


Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul who has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, was denied bail again on Wednesday after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ third attempt to challenge his detention.
Judge Arun Subramanian wrote in the order that prosecutors had presented evidence of Mr. Combs’s violence and of a serious risk of witness tampering.
The decision orders Mr. Combs to remain at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking federal facility on the Brooklyn waterfront, until his trial, which is scheduled for May. Mr. Combs, 55, has been detained since his arrest in September after a nearly 10-month federal investigation.
After Mr. Combs’s arrest, his lawyers offered a robust bail package that they argued was more than sufficient to assuage the court’s concerns about the risks of his release. They offered a $50 million bond, secured by Mr. Combs’s Florida mansion — as well as his mother’s house there — and said that Mr. Combs would pay for round-the-clock security, with visitors restricted to family. Apart from contact with his lawyers, he would have no access to phones or the internet.
Prosecutors asserted that there was no way the government could trust that private security guards, paid for by Mr. Combs, could be depended on to prevent efforts toward obstructing justice, which, they argued, he had been engaging in before and after his indictment.
The first two judges who considered the bail issue were persuaded by the government’s arguments that Mr. Combs posed a danger to the safety of others, relying largely on the leaked hotel footage from 2016 of Mr. Combs abusing his girlfriend, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, which was broadcast in May by CNN. Ms. Ventura, who filed a bombshell civil suit a year ago, is the center of the government’s case, though she is identified only as “Victim-1” in its indictment.