New York, NY, July 2, 2025 – At the end of an eight-week trial and after 13 hours of deliberations, a jury in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of New York acquitted the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs today of sex trafficking and racketeering charges but found Combs guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution under the Mann Act. With the Mann Act charges of promoting prostitution – also known as pimping under federal law – Combs could face up to 20 years in prison.

The prosecutors tried to prove that Combs had trafficked two women for sexual exploitation, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and “Jane Doe”, each of whom had long-term on-and-off relationships with the defendant. Both women provided multiple days of highly detailed and grueling testimony, covering years of extreme sexual violence, physical abuse, dehumanization, control, coercion, and inducement into acts of prostitution they experienced at the hands of Combs.

While it is not surprising that “a jury of his peers” could not find Combs guilty of the horrific acts of sexual exploitation the women described, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) remains deeply disappointed that the verdict failed to hold Combs accountable for these crimes, denying these survivors a sense of justice.

Despite these key witness testimonies, the prosecution faced a steep challenge in proving the sex trafficking charges based on the current definition of sex trafficking in the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), requiring proof of “force, fraud, or coercion,” exceedingly high burdens to meet in a court of law.

The TVPA does not meet the international standards of the United Nations trafficking convention, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), which the U.S. has ratified. The Palermo Protocol definition offers an expansive list of the means traffickers use to exploit their victims, including “…fraud, deception, abuse of power or a position of vulnerability, or the giving or receiving of payments or benefits”, and codifies that consent is never a defense to one’s exploitation. Any one of these elements could have been key in successfully proving sex trafficking in the Combs case.

“The results of this high-profile trial are both complex and illustrative of the cultural and legal challenges we face,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of CATW. “One, this case proves yet again that the TVPA has never been a strong tool to convict traffickers and offer victims the justice they deserve. Secondly, this verdict is symptomatic of an insidious, deeply ingrained cultural tolerance of men committing grave acts of violence and sexual abuse against women. The mainstream ethos in our society, now imbued in porn culture, is that ‘she consented’ to all of it.”

Until the TVPA matches the standards defined in the Palmero Protocol, the public – sometimes called upon to act as arbiters of the law – will maintain an understanding of sex trafficking that is confused and incomplete, and sex traffickers will walk free.

While we must remember that Combs is now a convicted pimp, not finding him guilty of sex trafficking will carry reverberations for Cassie, “Jane,” and survivors of all forms of sexual violence and sexual exploitation. Many people will interpret the not-guilty verdicts as an endorsement of the abuse of power exercised by the most successful men in our society, and a dismissal of the women who speak out against such abuse.

CATW stands in solidarity with all survivors of sexual exploitation and sexual violence, and will continue to fight for cultural change and strong laws that hold perpetrators accountable and offer enduring justice for survivors – and equality in law and in practice for women and girls.

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