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Tag: sexual assault charges

  • Court denies ‘Diddy’ Combs bail for a 3rd time; set to be in jail until May 2025 trial

    Court denies ‘Diddy’ Combs bail for a 3rd time; set to be in jail until May 2025 trial

    Sean “Diddy” Combs is set to remain behind bars until his sex-trafficking trial scheduled for May 2025.

    This comes after the court rejected yet another attempt to secure bail, marking the third unsuccessful bid by the defence to free the 54-year-old music mogul with the latest ruling handed down on Wednesday.

    This comes after the “Last Night” hitmaker was arrested on September 16, 2024, in New York City. He was taken into custody following a federal grand jury indictment.

    The charges against him include racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation for prostitution. The indictment also includes allegations of kidnapping, forced labour, and bribery.

    Diddy has denied all accusations and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

    The defence had previously presented a $50 million bail package in an effort to convince the court. The proposal included strict conditions such as house arrest with GPS tracking at a New York City residence, a restricted list of approved visitors—excluding women who are not family members—and round-the-clock monitoring by a private security team.

    However, federal prosecutors rejected the plan over concerns of altering witnesses, arguing that the release of Combs would be a threat to others even while incarcerated.

    After careful consideration, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian ultimately sided with the prosecution. The judge had initially planned to issue his ruling during a hearing on November 22 but took additional time to deliberate before making his decision.

    “The Court finds that the government has shown by clear and convincing evidence that no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure the safety of the community,” Subramanian wrote, denying Combs’s motion for bail.

    It’s reported that ‘Diddy’ Combs’ had sent handwritten jailhouse notes; they were the subject of a heated hearing last week. Prosecutors gained access to them after an Oct. 28 sweep of the Metropolitan Detention Centre (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y.

    The government claimed it showed that the entrepreneur was trying to pay off witnesses from jail. Combs’s defence team argued that the notes viewed were “attorney-client privileged material”; they included the defence’s legal strategy.

    Subramanian said at the Nov. 19 hearing that he’d review whether the notes contained privileged information, which could take weeks, but that he would not take the notes into consideration when ruling on the issue of bail.

    However, he had some questions for the defence at the Nov. 22 hearing about if the defence retroactively wrote “legal” on the notes in question.

    The defence team said it was trying to get to the bottom of when “legal” was written on some of the notes, according to the Inner City Press.

  • Fashion mogul Peter Nygard faces sentencing for sexual assault charges

    Fashion mogul Peter Nygard faces sentencing for sexual assault charges

    Former fashion mogul Peter Nygard, once the head of a prosperous global apparel empire, is set to be sentenced in a Canadian court this week for sexual assault. Convicted by a Toronto jury last November of assaulting four women, Nygard had denied the charges.

    The upcoming sentencing will not conclude the 83-year-old’s legal troubles. He faces additional sexual assault and sex trafficking charges in Montreal, Winnipeg, and the US, all of which he has denied.

    Nygard stands accused of leveraging his influence and wealth to systematically assault and traffic women in both countries over several decades. For years, he led an international clothing design, manufacturing, and supply business, Nygard International, headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, with offices in New York City and California.

    During his six-week criminal trial in Toronto last autumn, prosecutors argued that Nygard, once estimated to be worth at least $700 million (£542 million), used his “status” to assault five women in incidents spanning from the late 1980s to 2005. His defense lawyers contended that four of the five women, who are also part of a US class-action lawsuit on behalf of his alleged victims, were motivated by financial gain.


    Nygard also claimed during the trial that he did not recall four of the five women, and that he would have never acted “in that kind of manner”.
    A jury found him guilty on four counts and not guilty on a fifth count of sexual assault and on one count of forcible confinement.
    Nygard’s sentencing, scheduled to take place on Wednesday and Thursday, has been repeatedly pushed back, with two of his lawyers resigning over ethical concerns and causing delays.


    His current lawyer, Gerri Wiebe, applied to delay sentencing again – once in June to get up to speed on Nygard’s case and again in July to gather more expert testimony on her client’s medical condition.
    Nygard had previously applied for the remainder of his hearings to be virtual, saying his health was declining.


    But during a remotely held hearing last Friday, Toronto Superior Court Justice Robert Goldstein said he “simply will not entertain” any further delays unless Nygard “is in a coma”.


    Prosecutors in the Toronto case revealed that Peter Nygard lured victims, aged 16 to 28 at the time, to a private luxury bedroom located in his firm’s headquarters. One prosecutor described the room as having “a giant bed, a bar, and doors with no handles and automatic locks controlled by Peter Nygard.” Once the women were trapped in the room, Nygard allegedly assaulted them.

    Nygard now faces another sexual assault case in Montreal, where he is charged with assaulting and forcibly confining a woman over two decades ago. A preliminary inquiry for that case is set to begin in January 2025.

    Additionally, he is facing charges in Winnipeg related to offences allegedly committed in 1993, involving a 20-year-old woman.

    In that instance, he is accused of holding the woman captive and raping her after inviting her to a modeling job. Nygard has denied these charges.

    Following the completion of his criminal cases in Canada, Nygard is set to be extradited to the US. There, authorities allege he engaged in a “decades-long pattern of criminal conduct” involving at least a dozen victims worldwide. In December 2020, New York prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking and racketeering offenses.

    The US Department of Justice accused him of targeting “women and minor-aged girls who came from disadvantaged economic backgrounds or had a history of abuse.”

    They claimed that Nygard maintained close relationships with certain victims, whom he referred to as “girlfriends” or “assistants,” using them to recruit new women for him to exploit sexually.

    A separate class-action lawsuit has been filed against him by 57 women in the US, though it has been put on hold due to his ongoing criminal proceedings. Nygard has been in custody in Canada since his arrest in Winnipeg in 2020.

    In February of that year, he stepped down as chairman of his firm shortly before it filed for bankruptcy following a raid by US authorities on its New York headquarters.