Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Nine Lives

For decades, he occupied a special stripe of the celebrity stratosphere. Now the man who helped turn rap into a global concern has escaped a sex-trafficking conviction.

For the last two months, Sean Combs — once the most powerful executive in hip-hop, and one of the most recognizable global avatars of American cool — had been reframed as a full-time defendant.

Facing trial in federal court on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transporting people for prostitution, he seemed diminished — a powerful man brought low by those he had allegedly harmed, an avatar of how even the loftiest realms of celebrity might not offer a buffer against accountability. It appeared as if Combs’s life, his career, his public image would forever be changed. That his career had reached a cul-de-sac of his own making.

On Wednesday, though, Combs was found not guilty on all charges apart from transportation to engage in prostitution, the least serious of them.

If the time since late 2023 — when Combs’s ex-girlfriend Casandra Ventura (the singer Cassie) filed a civil suit against him, which he settled in one day — has prophesied a fall from grace for Combs, Wednesday’s verdict demonstrated the opposite: that even several weeks of grim testimony from his intimates, employees and others about how he flaunted power and resources to bend them to his will was not compelling enough to completely knock him from his perch.

Combs largely escaped the fate of some other high-profile entertainment figures who have been held accountable in the #MeToo era. Had he been convicted across the board, he likely would have faced a full reputational shattering like Harvey Weinstein, once the most powerful man in film, who has been imprisoned on federal sex crimes since 2020. Or R. Kelly, once R&B’s most formidable and popular star, who has been in prison since 2022 on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges. Combs would have been a villain who once was famous, not the other way around.

Instead, it’s possible that these charges and this trial might end up being viewed as a blemish on his résumé, another tragedy that registered only as a speed bump.

In between achievements and laurels, Combs has often tested the firmness of the bubble that inoculates celebrities from consequences for their actions, brushing away a long tally of criminal and civil allegations that date back to the earliest years of his career.

Many of them have played out in public, then receded from memory, turning Combs into a gleaming Dorian Gray figure. A charity basketball game he helped organize at City College in 1991 ended in a stampede, killing nine people. In 1999, he assaulted the record executive Steve Stoute with a champagne bottle, and later in the year was involved in a nightclub shooting that landed his then protégé Shyne in prison.

Were it not for the hotel security tape that showed him violently beating Ventura in 2016, Combs might have argued this latest set of allegations was all smoke and mirrors, a misunderstanding about how power works, who can wield it and how it lures others.

Combs’s team did not call any witnesses during this trial; his lawyers argued in opening and closing statements that the sexual activity at issue was consensual, and that Combs never kidnapped anyone, or took part in an arson, or tampered with any witnesses. They contended that anyone who said they felt trapped in the tractor beam of Combs’s power and rage was there of their own volition.

And that argument worked. Even though the details of Combs’s sex life with Ventura and Jane (a second ex-girlfriend he was accused of sex trafficking, who testified under a pseudonym), which included drugs and sex with male escorts, felt severe in the aggregate, the jury agreed with the defense’s argument that, in essence, they were part of a swingers’ lifestyle.

And so Combs has secured a victory that’s both legal and social. How he treats that freedom will be another test. Possibly he’ll accept it as a quiet victory, in which he largely retreats from public life, in the manner of Russell Simmons, the defining pre-Combs hip-hop executive, who was accused of rape and sexual misconduct by several women (though he has never been criminally charged on those allegations).

Or perhaps, emboldened, he’ll make a vocal return to public life. Talk about the trial as an example of legal overreach into his private affairs. Demonstrate a modicum of remorse for those who’ve said he hurt them. Insist his intentions have always been noble. Give the world some time to process, and absorb, and then slowly inch back toward the spotlight, and its warm protection.

He may well find that he is still embraced by the powerful and by fans. There are no rules for public rehabilitation, no threshold for how someone accused or even convicted of heinous acts will be received. And no correlation between how morally pure a person has been and how much power they are entrusted to wield.

Few celebrities aside from Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, rallied to Combs’s side as a defendant, but as someone who’s been largely acquitted, he may find himself welcome once more, at least in some rooms.

And then behind closed doors, who knows?