There seems to be damn good reason for Sean “Diddy” Combs to have paid off Cassie Ventura rather than have her expose his sexual proclivities to the world. Many are disgusted by what he did, and with good reason. But disgusting as it may be, he’s not on trial for being a guy whose sexual proclivities were disgusting, but for sex trafficking. That’s a different matter.

Rick Horowitz sent over a post by Ron Chapman making a very salient point, that the contention that she was coerced into being an “enthusiastic” participant in Comb’s “freak outs” comes at the expense of her agency.

Prosecutors will argue that despite:

• asking for Freak Offs,
• seeking them out,
• organizing them
• remaining with Diddy for 11 years,
• breaking up with him and coming back,
• seeking $20 million in a suit
• not making any contact with law enforcement

that Cassie Ventura had “no viable choice” but to participate in the “freak offs”. Prosecutors will argue that her verbal and written consent should be ignored, and a man can go to prison for the remainder of his life for “psychological pressure” and “implied threats”. This is a dangerous step; a conviction will mean disaster for the rule of law.

The counter to these facts is that she felt that she had no choice, and she was under his psychological thumb, plus the threat that he would reveal video of her engaging in sex acts.

At the heart of the case is a theory that “psychological coercion” and “career pressure” can transform licentious romance into federal sex trafficking. Cassie Ventura – the R&B singer who dated Combs for over a decade – is portrayed not as a willing participant in kinky “freak-offs,” but as a victim forced by lies, threats, and manipulation. The government told jurors that Combs ran a criminal enterprise for 20 years, using “lies, drugs, threats and violence” to “force Cassie and ‘Jane’ to have sex with escorts,” even allegedly threatening to leak videos of the encounters if the women didn’t comply. It’s a lurid narrative, but look closer: the “force” here is largely invisible. No one claims Combs held a gun to anyone’s head. Instead, the prosecution stretches “force” to encompass emotional sway – the implicit leverage of a powerful man over his lover’s psyche and career.

And, indeed, this tugs at the underpinnings of the #MeToo progress of the past ten years.

Ventura is not on trial. She is considered to be the government’s star witness in the racketeering conspiracy case against Combs. There are many other high-profile witnesses who testified to Combs’s violence, including the rapper Kid Cudi, who briefly dated Ventura, and Dawn Richard, who is a former member of the group Danity Kane. The entire world saw hotel surveillance video depicting Combs physically assaulting Ventura that was obtained by CNN, and Combs paid Ventura an eight-figure settlement after she sued him for sex trafficking and sexual assault in 2023.

This misapprehends the nature of criminal trials. No, Ventura is not the defendant and, should her testimony not be found credible enough by the jury to convict, she will not be punished. But Ventura is very much on trial. The prosecution is on trial. The burden is on the prosecution, and by extension its witnesses, to prove guilt. The defendant has no burden, nothing to prove.

While the hotel hallway video is damning, it proves only what it shows, not that Ventura was unable to walk away a thousand times over the 11 years they were together, if she wanted to. That’s what her agency is about, that she had the ability to make decisions for herself and act upon them, and her failure to do so, or her enthusiastic participation otherwise, was her choice.

Chapman argues that the nature of coercion in the statute is akin to putting a gun to someone’s head to force them to do something upon pain of harm.

Under federal law, “coercion” does include more than just physical violence. Statute defines “serious harm” to include nonphysical harm – psychological, financial, reputational – sufficiently serious to compel a reasonable person in the victim’s circumstances to comply. That broad language was intended to reach truly coercive situations: pimps threatening to bankrupt a woman’s family, or to publicly shame a survivor with revenge porn. But in practice, courts have required proof of a scheme or threat that would make a person reasonably fear grievous harm if they refused the sex act.

But that’s not what advocates of #MeToo coercion would have to convict. Instead, it’s emotional harm, the personal sway one person may have over another in the ordinary course of a relationship that turns a man into an emotional manipulator and a woman into putty without the capacity to say no, walk away, make decisions for herself. Men are strong. Women are weak and incapable of standing up to a man. In support of this, a litany of excuses has been developed.

This cultural playbook is called DARVO, a term coined by the psychologist Jennifer Freyd, which stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, said Kat Tenbarge, who writes the newsletter Spitfire and has spent years covering how the internet responds to accusations of abuse. (This is also a tactic used by individual abusers toward their victims.) Often the alleged victim is treated as the greater monster, Tenbarge explained, and the men who are accused of violence are painted as “the true victims who deserve some sort of restitution or justice through the system.”

If this is reminiscent of the rationalizations for sexual misconduct on campus under Title IX, it’s because it is the same thing, the same playbook of excuses for why the evidence that militates against guilt is twisted into evidence of guilt.

Augustyn said that in her experience working on a campus, students are perhaps more likely than they used to be to report sexual assault informally — they are more willing to tell a friend or a resident adviser what happened to them, because colleges have done a lot of educating in the past five or 10 years on consent and related issues. But when it comes to reporting sexual assault to the police or prosecutors, there’s still a great deal of reluctance, because victims are worried about being retraumatized, and they see what happens to accusers like Cassie as a cautionary tale.

But in Comb’s case, the issue isn’t whether the rationalizations are right or just excuses for conduct that can’t be rationally explained. In Comb’s case, the question is whether he will be convicted upon evidence or convicted upon a fabric of excuses to explain away the facts brought out about Cassie Ventura. It’s not that she may not be telling the truth in that she felt coerced such that she couldn’t leave Diddy. It’s that no defendant should be convicted based on excuses when the evidence fails.