Sean “Diddy” Combs apologized and expressed “how sincerely sorry I am for all of the hurt and pain that I have caused” in a letter Thursday to the judge set to sentence the disgraced hip-hop mogul on two prostitution-related convictions Friday.
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“I lost my way. I got lost in my journey. Lost in the drugs and the excess. My downfall was rooted in my selfishness,” Combs wrote in the letter to U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian.
The letter was dated Thursday, a day before Combs is to be sentenced in a Manhattan courtroom on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Combs was acquitted of the most serious counts, one count of racketeering conspiracy and two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion.
He faces up to 20 years in prison, 10 years on each count on which he was convicted.
The letter marks the first time that Combs has addressed the judge in any meaningful way. During his eight-week federal trial, Combs did not testify and gave brief answers in response to questions from the judge.
Federal prosecutors had accused Combs of orchestrating a decade-spanning “criminal enterprise” and forcing women to participate in marathon, drug-dazed sexual encounters with male escorts, known as “freak-offs.”
Combs’ former girlfriend Casandra Ventura testified that she was controlled and coerced to participate in the sex acts against her will. Hotel video showed Combs beating Ventura and dragging her in 2016.
His defense has insisted that the prosecution’s key witnesses — including Ventura and a woman identified by the pseudonym “Jane” — willingly participated in the “freak-offs.”
Combs is expected to speak at Friday’s sentencing hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. and last for several hours.
Prosecutors are seeking 11 years and three months in prison.
Combs’ attorneys are asking for 14 months in prison.
In the letter to Subramanian, Combs asked for mercy, saying he has “been humbled and broken to my core.”
He recounted the conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been held for a little over a year, and wrote that he never wants to appear in a criminal courtroom again.
“Over the past year there have been so many times that I wanted to give up. There have been some days I thought I would be better off dead. The old me died in jail and a new version of me was reborn,” Combs wrote.
In his letter, Combs said he takes full responsibility for the abuse of Ventura, an R&B singer known as Cassie, and his other conduct.
“The scene and images of me assaulting Cassie play over and over in my head daily. I literally lost my mind. I was dead wrong for putting my hands on the woman that I loved. I’m sorry for that and always will be,” Combs wrote.
Ventura has said in a letter to the judge that she is scared for her safety. She wrote in a letter to Subramanian filed Tuesday that her experience was “the most traumatic and horrifying chapter in my life.”
“His defense attorneys claim he is a changed man, and he wants to mentor abusers. I know firsthand what real mentorship means, and this disgusts me; he is not being truthful,” Ventura wrote in the victim impact statement.
“I know that who he was to me — the manipulator, the aggressor, the abuser, the trafficker — is who he is as a human,” she wrote. “He has no interest in changing or becoming better. He will always be the same cruel, power-hungry, manipulative man that he is.”
Subramanian rejected an effort by Combs’ attorneys Tuesday to toss out the two criminal counts on which he was convicted.
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