Diddy’s lawyers dramatically demand mistrial after bombshell Kid Cudi murder plot allegations: Live updates

Diddy’s lawyers have asked the judge for a mistrial after arguing the prosecution made an unacceptable suggestion in front of the jury.

The defense said it was ‘outrageous’ when prosecutors appeared to suggest the mogul had destroyed fingerprints taken from Kid Cudi’s house after the January, 2012 bombing of his car.

Prosecutors had asked LAFD official Lance Jimenez about the fingerprints, and he said the evidence was destroyed in August 2012.

Jimenez said ‘somebody within LAPD’ authorized the destruction of the evidence.

This is when Diddy’s team objected.

‘They know what they were doing,’ the defense said of prosecutors.

‘They were suggesting that someone in this courtroom has something to do with improper and suspicious destruction of these fingerprint cards and that’s outrageous.’

The attorneys added: ‘The only proper remedy to cure the outrageous prejudice is a mistrial.’

However, the defense’s motion for a mistrial was denied.

To hear all the explosive testimony from singer Cassie Ventura and the other witnesses in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ trial, tune in to Daily Mail’s hit podcast The Trial.

From sworn testimony to video evidence and the rapper’s every subtle move, our team of journalists take you inside the courtroom of the world’s biggest celebrity case.

Daily Mail has been following Diddy’s downfall from the very beginning. Join us as we hear from experts involved in the case, and members of the rapper’s inside circle.

Stylist Deonte Nash shared more details in court about an incident in 2013 when Diddy allegedly brutally assaulted Cassie.

Cassie talked about the incident during her time on the stand, saying Diddy became enraged as she was getting ready to go to Drake’s music festival in Canada.

Cassie said Combs scuffled with her friends and threw her into a bed frame.

She said she suffered a ‘pretty significant gash’ above her left eye. Combs’ security personnel brought her to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills to get the wound stitched up.

Dash confirmed the details on Wednesday, saying he tried to jump on the mogul to stop the assault but he was unable to.

The stylist said the attack did not stop until a few seconds after Diddy noticed Cassie was bleeding.

‘I tried to call 911. I was immediately told to hang up,’ Dash told the court.

Dawn Richard got her big break in the music business as a cast member on Combs’ reality TV show, Making the Band. She performed with two Combs-backed acts, Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money.

But Richard said from the stand during the trial that Combs threatened her life after she saw him beat Cassie and try to hit her with a skillet in 2009.

She said Combs told her and another woman that they ‘could go missing’ if they didn’t stay quiet.

She said she saw Combs beat Cassie frequently. ‘He would punch her, choke her, drag her, slap her in the mouth,’ she said.

Cassie briefly dated Kid Cudi during a period of time when it looked like she might split with Combs.

Cassie’s mother, Regina Ventura, testified that she felt ‘physically sick’ after her daughter sent her an email saying Combs had learned about the relationship with Cudi and planned to retaliate by releasing tapes of Cassie having sex.

Then, Ventura said, Combs contacted her and angrily demanded $20,000, saying he was owed it because he’d spent money on Cassie’s career.

Ventura tapped home equity to wire the money to Combs’ business. Several days later, the money was returned.

Much of the case presented by prosecutors so far has revolved around accusations that Combs physically and sexually abused Cassie for years, and coerced her into sexual encounters called ‘freak-offs’ with men who were paid thousands of dollars to have sex with her.

Yet Combs isn’t simply charged with sex crimes. He’s charged with racketeering. Prosecutors say they will prove that Combs used his businesses and employees ‘to carry out, facilitate, and cover up his acts of violence, abuse, and commercial sex.’

Some of those employees testified in Week 2.

George Kaplan, a personal assistant for Combs from 2013 to 2015, told jurors he’d toss out liquor bottles and drugs and clean up baby oil from Combs’ hotel rooms after the music producer finished freak-offs.

He said he never reported abuse to authorities, even after Combs beat up Cassie on a private jet.

Another personal assistant, David James, testified that Combs had him stock hotel rooms with Viagra, condoms, baby oil and lubricant, among other supplies.

He also recounted how Combs had three handguns on his lap as they drove to a Los Angeles diner looking for his record industry rival, Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight.

Stylist Deonte Nash will continue his testimony after a lunch break.

Cassie’s former stylist Deonte Nash told the court about an incident in 2014 when Diddy allegedly lost his temper because he was displeased with Cassie’s hairstyle.

