At a Grammy party five years ago that now seems like the ancient past, music stars like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Cardi B listened in rapt attention as Sean Combs accepted an honorary award and demanded that the Recording Academy do more to recognize Black talent.

“It’s going to take all of us to get this done,” he declared at a podium to a standing ovation that swept through the Beverly Hills ballroom.

It’s doubtful Mr. Combs, also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, will ever enjoy that level of adulation and prominence in the entertainment industry again.

On Friday, he was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for prostitution-related offenses, following a federal trial this summer in which prosecutors accused him of coercing two former girlfriends into participating in elaborate, drug-dazed sexual encounters that could last for days.

A jury acquitted Mr. Combs of the most serious charges against him — sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which could have resulted in a life sentence — but the case still laid bare evidence of brutal domestic abuse, and the two women testified that they felt violated and manipulated by his sexual demands.

Accounting for the year that Mr. Combs has already served since his arrest last September, the onetime music mogul could be free by 2028. But he still faces a hard path to rebuild his career, and many commentators are deeply skeptical that he can regain anything like the status he enjoyed when he wielded a Midas touch in music, fashion and media, and earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a pitchman for consumer brands.

“I’m sure he will find his way to hustle into something that’s meaningful to him, because that’s been his M.O. his whole career,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African American studies scholar who teaches about Black popular culture at Duke. “But the return to what he meant to the culture and what he meant to some of these brands — I think that’s forever gone.”

Mr. Combs’s wider legal battle is also far from over. He continues to face more than 50 lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse — assertions he has vehemently denied and that his lawyers say were fabricated to extract financial settlements from a wealthy defendant.

But the damage to Mr. Combs’s reputation and business career has been severe since Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie and the star witness at his criminal trial, sued him in late 2023. She accused him of much the same behavior that was later detailed in his criminal indictment. Her suit was quickly settled for $20 million, but it became the instigating force in a cascade of other complaints, as well as the federal investigation that would ultimately lead to his arrest.

“Because of my decisions,” Mr. Combs said in court on Friday, “I lost all my businesses, I lost my career, I totally destroyed my reputation.”

The mogul’s own lawyers have portrayed the effects of the last two years as devastating.

“Mr. Combs’s 35-year legacy as an entrepreneur, fashion pioneer, music mogul and global businessman has collapsed,” the defense wrote in a court filing ahead of his sentencing.

Lawyers have been known to exaggerate in their efforts to convince a judge that their client has suffered enough and should be treated with leniency. But in Mr. Combs’s case there is no denying the steep fall by a man who once wielded a culture-shifting power in music and beyond.

From his career beginnings in the early 1990s, he not only produced hit songs but helped sculpt talented young performers like Mary J. Blige and the Notorious B.I.G. into mainstream global ambassadors of hip-hop. As a brand of his own, Mr. Combs started a fashion line — Sean John, named after himself — became a reality TV star and hobnobbed with the elite of American society, from Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump.

Now he has been largely shunned by the industry where he was once a leading light.

“Puff sold the world a brand of cool based on the sense that the party was wherever he was, and that any room he was in was the room to be in,” said Dan Charnas, a hip-hop scholar and associate professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. “I have a hard time believing anybody would want to be in one of his rooms now.”

At the Davis Institute, whose namesake was a mentor to Mr. Combs, photos of the hip-hop mogul have been removed from a gallery “out of respect for folks who are aghast at Puff’s behavior,” Mr. Charnas said.

As Mr. Combs’s legal woes mounted in the aftermath of Ms. Ventura’s suit, he was forced to retreat from his universe of businesses and brands.

He laid off more than 100 employees, according to his lawyers; others at his companies, including high-ranking executives, exited of their own will because they did not want to be associated with him anymore.

Mr. Combs sold his majority stake in Revolt, the media company that he helped found; he was removed from the boards of three charter schools that he had started; and a planned reality television show about him and his family was shelved. He and Diageo, the liquor giant that had provided much of his wealth over the years, cut ties for good.

Mr. Combs was once estimated to have a net worth of about $1 billion, but last year Fortune downgraded that to $300 million. He still retains significant assets, including a Miami-area island estate that has been appraised at $48.5 million and a private plane that has recently been chartered out.

Another mansion, in Los Angeles, was put on the market more than a year ago for $61.5 million, and Mr. Combs recently sold a Kerry James Marshall painting that he had purchased in 2018 for $21 million.

Some allies of Mr. Combs believe it is too soon to suggest his future is so bleak. Over more than three decades, Mr. Combs has had a career defined by resiliency, as he has reinvented himself again and again in the aftermath of crisis.

As a novice producer in 1991, he was the public face of blame when nine people were crushed to death at a charity basketball game he helped promote at the City College of New York, though he was never charged and public outrage over the incident didn’t slow his rapid ascent. A decade later, he was acquitted of gun possession and bribery charges in connection with a shooting at a New York nightclub; again, the notoriety had little effect on a charmed career.

But it may be far more difficult to come back this time, observers predict. At age 55, his career as a performer and music producer has long been dimmed, and much of his recent fame has been built on branding deals that have now vanished.

More significantly, perhaps, the jury verdict that acquitted him of sex trafficking and racketeering could not erase weeks of testimony in which girlfriends described beatings and other abuse, and employees told of purchasing drugs for Mr. Combs and once chauffeuring him while he kept guns in his lap. Footage of Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura in a hotel hallway in 2016 was shown repeatedly at trial.

His lawyers were even forced to admit he was a domestic abuser as part of a strategy to embrace evidence that seemed incontrovertible while stressing that did not make their client either a sex trafficker or a racketeer.

“He has a lot of reconciling to do with the community,” Kim Osorio, a hip-hop journalist, said. “And just looking at his track record, I can see him doing that.”

In a letter to the judge, Mr. Combs apologized for “all of the hurt and pain that I have caused others,” and said he thinks daily about the video of him assaulting Ms. Ventura: “My domestic violence,” he said, “will always be a heavy burden that I will have to forever carry.”

Despite the sentence, Mr. Combs and his representatives are still holding out hope that he can have the convictions removed from his record. His lawyers have indicated they intend to appeal the Mann Act convictions, and one said in an interview that other representatives of Mr. Combs have approached the Trump administration in hopes of a presidential pardon.

In sentencing papers, Mr. Combs’s lawyers painted a picture of life after prison focused on his family, which includes his 84-year-old mother, a 2-year-old daughter and six adult children. They also portrayed him as eager to mentor young people, in part by helping them learn from his own failures.

Rob Shuter, who worked as a publicist to Mr. Combs in the early 2000s, said he would be shocked if his former client, while in jail, hasn’t already been considering potential avenues for returning to public life.

“He will be back,” Mr. Shuter said. “Maybe not at the Met ball ever again; maybe he won’t be sitting down for drinks with Anna Wintour or Clive Davis or the owners of Estee Lauder’s company. But he will be back.”