Attorneys for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs will return to Manhattan Federal Court Wednesday afternoon to try to spring the embattled hip hop mogul from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, the notorious lockup repeatedly criticized for violence, untimely deaths, suicides, and poor living conditions.
Attorney Marc Agnifilo and his team are expected to once again ask that the “Shake Ya Tailfeather” rapper be released on bail.
On Tuesday, Agnifilo proposed Combs be released on $50 million bond. But Manhattan Federal Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky was more swayed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson’s claims that the Bad Boy Records founder if freed might threaten and intimidate witnesses poised to testify against him.
Combs was hit with federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges on Tuesday, accusing him of flying sex workers across state lines and forcing women he dated to have sex with male prostitutes during wild and sometimes dangerous Caligula-like sex parties he called Freak Offs.
If they didn’t want to join in, he would verbally and physically abuse and harass them until they would, then “used the embarrassing and sensitive recordings as collateral against the victims,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams told reporters Tuesday.
Tarnofsky ordered Combs to be housed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. On Tuesday night he was held there at the Special Housing Unit for inmates who require additional protection and need to be kept separate from the general population.
At his new digs, Combs follows in the footsteps of R. Kelly, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Metropolitan Correctional Facility – MCC
Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, New York. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
The federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, where Combs could have been housed, has been closed since 2021 after the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein two years earlier.
Patrick McMullan Archives
Patrick McMullan via Getty Image Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Cipriani Wall Street on March 15, 2005 in New York City. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Image)
The Brooklyn jail has been plagued for years by gross understaffing, medical mistreatment, atrocious conditions and violence. Federal judges routinely reduce prison sentences for defendants who have had to endure horrific conditions there while being held pretrial.
While the vast majority of inmates there are being held before trial, prisoners sentenced to less than a year sometimes do their terms there — until now.
The federal Bureau of Prisons last month changed policy and will no longer have inmates serve any sentences at the troubled facility, the Daily News reported earlier this week.
