The trial of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has culminated in a verdict, after more than seven weeks of intense media scrutiny and testimony about drug-fuelled celebrity sex parties.But beneath the salacious details, advocates say there are critical takeaways about how sexual violence is understood – and sometimes tolerated – within the criminal justice system.
On Wednesday, a federal jury in the United States delivered a split decision.
It found Combs guilty of transporting individuals to engage in prostitution, but not guilty of the weightier question of whether he engaged in sex trafficking or racketeering for flying girlfriends and sex workers to the parties he organised.
Prosecutors had described Combs’s activity as a “criminal enterprise” in which he leveraged money, power and physical violence to force former girlfriends into abusive circumstances.
The split ruling has, in turn, divided opinion about what the case means for the beleaguered #MeToo movement, which emerged in the early 2010s to bring accountability to cases of sexual violence.
For Emma Katz, a domestic abuse expert, the jury’s decision indicates there are still yawning gaps in public understanding about sexual violence. That understanding, she maintains, is necessary to assess the behaviours that accompany long-term abuse and coercion, particularly between intimate partners.
“I think a ruling like this would be a good news kind of day for perpetrators,” she told Al Jazeera. “The jury seems to have concluded you can be a victim, a survivor, whose boss beats you in hotel corridors …
