conviction

Sean Combs, the disgraced music mogul convicted of prostitution-related offences, has been accepted into a drug abuse rehabilitation program that could reduce his sentence by up to a year

Disgraced hip hop mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has entered into rehab behind bars – a move that could cut up to a year from his sentence.

The I’ll Be Missing You hitmaker is currently being held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, New Jersey, a low-security prison after he was convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was sentenced on October 3 to 50 months in prison and received 14 months’ credit for time already served.

Now, his spokesman, Juda Engelmayer, has confirmed the Bad Boy Entertainment founder had entered the programme and is “committed to sobriety, healing and trying to set an example for others”. He added: “Mr Combs is an active participant in the Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) and has taken his rehabilitation process seriously from the start.”

Engelmayer said the rapper has been accepted into the programme and is working in the prison’s church library.

“He works in the chapel library, where he describes the environment as warm, respectful, and rewarding,” he said. According to the federal inmate locator, Combs is scheduled for release in May 2028.

Successful completion of RDAP could reduce that date, though he would still be subject to five years’ supervision after release, alongside drug testing and mental health treatment conditions. He is currently appealing his sentence.

Prosecutors had sought more than 11 years, citing what they described as a sustained pattern of coercion, manipulation and violent sexual abuse.

During the trial, former girlfriend Cassie Ventura testified that Combs used violence to force her participation in so-called “freak-offs” – drug-fuelled sex sessions involving sex workers he hired. She told the court she felt “disgusted” and “humiliated” afterwards.

At sentencing, US District Judge Arun Subramanian told Combs he “abused the power and control with women you professed to love” and said: “You abused them physically, emotionally and psychologically.” Combs apologised to Ventura and another former girlfriend, calling his conduct “disgusting, shameful and sick.”

Combs’ legal team reached out to President Donald Trump for a pardon after the conviction, according to a source close to the defence.

In an interview with Newsmax on August 1, Trump said he had once been “very friendly” with Diddy, but claimed Combs “was very hostile” during his presidential campaign.

Asked whether he would pardon the artist, Trump replied, “I would say so.”

Combs is living in a nine-person room inside a larger 200-bed unit.

Engelmayer said he has restarted “Free Game with Diddy,” a class designed to help inmates build confidence, learn entrepreneurial skills, and plan for employment after release.

He previously ran the programme while held at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.

NEW YORK — A federal appeals court on Thursday gave new life to President Trump’s bid to erase his hush money conviction, ordering a lower court to reconsider its decision to keep the case in state court instead of moving it to federal court.

A three-judge panel in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein erred by failing to consider “important issues relevant” to Trump’s request to move the New York case to federal court, where he can seek to have it thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.

But, the appeals court judges said, they “express no view” on how Hellerstein should rule.

Hellerstein, who was nominated by Democratic President Bill Clinton, twice denied Trump’s requests to move the case. The first time was after Trump’s March 2023 indictment; the second followed Trump’s May 2024 conviction and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that presidents and former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts.

In the later ruling, at issue in Thursday’s decision, Hellerstein said Trump’s lawyers had failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.

Hellerstein’s ruling, which echoed his previous denial, “did not consider whether certain evidence admitted during the state court trial relates to immunized official acts or, if so, whether evidentiary immunity transformed” the hush money case into one that relates to official acts, the appeals court panel said.

The three judges said Hellerstein should closely review evidence that Trump claims relate to official acts.

If Hellerstein finds the prosecution relied on evidence of official acts, the judges said, he should weigh whether Trump can argue those actions were taken as part of his White House duties, whether Trump “diligently sought” to have the case moved to federal court and whether the case can even be moved to federal court now that Trump has been convicted and sentenced in state court.

Ruling came after oral arguments in June

Judges Susan L. Carney, Raymond J. Lohier Jr. and Myrna Pérez made their ruling after hearing arguments in June, when they spent more than an hour grilling Trump’s lawyer and the appellate chief for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which prosecuted the case and wants it to remain in state court.

Carney and Lohier were nominated to the court by Democratic President Barack Obama. Pérez was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden.

“President Trump continues to win in his fight against Radical Democrat Lawfare,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that the Witch Hunt perpetrated by the Manhattan DA be immediately overturned and dismissed.”

Bragg’s office declined to comment.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose allegations of an affair with Trump threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim, said he did nothing wrong and has asked a state appellate court to overturn the conviction.

It was the only one of the Republican’s four criminal cases to go to trial.

Trump team cites Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity

In trying to move the hush money case to federal court, Trump’s lawyers argued that federal officers, including former presidents, have the right to be tried in federal court for charges arising from “conduct performed while in office.” Part of the criminal case involved checks that Trump wrote while he was president.

