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A lawyer for Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul whose houses have been raided by federal brokers on Monday, known as the searches “a gross overuse of military-level drive” and criticized them as “nothing greater than a witch hunt primarily based on meritless accusations made in civil lawsuits.”
“There is not any excuse for the extreme present of drive and hostility exhibited by authorities or the way in which his youngsters and staff have been handled,” the lawyer, Aaron Dyer, stated in a press release on Tuesday. “Mr. Combs was by no means detained however spoke to and cooperated with authorities. Despite media hypothesis, neither Mr. Combs nor any of his members of the family have been arrested nor has their capacity to journey been restricted in any method.”
On Monday, armed brokers from Homeland Security Investigations searched two of Mr. Combs’s houses in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla. The authorities didn’t say whether or not Mr. Combs was a goal or what legal costs they have been investigating. Video taken by a neighborhood tv station in Los Angeles, Fox 11, confirmed armed officers getting into a house within the unique Holmby Hills space of town.
“This unprecedented ambush — paired with a sophisticated, coordinated media presence — results in a untimely rush to judgment of Mr. Combs,” Mr. Dyer stated. “There has been no discovering of legal or civil legal responsibility with any of those allegations. Mr. Combs is harmless and can proceed to struggle each single day to clear his identify.”
On the identical day as these searches, federal brokers additionally stopped Mr. Combs at an airport within the Miami space as he was making ready to depart with members of the family for the Bahamas, and took a variety of digital gadgets from Mr. Combs, based on an individual with data of the matter. Mr. Combs was not arrested, and remained within the United States, based on that particular person.
The raid was a putting growth for Mr. Combs, who has been one of many highest-profile figures within the music trade for many years, credited with remodeling hip-hop and R&B within the Nineties into a world enterprise. He labored with stars like Mary J. Blige and the Notorious B.I.G., and as lately as final fall was being showered with trade accolades.
Videos and images from the raid that have been broadcast by information organizations, and circulated broadly on social media, confirmed brokers apparently pulling down a door at Mr. Combs’s mansion and confiscating computer systems and different gadgets.
The investigation was led by prosecutors within the Southern District of New York, based on a law-enforcement official. Federal investigators in New York have been conducting interviews asking potential witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations towards Mr. Combs for a number of months, based on an individual acquainted with the interviews.
The raid this week got here after a sequence of civil lawsuits in current months which have accused Mr. Combs, usually in graphic and disturbing element, of sexual assault. The first, in November, was filed by Casandra Ventura, generally known as Cassie, Mr. Combs’s former girlfriend and an artist as soon as signed to his file label, Bad Boy. She alleged that along with rape and bodily abuse, Mr. Combs compelled her to have intercourse with male prostitutes in resorts throughout the United States over a interval of years.
Ms. Ventura’s case was settled in simply someday, with she and Mr. Combs each saying they’d reached their settlement “amicably,” and a lawyer for Mr. Combs noting that the settlement was “by no means an admission of wrongdoing.”
Suits by three different girls have been filed in fast succession, every accusing Mr. Combs of sexual assault. And in February, a music producer filed one other go well with, saying that he had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Combs and compelled to rent prostitutes and take part in intercourse acts with them.
In earlier statements, Mr. Combs and his attorneys have vehemently denied the allegations in these fits, saying they have been filed by folks on the lookout for a “payday.” But the fits have made Mr. Combs a pariah within the music trade and put a lot of his wider enterprise empire in danger.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