Dash said it was at the Vanity Fair Oscar party where Diddy started yelling at him over Cassie wearing her hair down.

The stylist said Diddy grabbed him by his jacket and lifted him up.

‘I started asking people in the party for hair pins,’ Dash told the court, adding that he instructed another person to redo Cassie’s hair in the bathroom.

‘When they came out, [Diddy] said, “oh ya’ll was right, it does look better down.”‘

Nash took the stand Wednesday and admitted he ‘absolutely’ did not want to testify in Diddy’s trial.

He said he worked with the music mogul and Cassie Ventura from 2008 until 2018.

When asked what threats Diddy made against Cassie, Nash replied: ‘That he would beat her a**. He wouldn’t put her music out.

‘That he would get her parents fired from their jobs and send her sex tapes to their jobs, he would start there.’

She has been pictured going inside the Manhattan federal courthouse most days of the trial.

She is seen on Wednesday.

The mogul’s ex-employee has been mentioned about a dozen times by various witnesses who have taken the stand in the trial, and prosecutors claim she was kidnapped twice by Diddy or his bodyguards.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is currently in the fight of his life in federal court as he stares down the prospect of decades behind bars.

The disgraced rap mogul, 55, has been charged with two counts of sex trafficking, two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and one count of racketeering.

According to prosecutors, the rapper used his ‘multi-faceted business empire’ to carry out a ‘criminal enterprise’ for years, allegedly coercing victims into sexual ‘freak off’ marathons and threatening them into silence.

The racketeering and sex trafficking charges carry a minimum sentence of 15 years each, while transportation to engage in prostitution carries a maximum of 10 years behind bars.

The hip-hop mogul is using his street smarts to help lawyers battle the sex trafficking and racketeering allegations he faces, a source close to the trial claimed.

Diddy has been passing dozens of notes in court each day, grilling his lawyers during breaks and suggesting they bring in different evidence.

He has also been using his personal memories to bolster the tactics of the nine highly paid lawyers he has on the case.

‘He was there, he remembers exactly what happened: nobody knows more about Diddy’s life than he does,’ the source told the Daily Mail.

Read the full story below:

LAFD officer Lance Jimenez said he found a Molotov cocktail inside Kid Cudi’s car.

‘There was a bottle on the front seat and cloth handkerchief on the center console that was burned,’ he said, adding the bottle was a 40z malt liquor bottle, old English, and it smelled of gasoline.

Jimenez said the explosive did not blow up as it was designed to, and caused minimal damage compared to that usually caused by a Molotov cocktail.

‘It’s severe damage but not nearly what I’d normally see with a molotov,’ Jimenez told the jury ‘I’ve seen some vehicles, you wouldn’t even recognize the vehicle.’

‘I think the foliage would have been more exposed to the heat, that would have caught fire,’ Jimenez said when asked what would have happened if the bottle had shattered.

He added that ‘if the fire gets big enough it would have affected the home, causing the home to burn and the vehicle behind it.’

Diddy is charged with racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex trafficking and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution.

Prosecutors claim Diddy coerced victims into drug-fueled sex parties using sex and violence. The rapper has denied all accusations, saying all sex acts were consensual.

As the 55-year-old music mogul faces at least another six weeks of grilling, the Daily Mail unpacks the drama which has unfolded in the Manhattan federal courtroom so far.

The shocking pictures were presented to the jury at the disgraced music mogul’s federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial in New York City.

They appear to show evidence of the molotov cocktail which the rapper, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, told a court was thrown through the roof of his convertible.

The images show the car’s soft top with a gaping hole in the middle.

The vehicle’s interior is charred and burnt and the red leather on the driver’s seat has been melted away.

Another photograph shows the blackened inside of one of the car’s doors and window.

‘Looks like the top of my Porsche was cut open, that’s where they inserted the molotov cocktail,’ Mescudi said of one of the images shown to the jury.

LAFD arson specialist Lance Jimenez has taken the stand Wednesday after LAPD officer Ignacio.

Jimenez has worked on the force for 22 years and was one of the officials who responded to Kid Cudi’s home in January, 2012, after a molotov cocktail was placed in his car.

Cudi said on the stand last week that he believes Diddy was responsible for the arson.