Trump’s lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision. He also said they erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under that ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.

“The district attorney holds the keys in his hand,” Wall told the three-judge panel in June. “He doesn’t have to introduce this evidence.”

In addition to reining in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts, the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling restricted prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Wall, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, called the president “a class of one,” telling the judges that “everything about this cries out for federal court.”

Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the district attorney’s office, countered that Trump was too late in seeking to move the case to federal court. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment. Exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown.

Hellerstein concluded that Trump hadn’t shown “good cause” to request a move to federal court as such a late stage. But the three-judge panel on Thursday said it “cannot be confident” that the judge “adequately considered issues” relevant to making that decision.

Wall, addressing the delay at oral arguments, said Trump’s team did not immediately seek to move the case to federal court because the defense was trying to resolve the matter by raising the immunity argument with the trial judge, Juan Merchan.

Merchan rejected Trump’s request to throw out the conviction on immunity grounds and sentenced him Jan. 10 to an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction intact but sparing him any punishment.

Sisak writes for the Associated Press.

Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.

Conte died Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. It did not disclose his cause of death.

The federal government’s investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Conte, who served four months in federal prison for dealing steroids, talked openly about his famous former clients. He went on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.

The investigation led to the book “Game of Shadows.” A week after the book was published in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.

The Steroids Era

Conte said he sold steroids known as “the cream” and “the clear” and advised on their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.

“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the Mitchell report said. “Widespread use by players of such substances unfairly disadvantages the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records.”

Mitchell said the problems didn’t develop overnight. Mitchell said everyone involved in baseball in the previous two decades — including commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players — shared some responsibility for what he called “the Steroids Era.”

The federal investigation into BALCO began with a tax agent digging through the company’s trash.

Conte wound up pleading guilty to two of the 42 charges against him in 2005 before trial. Six of the 11 convicted people were ensnared for lying to grand jurors, federal investigators or the court.

Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges stemming from his BALCO connections. Anderson was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement.

Bonds was charged with lying to a grand jury about receiving performance-enhancing drugs and went on trial in 2011. Prosecutors dropped the case four years later when the government decided not to appeal an overturned obstruction of justice conviction to the Supreme Court.

A seven-time National League MVP and 14-time All-Star outfielder, Bonds ended his career after the 2007 season with 762 homers, surpassing the record of 755 that Hank Aaron set from 1954-76. Bonds denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs but has never been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Bonds didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Conte told the Associated Press in a 2010 interview that “yes, athletes cheat to win, but the government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too.” He also questioned whether the results in such legal cases justified the effort.

Conte’s attorney, Robert Holley, didn’t respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. SNAC System didn’t respond to a message sent through the company’s website.

Defiant about his role

After serving his sentence in a minimum security prison he described as “like a men’s retreat,” Conte got back in business in 2007 by resuscitating a nutritional supplements business he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He located it in the same building that once housed BALCO in Burlingame, Calif.

Conte remained defiant about his central role in doling out designer steroids to elite athletes. He maintained he simply helped “level the playing field” in a world already rife with cheaters.

To Dr. Gary Wadler, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte might as well have been pushing cocaine or heroin.

“You are talking about totally illegal drug trafficking. You are talking about using drugs in violation of federal law,” Wadler said in 2007. “This is not philanthropy and this is not some do-gooding. This is drug dealing.”

The hallway at SNAC System was lined with game jerseys of pro athletes, and signed photographs, including athletics stars Tim Montgomery, Kelli White and CJ Hunter, all punished for doping.

Conte wore a Rolex and parked a Bentley and a Mercedes in front of his building. He told the AP in 2007 he wouldn’t drive over the speed limit.

“I’m a person who doesn’t break laws anymore,” he said. “But I still do like to look fast.”

Years later, he met with the then-chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound.

“As someone who was able to evade their system for so long, it was easy for me to point out the many loopholes that exist and recommend specific steps to improve the overall effectiveness of their program,” Conte said in a statement after the meeting.

He said that some of the poor decisions he made in the past made him uniquely qualified to contribute to the anti-doping effort.

SNAC System’s social media post announcing Conte’s death called him an “Anti-Doping Advocate.”

Conte was also a musician, serving as a bass player for the funk band Tower of Power for a short time in the late 1970s. He is pictured on the back of the band’s 1978 “We Came To Play” album.

“He was an excellent musician and a powerful force for clean sports and he will be missed,” band founder Emilio Castillo posted on X.

Associated Press sports writers Janie McCauley and Chris Lehourites contributed to this report.