Forget the twinkie defense. The new hip defense is the “family man defense,” raised according to Jessica Grouse in the New York Times to sanitize Sean “Puff Daddy,” etc., Combs’ crimes because he’s rich.

On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”

If he’s convicted, he could end up with a life sentence. But as far as Grouse is concerned, there  already is no question of his guilt.

The latest charges are vile, describing years of sexual and physical abuse, enabled by Combs’s vast fortune and the pull of his celebrity. The government outlines the way Combs and his staff allegedly used their power to “intimidate, threaten and lure female victims into Combs’s orbit, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Combs then used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers.”

Is Combs guilty? I certainly have no idea, and neither does Grouse. But she surely knows how he got away with his vile crimes. And the way he’s trying to get away with it is by showing that he’s a “loving family man.” How horrifying!

Despite the fact that the world has seen video evidence of Combs assaulting his ex-girlfriend, his lawyers seem to believe that pitting Combs, a “loving family man,” against an “adult woman who lived alone” would be an effective defense.

They’re trying it because, to some extent, we still assign a positive moral value to getting married and having children. It’s why Republicans keep using Kamala Harris’s lack of biological children to attack her character. Combs’s lawyers are also likely playing on built in prejudices against Black women in particular, who have always had a harder time being seen as respectable, aspirational or worthy of protection in the public eye.

What Combs’ defense lawyers raise has absolutely nothing to do with Kamala Harris, but why waste an opportunity to connect the unrelated to impute some malice while simultaneously attacking those who would question Harris’ choices?

Two things can be true. One can be a loving family man and commit heinous crimes, and one can be wealthy and the target of accusations and not commit crimes. That Combs’ lawyers raise his status as a family man in the course of their seeking bond for his pre-trial release isn’t to malign black women, to play upon some prejudice. It’s to demonstrate his family stability and provide the court with a rationale for why he will neither flee nor engage in conduct that would threaten the family he loves.

Combs is the perfect target for the correlation between wealth and bad conduct. Rappers are bad boys. Rappers come from the tough streets where they had hard lives and did bad things. Just because they’ve achieved wealth and notoriety for their bad conduct doesn’t mean they’ve become respectable. The same street thug that gave rise to their success is still in there, hidden behind the veneer of wealthy respectability. Indeed, they still walk around wearing their tough guy face along with their diamonds and gold chains. How much more proof do you need?

Not being a family man, or family woman as the case may be, does not make you a criminal or even a bad candidate. But it also isn’t a bad thing for a person to be. To the contrary, it reflects love and concern for others, which used to be considered a virtue until it was applied to someone like Combs whom someone like Grouse wants to malign.

For as long as we have had mass media, celebrities — both men and women — have used their families as a means of image rehabilitation, and a way to deflect from run-ins with the law and general bad press. As the cultural critic Leo Braudy explains in his seminal history of fame, “The Frenzy of Renown,” the “aura of social glory” that trails performers has its roots in the 19th-century “self-help belief that making money signified not the quantity of wealth but the quality of virtue.”

Putting aside the obvious non-sequitur, that some celebrities used their family image to “rehabilitate,” or more accurately sanitize, their bad behavior is no doubt true, just as there may be people who work as soup kitchens on one day and engage in the crime of blocking highways  in support of terrorism the next. But that doesn’t make the fact that someone is a family man a bad thing, or some sort of facile proof that anyone who appears otherwise virtuous must be doing so to conceal their “run-ins with the law and general bad press.”

It may well turn out that Sean Combs is a bad dude, and that he did pretty much everything the government is charging he did. But none of that means he didn’t love his family as well, and when the question is whether he should be out on $50 million bond pending trial, the fact that he would never abandon the family he loves is highly relevant and certainly in his favor. What it is not, as Grouse tries to make it, is some insidious defense of the wealthy who hide their malevolence behind the love of their family.