Contradicting the testimony of Diddy’s ex-assistant Capricorn Clark, LA police officer Ignacio said he did not see Kid Cudi’s Porsche around Diddy’s Escalade after the break-in at the rapper’s mansion in 2011.

Clark claimed she saw Cudi arrive after Diddy forced her to take him to his house.

She said Cudi took off as he noticed the Escalade in the driveway, and that Diddy followed him.

Diddy’s defense appeared to use the moment to undermind Clark’s claims.

Once one of the most powerful music moguls in the world, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is now relying on a $10 million team of legal heavyweights to rescue his ruined reputation as his sex trafficking trial rolls on for another six weeks.

The defiant Grammy Award winning rapper is used to commanding a crowd – but he has been sitting silently on the defense benches while eight key defense attorneys take center stage during the blockbuster case in Manhattan federal court.

His leading lawyers are Marc Agnifilo, 60, a former Manhattan District Attorney who has tried more than 200 cases during his 30-year career, and millennial ‘nepo baby’ defender Teny Geragos, 34, who has been using TikTok to argue Diddy’s case.

Officer Ignacio took the stand on Wednesday for the prosecution.

He was the officer to respond to Kid Cudi’s house in 2011 after Diddy allegedly broke into the home after learning of the rapper’s romance with Cassie Ventura.

Igancio said when he arrived he found a black Escalade in the driveway, with tinted windows.

‘It was parked directly in front of the residence and as soon as we arrived it took off up the hill,’ Ignacio told the jury.

Diddy’s former assistant Capricorn Clark testified on Tuesday that the mogul was inside the vehicle at the time.

On Wednesday, Ignacio confirmed the vehicle was registered to Bad Boy Productions Inc.

One of the witnesses expected to take the stand today, who is going by the name Mia, was said to be extremely nervous before her testimony.

Her lawyer, Michael Ferrara, said his client will tell about the worst things ever to happen to her.

Those things, he said, she otherwise would have taken ‘to her grave.’ He said she will want emotional support during her testimony.

‘Candidly, her nerves are through the roof,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how to support her if we can’t discuss the pain she’s going to experience from having to tell the world about her worst experiences.’

So far, the blockbuster trial has consisted of a number of bombshell testimonies from his ex-girlfriend and main accuser Cassie Ventura, rapper Kid Cudi, Dawn Richard, a former member of Combs’ pop group Danity Kane, and his former executive assistant George Kaplan, among others.

Here is a full list of everyone who has taken the stand so far:

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitzi Steiner questioned Capricorn Clark about her off-and-on employment with Combs from 2004 to 2018, beginning with her first day when she said Combs and a bodyguard took her to Central Park after 9pm and said he hadn’t been aware of her past work for other rappers.

Clark testified that Combs told her that if that work became an issue, he’d have to kill her.

Clark said she was only weeks into the job when Combs tasked her with carrying diamond jewelry and it went missing. As a result, she said, she was repeatedly given lie detector tests over five-day stretch by a man who seemed five times larger than her own size.

‘He said: “If you fail this test they’re going to throw you in the East River,”‘ she recalled, adding that they eventually let her return to work.

Even the alleged kidnapping didn’t scare Clark away, Agnifilo noted.

Judge Arun Subramanian provisionally denied a joint application by news outlets for the videos to be played in open court and be described by the media.

He agreed with a prosecution argument that playing them would ‘revictimize’ Ventura and one of the unnamed female victims who will testify later iun the trial.

The judge also denied an alternative proposal to allow three pool reporters to stay in court when they were played, and share reports with other outlets.

“I’m not seeing any case that would suggest in any way, shape, or form that images or videos of these types of acts that are alleged to be sexual abuse would be required to be shown in open court when they pose the obvious risk of revictimization,’ he said.

Robert Balin, the lawyer who argued on behalf of the press, earlier said the First Amendment was ‘at its zenith’ in the case.

He argued it was important ‘people, though the press, be able to see justice is being done’.

Balin said the best evidence of whether the sex acts in the ‘freak offs’ were coerced – which underpinned the prosecution’s case – were the videos themselves.

The application was only ever to view the videos and describe them, not for the footage to ever become public.

Ray J spoke about his former mentor Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ ongoing sex-trafficking trial while appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored.

‘I think it’s kind of becoming a circus, and with all the allegations and now with everybody explaining what’s happening in the bedroom, I mean, every day. It just sounds crazier and crazier and freakier and weirder, right?’ he said.

