A man is squirting baby oil on a woman’s breasts as she jumps around in a bikini top, twirling under the eyes of craning selfie sticks. A crowd hollers with glee as weed and cigar smoke form stinky clouds.
No, this is not a “freak-off” — one of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex parties. This is the scene outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan, hours after the jury delivered a mixed verdict in the Diddy trial, convicting him of transportation to engage in prostitution, but acquitting him on the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
“If it don’t slip, you must acquit!” yells Baby Oil Man into his iPhone, which is propped up on a tripod. He’s holding three bottles of the stuff — now a symbol of the disgraced hip-hop mogul and his court case — and he’s waving his arms around like a cartoon animal flailing on ice.
Hordes of TikTokers and looky-loos surround the courthouse, alongside Combs supporters wearing T-shirts that proclaim, “A FREAKO IS NOT A R.I.C.O.,” in reference to the racketeering act. Street preachers in “FREE PUFF” caps are yelling about the prophet Elijah. People are climbing police barricades and chanting “Freedom!”
Combs still could go to prison for more than a decade, but for his supporters, the verdict is cause for celebration. For the reporters who have covered the trial since the beginning, this scene is just one more example of the crazy characters, conflicts and chaos that have consumed the New York courthouse. The Diddy trial was the most talked-about legal scandal since O.J. Simpson, but just as much of a spectacle was the circus unfolding beyond the witness stand.
It was a full-time job covering Combs, whose grueling eight-week trial featured 34 witnesses accusing the Bad Boy Records founder of crimes ranging from rape to domestic violence. Snagging a spot in the main courtroom — where Combs sat beside his squad of attorneys and in front of his sons and mother — often required arriving at the courthouse before 6 a.m. and queuing up behind the professional line-sitters hired by TMZ, CNN and the other news networks. (One guy with a shaggy beard and beach chair — an amateur line-sitter, if there is such a thing — would camp overnight and try to hawk his spot for $300 each morning. When no one bit, he would cut his losses and head in to watch the trial himself. After a few days inside, he became so engrossed that he stopped putting himself on the market.)
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Once inside the courthouse, my line mates and I funneled through an airport-level security procedure run by a group of marshals — a cuddly crew of cartoon henchmen with “Hey, tough guy” facades. By week two, I was a pro, like George Clooney in “Up in the Air”: belt off; phone, wallet, keys and press pass in hand. Still, as I collected my things from the bin, I was hazed by bald, grinning, middle-aged men: “Get the fuck outta here! C’mon, bro, hurry up!” After security, we hurried over to a kiosk where an officer stashed all our electronic devices. One time, on the way there, I dropped my AirPods, causing them to ricochet across the immaculate marble floor. As I handed them to the guard, he said, deadpan: “See you at lunch, Butterfingers.”
On an eventful day, writing and updating news stories required exiting and reentering the courthouse three or four times in the span of a few hours. My frequent journeys through security earned me less-than-warm welcomes, like “Do me a favor, kid: When you get up there, don’t come back down.” (It sounds like a joke. I promise you, it was not.)
In the early mornings, before witness testimony started, the mood was usually pretty jovial on the 26th floor. A marshal with a thick New York accent cracked jokes at the gallery before the judge hit the bench. And sometimes even Combs seemed to be in a good mood — or as good a mood as one can be in while facing a potential life sentence in prison. Every day, he entered the courtroom slightly hunched over, dressed in a sweater over a white collared shirt that matched the color of his hair. (In jail, he was not permitted the dye he used to keep himself appearing young, so he leaned into a Mr. Rogers look.) After hugging and dapping up his lawyers, Combs would acknowledge whoever appeared in his friends and family section by bowing in gratitude or blowing a kiss. Then he’d scope out the press section, coaxing any journalist in his sight line into a staring contest. I locked eyes with Combs on the fifth day of trial. He won.
Many days, I missed the early-morning cutoff and landed in the overflow room on the 24th floor, where journalists, grifters and members of the public alike watched United States v. Sean Combs on the only televisions in the world permitted to show it. Away from the icy protocol of the main courtroom, the overflow room was unruly. Order — that old courthouse cliché — did not exist on this planet. Filled with Diddy fans, true-crime junkies and other unemployed New Yorkers, it devolved into the cursed living-room watch party of my nightmares. Despite the restrictions on food and beverages, one Guy Fieri wannabe, complete with Oakley sunglasses strapped to the back of his head, smuggled a giant bag of buttered popcorn into the courtroom, shoving handfuls into his mouth while skirting the snack police. Two different women on separate occasions watched the trial with crying babies on their laps. On a good day, the room resembled a Spirit Airlines flight. On a bad day, a UFC arena.
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A few days into the trial, a confrontation broke out in the overflow room. As a TV anchor strode toward an open seat in the front row of the gallery, a member of the public, wearing a full subway-conductor costume, ran up behind her and got in her face. “You knew I was going for that seat!” she whined.
The star witness, Combs’ ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, was on the stand, accusing the hip-hop mogul of more than a decade of violent abuse and sexual assault. But dozens of reporters, influencers, attorneys and trial chasers were no longer paying attention to the live video feed.
