Diddy Update: District Attorney Reveals Key Development That Changed Case

A New York law on sexual offenses has changed everything in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case, a New York District Attorney has said.
Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah said the case was changed by the 2022 Adult Survivors Act, which suspended the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits.
The act opened a one-year window, between November 24, 2022 and November 24, 2023 for people to sue for alleged sexual offenses, in situations where the case had been time barred.
Combs, 54, is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial for charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and travel to engage in prostitution, among other charges.
Over 120 alleged victims have come forward accusing him of sex crimes. Diddy denies the charges against him, and according to his attorney, Marc Agnifilo, the rapper plans to testify in court.
Newsweek sought email comment from Agnifilo on Friday.
Speaking to former prosecutor Elie Honig on his Cafe Insider podcast, Rocah said that the Adult Survivors Act has helped the rapper’s alleged victims to come forward.
Honig had noted that many people were asking why the case had taken so long to come to court as Combs’ alleged conduct dates back to 2008. A victim’s suit didn’t start until November 2023 and Combs wasn’t indicted until September, 2024.
Rocah said the civil lawsuit was taken because the Adult Survivors Act lifted the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases.
“So the time from November 2023, when these civil suits started being filed, until the criminal charges are filed, it’s actually not that much time.
Just the process of sending a memo down to DOJ [Department of Justice] can take six months,” she said.
She said that prosecutors were entitled to gather information from the civil cases and then use that to press charges against Combs.
She also said that prosecutors have to be careful with civil lawsuits because of the financial reward for plaintiffs and their lawyers and prosecutors have to make an assessment on whether to bring criminal charges.
“While the conduct may have been old, it again wasn’t in the public sphere. Prosecutors get information and ideas for charges all the time from public sources like newspaper articles, like civil suits, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as your prosecutors are evaluating it independently and not relying, which the [Manhattan federal prosecutors] would not do, only on a civil suit or what one plaintiff says or anything like that,” she said.
Rocah added that a lawsuit may motivate prosecutors to think: “This is something we should now investigate, we should look at, look at this pattern, look at all these different people making these allegations.”
She added that the criminal investigation is different from the civil suit, “but [the civil suit] gives the impetus.”
In a court filing on Wednesday, New York federal prosecutors informed federal judge Arun Subramanianm that they have “several terabytes of electronic material” from searches in Diddy’s homes in California and Florida.
A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes of data and represents a large volume of material.
That material includes video of Combs’ alleged assault on women, including a 2016 hotel attack on his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, for which he has publicly apologized.
Prosecutors acknowledged in a separate filing on Thursday that they have a copy of the hotel video.