion, cutting them off with a terse “hold on” comment several times. “Can I give Your Honor an example?” defense attorney Marc Agnifilo asked, to which Subramanian retorted: “No. Can you do what I’m asking?”