He continued: ‘I’m trying to understand, with all this being said, like with Kid Cudi going on and saying everything that happened, but then ended up saying, “Cassie played both of us”… Where are we trying to go? Are we just trying to tell all of these crazy stories, and then that equals out to sex-trafficking?’

Ray J went on to say that he felt the claims against Diddy were ‘starting to become outrageous.’

Taking the stand on Tuesday, Capricorn Clark said she was left ‘petrified’ after being brought to an abandoned building in New York and locked in while being questioned about the hip hop mogul’s missing jewelry.

Another time, she claimed Diddy kidnapped her at gunpoint and drove her to a love rival’s house where he intended to shoot the man dead, the court heard.

The extraordinary claims emerged during the testimony of Clark, 46, who repeatedly broke down in tears while describing her nightmarish employment with Diddy.

Diddy is in court ahead of the 11th day of his sex-trafficking and racketeering trial in Manhattan federal court.

He’s wearing a Navy sweater today – as he did on Tuesday.

The mogul arrived earlier than usual and began speaking to his lawyer at the table.

He is allowed to wear his own clothes to the trial but with some conditions.

He can only have up to five pairs of pants, shirts and socks and only two pairs of shoes – with no laces.

Former Danity Kane member Dawn Richard said on the stand that Diddy punched Cassie in the stomach during a private argument at a West Hollywood restaurant in 2010.

She claimed several celebrities were at the dinner, including Usher, Ne-Yo and superstar music executive Jimmy Iodine.

‘Mr Combs punched Cassie in the stomach,’ Richard told the jury.

‘They were having a private conversation, we were all sitting eating at the tables together. Some of Bad Boy label mates, some celebrities were in the room.

‘They were secretly arguing [and] he punched her in the stomach.

Richard added: ‘[Cassie] immediately bent over and he told her to leave, I could see him point out and she went out.’

The trial of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is in its third week in New York and several A-list celebrities have been named-dropped throughout the bombshell testimony.

His former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, delivered graphic testimonies alleging that the music mogul physically and psychologically abused her over more than a decade from 2007-2018.

Diddy’s ex-assistant Capricorn Clark exposed the mogul’s list of celebrities enemies and many other A-listers have come up in testimony.

The trial has even inspired deep fake videos that use AI-generated images to falsely claim that certain celebrities, such as Oprah and Jennifer Lawrence, have been mentioned in the mogul’s sex-trafficking case.

Here is a list of all the celebrities named in the trial so far:

The government plans to call a Los Angeles police officer and arson investigator to the stand on Wednesday.

Stylist Deonte Nash and an alleged victim who was also one of Combs’s former employees, who is going by the name Mia, are also expected.

Diddy’s former assistant Capricorn Clark told the jury on Tuesday that Cassie once suggested she wanted to date Jay-Z.

In a meeting with Diddy’s lawyers in April, 2024, Clark said she once told Cassie to date other people than Diddy – but Cassie apparently replied that Jay-Z was taken.

Agnifilo asked Clark: ‘Do you remember saying at the meeting that … you told Cassie, you have to — you should move away from [Diddy] and date other people, right?’

The attorney added: ‘And she said to you that Jay-Z was taken, who would she [date]?’

She added: ‘She did [say that.]’

Diddy, Beyonce and Jay-Z are pictured together in 2005.

Diddy’s longtime rival Suge Knight told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that he believes the music mogul should be declared not guilty in his sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.

‘I say this all the time, Puffy and I are not friends,’ the Death Row records founder said on a phone call from prison.

‘But, Puffy should definitely walk.’

‘I don’t think this is a case where Puffy should be going to prison,’ Knight, who is serving a 28-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter, added.

Meanwhile Ray J told Piers Morgan on Tuesday that his longtime friend will soon be freed from jail.

‘I personally think it’s gonna happen faster than a lot of people think, because I think we’re all starting to see what this is, even if you’re on the other side of it,’ Ray J said on Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Cassie Ventura has welcomed her third child with husband Alex Fine, just days after testifying in her ex Diddy’s sex trafficking trial.

TMZ reports the Me and U singer welcomed baby number three on Tuesday at a hospital in New York City, citing sources with direct knowledge.

The insiders say the baby arrived slightly ahead of schedule, but Cassie and her child are healthy and well.