


A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Sean Combs to remain in jail until his trial for sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, rejecting an appeal by the music mogul’s lawyers requesting that he be released on bail.
Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. said at a hearing in Lower Manhattan that Mr. Combs posed a risk of witness tampering and was a danger to the safety of the community. He rejected an unusual proposal from Mr. Combs’s legal team in which the music mogul would have remained at his mansion in Florida, monitored around the clock by a private security force. The lawyers had offered a $50 million bond for his release.
Prosecutors argued that Mr. Combs should not be released because he was prone to violence. They spoke at length about a leaked surveillance video from 2016 in which Mr. Combs was seen physically assaulting Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him last year that was quickly settled.
The judge said “that video is quite disturbing,” after which Mr. Combs, seated between his lawyers, nodded several times.
Marc Agnifilo, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, asserted that his client should not be detained based on an assault from eight years ago that led him to go to rehab. “Mr. Combs has the unfortunate reality that the worst thing he ever did is on videotape,” the lawyer said.
Mr. Agnifilo argued that if Mr. Combs remained incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn — which he said would involve him living in a special housing unit — the restrictions would make it difficult for them to properly prepare for trial.