A marshal, clad in a navy suit and bulletproof vest, gently chided the woman, whispering something about how she mustn’t “act like a baby” in the courthouse.
“You fucking racist bastard!” she shouted. She stepped closer to the marshal and, acting exactly like a baby, pointed a finger at his chest. “Watch you lose your job because of me.”
She stormed out of the room, and a silence fell over the gallery. The journalist next to me leaned over, a dumb grin plastered on his face. “Now that’s a story,” he said.
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Weeks later, “MTA Lady,” as reporters and marshals called her, finally made it into the main courtroom, where she interrupted the proceedings. “Diddy, these motherfuckers laughing at you!” she yelled. Then she taunted a marshal: “Pull your gun out, ninja, I dare you!” Spectators in the gallery recoiled. It took three officers to throw her out. She never made it back in, but every single day she held court on the sidewalk, often sitting in a swivel chair with a joint in her mouth.
Conspiracy theories thrived in the courthouse. During a rather boring testimony, a woman held me hostage in the hallway with hypotheses about the true paternity of Combs’ children. “That one’s 50 Cent’s kid — everybody knows that,” she said, as my eyes scanned the windows for fire escapes.
People wearing “FREE DIDDY” merchandise, or hats from the snack-delivery service Gopuff (get it?), had no qualms about revealing their support for the man on trial. But sometimes allegiances were less straightforward, like when a woman in her 70s wore a skin-tight green “J.Lo dress” with the hope of “startling Diddy,” she said. I don’t think she knew that in the overflow room, he had no way of seeing her.
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Early in the trial, a certain manosphere podcaster collected a group of fanboys, and they moved around the courthouse like a clique of high school bullies. He would mock Combs’ accusers as his minions snickered in agreement. When a former personal assistant, George Kaplan, took the stand, the podcaster sneered, “Is he a Jew? Cha-ching!”
After only a few days of trial, an off-putting locker-room vibe had consumed the public section of the overflow room and spilled out into the street at breaks. During testimony, elevators roared with comments like “That bitch is lying” and “She hit him too!” Audience members in the overflow room would yell “Mic drop!” after a witness was faced with a tough question. And one day, a particularly sharp cross-examination of a psychologist resulted in exaggerated rap-battle “Ooohhhhh!”s from the gallery, as if the video feed was a YouTube clip titled “Defense Attorney DESTROYS Expert Witness.”
Even some of my fellow journalists got swept up in the hype. As one reporter blabbed about how said witness “just handed the case to the defense,” another reporter nudged me with her notebook. Written in big, underlined letters, it said “TOTAL FUCKING MORON.”
There was a perversely touristic appeal to United States v. Sean Combs. Dozens of people traveled from out of state and even overseas to watch the court proceedings — even if only from a screen in an overflow room. A Midwestern woman accompanied by her teen daughter told me their sightseeing in New York included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square and the Diddy trial. Various Europeans shuffled in and out of the courtroom to catch a glimpse of “Dee-dee,” as they called him. Two siblings from Germany bobbled with excitement as they entered the overflow room in week five, but left after an hour of watching the attorneys deliberate about a juror issue.
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Two stand-up comedians, one from Los Angeles and the other from Philadelphia, traveled to New York to mine material from the testimony. One woman, who claimed to be a lawyer herself, came from Texas, not to see Combs but his attorneys. “I’m in love with Brian Steel,” she whispered to me before being shushed by a marshal.
One day, another eccentric character from out of state visited the courthouse: Kanye West. The Diddy- and Hitler-loving rapper strutted out of a Maybach wearing all white and was greeted outside by Combs’ son Christian, with whom he released the song “Diddy Free.” Marshals escorted West to another, empty overflow room, where he sat front row as his security guards whispered in his ear. After about half an hour — once reporters began fleeing the courtroom to catch a glimpse of West — the rapper left to get lunch with his entourage. Reporters scoured the hallways with tips that he’d return, but he never did.
Some trial days were explosive. I sat on the aisle as Kid Cudi walked into the courtroom clad in leather and accused a jealous Combs of setting his car on fire. And when Ventura was on the stand, face-to-face with Combs for the first time in seven years, it felt like the climax in the movie of their lives. On other days, forensic experts and summary witnesses spent hours verifying the legitimacy of text messages introduced weeks prior. It literally put people to sleep.
Some of the testimony was gripping. Hearing Ventura trace her troubled relationship with Combs from New York to Los Angeles, with excursions to Miami, Burning Man and Las Vegas, was as captivating as any great novel. Other witnesses filled in the details: a terrifying story of abuse outside Prince’s house; a woman’s hotly disputed allegation of Combs dangling her off a 17th-story balcony; a male escort’s graphic account of having sex with Ventura as a masked Combs watched.
Certain bizarre details will never leave my mind, as much as I want them to. For instance, one witness testified that Combs put applesauce on “everything,” including cheeseburgers. He allegedly liked getting his feet rubbed and watching “Dateline” after his drug-fueled freak-offs. He and one of his alleged sex-trafficking victims called each other “Bert” and “Ernie” in the streets, and “Kobe” and “Michael Jordan” in the sheets. There were also, of course, details about Combs’ bedroom behavior that are so X-rated I wouldn’t dare print them in this 120-year-old publication.
