Lawyers representing hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs have asked a federal appeals court in New York to order his immediate release from prison and overturn his conviction on prostitution-related charges, or alternatively, reduce his four-year sentence.
In a filing submitted late Tuesday to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, Diddys’ legal team argued that the rapper and music executive was unfairly treated during sentencing. They claimed the federal judge improperly relied on evidence tied to charges Combs had already been acquitted of when determining his punishment.
Diddy, 56, is currently serving his sentence at a federal prison in New Jersey and is scheduled for release in May 2028. In July, a jury cleared him of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges but convicted him under the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting individuals across state lines for sexual crimes.
According to his lawyers, Judge Arun Subramanian acted like a “thirteenth juror” when he sentenced Combs in October to four years and two months behind bars. They argued that the judge allowed allegations linked to the dismissed charges to influence the final sentence.
The legal team stressed that Diddy was only convicted on two lesser prostitution-related counts that did not involve force, fraud, or coercion. They urged the appeals court to acquit him outright, order his release, or send the case back to the trial judge with instructions to impose a lighter sentence.
“Defendants typically get sentenced to less than 15 months for these offenses — even when coercion, which the jury didn’t find here, is involved,” the lawyers wrote.
They further claimed that the sentence imposed was unusually severe. “The judge defied the jury’s verdict and found Diddy ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have s£x and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings trumped the verdict and led to the highest sentence ever imposed for any remotely similar defendant,” the filing stated.
During sentencing, Judge Subramanian said he considered testimony from two former girlfriends who accused Combs of physical abuse and coercing them into sexual acts with male sex workers while he watched and recorded the encounters.
One of the women, singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, told the court that Combs ordered her to engage in what she described as “disgusting” s£x with strangers hundreds of times during their decade-long relationship, which ended in 2018. Jurors were also shown video footage of Combs dragging and beating her in a Los Angeles hotel hallway following one such incident.
Another former girlfriend, identified only as “Jane,” testified that she was pressured into similar encounters between 2021 and 2024 during what Diddy allegedly referred to as “hotel nights,” which were described as drug-fuelled and lasting several days.
Rejecting the defense’s characterization of the events, Subramanian said at sentencing: “I reject the defense’s attempt to characterize what happened here as merely intimate, consensual experiences, or just a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll story.”
He added, “You abused the power and control that you had over the lives of women you professed to love dearly. You abused them physically, emotionally, and psychologically. And you used that abuse to get your way, especially when it came to freak-offs and hotel nights.”
The appeals court has yet to hear oral arguments on the case.
