Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex trafficking case is set to involve a series of celebrities who face being sued alongside the rapper.
The rapper, 54, is in jail in New York awaiting trial, and attorney Tony Buzbee – who is representing more than 120 fresh alleged victims of the performer – has said he is getting ready to issue a raft of new lawsuits against high-profile names.
“I think I’ll let the lawsuits speak for themselves,” he added during a chat with TMZ Live about the upcoming cases. “Everyone’s focused on what other celebrities were involved, who’s going to be named, who’s going to be outed – I don’t expect that to happen this week. I’m hoping to file some lawsuits this week.”
Buzbee announced at a press conference on Oct. 1 that his Buzbee Law Firm and the AVA Law Group were representing a group of over 120 victims – made up of men and women – who say they were sexually assaulted by Combs and subjected to sex trafficking by the rapper in offenses allegedly dating to the early 1990s.
Both firms said they had been contacted by over 3,000 individuals, but no lawsuits have yet been filed.
Buzbee added in an update on the cases: “Of course, we’ll include Mr. Combs and some corporate entities, but we want to make sure if we name individuals beyond Mr. Combs that we make sure that we’ve done our homework because it’s gonna create a firestorm and we understand that.
“We’re gonna make sure we dot our I’s and cross our T’s,” he warned about celebrities who attended Combs’ now-infamous “Freak Off” gatherings.
“I want to be clear about something: if you were attending one of these ‘parties’ – if you will, and you attended before or you knew what was going to happen – that is, you know that a particular drug was being used in drinks and was causing people to be coerced and taken advantage of and you were there in the room, or you participated, or you watched it happen and didn’t say anything, or you helped cover it up, in my view, you have a problem.
“As we file each one of these cases, we’re going to make an effort to resolve them on the front end, but failing that, we’re gonna file public lawsuits and pursue these cases aggressively. A lot of people attended these parties. A lot of people saw this activity going on, a lot of people allowed it to go on, said nothing, didn’t intervene, maybe benefited from it, profited from it. All of these individuals and entities in my view have exposure here.
“In every single case, especially cases like this, we collect our data, collect our evidence, do our due diligence, spend time with the victim, and then, because it’s in the best interest of the victim, we attempt to resolve these matters without the filing of a public lawsuit. And we have done that already, I would say, with a handful of individuals, many of which you’ve heard of before, and (we) will continue to do that. That’s just the standard process that every lawyer in the United States who handles these types of cases uses because it’s the right way to do it.”
Combs was arrested in September on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution.
A 14-page federal indictment claimed the rapper had “abused, threatened and coerced women and others around him” for decades.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is in custody in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, N.Y., until his trial.