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On breaks, journalists would sometimes bolt out of the courthouse, furiously typing or relaying notes to editors over the phone in an attempt to be the first to file breaking news. Before the trial started, I assumed the press would be wrestling each other to the ground to be the first outside. In reality, nearly every reporter I met was lovely and collaborative.
There was no seating area outside, no protection from the elements, so we often sat on the ground with our laptops connected to hotspots. One stormy day, I straightened out the tin foil wrapped around my cafeteria sandwich and fashioned it into a lousy laptop shield to protect it from the rain. I was sweating and miserable as I flipped through my notes and tried summarizing the past few hours of testimony.
Next to me, a TikTok influencer stood glamorously under an umbrella, recounting the most sensational details into her cellphone, propped up on a tripod. She could barely finish a sentence without being interrupted by a loud ka-ching sound. “Thanks for the donation!” she said, again and again. I glanced at her designer shoes and wondered if I had chosen the wrong career path.
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At almost all hours of the day, a frenzy of new-media personalities paraded outside the courthouse. Livestreamers spewed only the most salacious tidbits of the day into their iPhone cameras as news reporters did TV hits with camera crews across the street.
If I could manage without my phone or laptop, I stayed inside and ate in the court cafeteria. Sometimes Combs’ family would convene there, the only restaurant in the city protected from paparazzi. As Combs’ sons placed custom sandwich orders, one reporter observed, “This must be a downgrade from their personal chef.” (For what it’s worth, I thought the cafeteria food was fine.)
A few times, I ventured out into the real world for lunch. At a nearby pizza place, an Italian grandmother dropped off free desserts in exchange for courtroom gossip. And at a sandwich spot, an overly chatty cashier saw my press badge and yelled on my way out, “Be safe out there! Don’t slip on all that baby oil!”
Outside the courthouse, there were constant fights. I once found myself literally caught between two people who grew up in Mount Vernon, arguing over who personally knew Combs best back in the day. “I grew up down the street from Puff. We were practically brothers,” a man said. A woman responded, “Well then how come I ain’t ever heard of you?”
People loved to shout at each other while holding their iPhone cameras in each other’s faces — the only way to solve conflicts in 2025. Around 6:30 a.m., one man would sometimes break into fits of screaming and then get whisked away by the cops. Phone cameras shot up like antennae as vloggers taunted each other — “Slap me! Slap me!” — and broke into physical altercations.
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During the last few days of trial, tensions boiled between a credentialed reporter and a testy influencer, who charged at him in the hallway. A man meditated with his bare feet on the gallery bench. Two separate people fell unconscious and were wheeled on gurneys into ambulances. And a woman in her underwear ran laps around the courthouse, screaming in the rain.
It was hard not to feel a little unsettled by the voyeuristic detachment surrounding the trial. Nearly every day for eight weeks, people sat and listened to harrowing testimony — allegations of sexual assault, violence and psychological abuse — and then immediately churned it through an unforgiving content machine, plucking the most scandalous details with glee. Were we all here to watch justice in motion, or to gaze perversely upon some human darkness that, thanks to Ventura and other witnesses, miraculously found the light? And once the trial ended, where would all these people go?
On Juneteenth, I met a couple friends at a bar just two blocks from the federal courthouse. The building was closed for the holiday, and it had been more than two days since anyone had taken the stand. There was no testimony, no legal theatrics, no Combs. And there wouldn’t be for another 15 hours. It was thunder storming in New York, and the air was sticky and hot. Still, the usual suspects — MTA Lady, the livestreamers and line-sitters — were posted up outside, in animated conversation.
Just before sundown on the final day of the trial, Combs’ attorneys exited the courthouse looking like Ocean’s Eleven in front of the Bellagio fountain. “Today’s a great victory,” said lead counsel Marc Agnifilo. “It’s a great victory for Sean Combs.” But Combs was nowhere to be seen. He had just been denied bail ahead of sentencing. He was probably already en route to the detention center where he’d spent the past 10 months.
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You won’t find this written on blogs, but one of the best views in all of New York City is from the elevator lobby of the 26th floor of this federal courthouse. You can see all of Chinatown and Little Italy sprawled out below, morphing into hundreds of little red and brown brick buildings, before the metallic skyscrapers sprout up around the Empire State Building. You can see New Jersey over the Hudson and Brooklyn over the East River. And on a clear day, you can see the string of glass towers known as Billionaires’ Row lining the bottom of Central Park, where Combs spent his last hours of freedom before he was arrested. Just out of sight is Harlem, where Combs was born 55 years ago.
I wondered if, during the past two months, Combs ever looked out the courthouse windows over the city — at the Bad Boy office where he built much of his billion-dollar fortune, at the hotels where he lived a secret double life before his alleged crimes landed him in a Brooklyn jailhouse. I wondered if he looked straight down, at the never-ending circus pitched in his name. At the reporters, streamers and supporters whose clothing demanded his freedom. And then I realized: Inside the courtroom, they kept the curtains closed.
From Variety US