The Crime Scene: Diddy on Trial

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The world knows him as Diddy.

The courts know him as Sean Combs.

Now, his federal trial for racketeering and sex trafficking is right around the corner.

Welcome to the crime scene.

I'm Brad Milke.

I host ABC's daily news podcast, Start Here.

And every week, we're bringing you the latest on what's big and what's new in the true crime space.

This week, I'm talking to attorney and ABC News legal contributor Brian Buckmeyer, who's host of the new podcast from ABC Audio called Bad Rap, The Case Against Diddy, which traces Diddy's rise and how it all came crashing down.

Brian today is going to walk us through everything we need to know about this trial that is really racing towards us now, including Diddy's claims of innocence and potential defense strategies.

And a quick note, this episode will deal with sexual assault and other difficult subject matter.

Hey, Brian.

Hey, Brett.

So thanks for being here.

Top level, Diddy is set to begin his federal trial in May.

It's less than two weeks from now.

He faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Before we even get into the specifics of that trial, I just want to talk about how big of a deal this is.

This is like going to be the biggest criminal trial of the year.

And Diddy is like an industry unto himself.

So how do we get here, I guess?

Yeah.

So first, thanks for having me here.

And I think you got to go back to when he started with Uptown Records with Mr.

Hurrell and then left to start Bad Boy Records.

And he was the producer for the notorious BIG.

And then he had his own kind of music that influence as well and started with other rappers and creating careers.

And we actually have a clip here that I want to play from your podcast.

This is Bad Rap, The Case Against Diddy.

And we're talking here about that time sort of in the 90s during that rise that you're describing.

So the voice you're going to hear here is first, the journalist Torre, along with Brian.

There was a time when it was ubiquitous, his records.

I remember multiple nights of being in a club.

They're playing a string of bad boy records.

You get in a cab to go to another club.

The radio is playing bad boy records in the cab.

You get in the next club and they're playing bad boy as soon as you walk in.

It was just everywhere.

And it wasn't just about the music.

Bad Boy's artists had an era-defining style.

A look.

Baggy, bold, flashy clothes.

They

were really smart in that they followed the Motown playbook.

There's a charismatic CEO who creates the brand and creates the image.

There's a brand image that links them all together and they're part of the culture.

And Brian, I remember like when we're talking about Diddy's influence, that's the thing.

Like you had this whole Sean John empire.

I'm thinking nowadays we have like the Gwyneth Paltrows and the Reese Witherspoons, these people that sort of evolved their performance brand into like something much larger, like a whole industry.

He was really at the forefront of all of that.

I mean, not to be the lawyer here, but I would argue he wasn't at the forefront.

He was the forefront, right?

And I have a brother and sister who are in their early 20s.

And so when I talk to them about hip-hop and rap, they're like, like, no, it was always a thing.

That genre of music has always been popular.

And I'm like, no, there was a time where you weren't supposed to listen to this music.

It was underground.

There was a time that it wasn't mainstream, that it wasn't cool.

It was considered a fad that it would come and go and be gone.

And the next day.

And then all of a sudden, you have this guy named Puffy.

And I'm still getting used to calling him Diddy.

But you have this guy named Puffy who's making it not only cool, but making it into an industry, not just through his music and his catalog of music and his artists, but also through getting into the liquor industry and getting into MTV.

I mean, MTV was huge, making the band 106 and Park, his artists, like they shaped our culture and our music in a massive way.

And yet, there are whispers of behavior that seemed to start surfacing a while ago.

So I guess walk us through that and how that all started becoming more public.

So you can go through the small stuff like the allegations of Sean Combs hitting his son's UCLA football coach with a kettlebell, right?

That kind of popped up, and we touch more on about it in the podcast, and then just kind of went away.

You can talk about the city college stampede, where he is accused of civilly, not criminally, of overpacking this, this area.

You heard whispers about keeping people's catalog of music and not giving it to them.

And that's maybe more so on the business and criminal and civil side.

But you also heard about Puffy.

Like, and I always find this astounding when people hear, why is his name Puffy?

His name is Puffy because he supposedly had a temper and supposedly still does, and he would puff out his chest and get angry.

And so.

I didn't even know that.

Yeah, I just took it for granted.

So even that, like the name that we've been calling him literally talks about his potential anger issues.

And then now we're all like, oh, okay, that dot's been connected.

It makes sense now, but it's always been there and glaring.

But I think we look past it.

in light of he was in many ways a representation of black excellence.

He was in many ways a person who could take something that was very much of the culture of black and African-American people and bring it to the forefront of being rich in culture, but also rich in the sense of how to take yourself from rags to riches to achieve that American dream.

And I think everyone, regardless of social status, race, ethnicity, religion, looked at it and admired it.

Yeah, to take something authentically yours and then take it mainstream.

So then you talk about these sort of maybe red flags-ish along the way.

What changes?

How does this become something much bigger?

So I think that the first major thing that changed those whisperers would be the lawsuit from Cassie Ventura.

Cassie Ventura, she's often referred to as Cassie just by the single name as an artist, but also a model.

And a long time, as we understood it, but are learning a little bit more, I think, through these lawsuits and this criminal case.

a girlfriend of Sean Combs, but now we are hearing allegations that she was, in fact, a victim of Sean Combs.

This was, I think, like a 35-page complaint where Cassie did two things that I think were very interesting from a legal and also storytelling standpoint.

She looked at her relationship with Sean Combs and was able to highlight things that we saw in the public eye, things that we saw her at the VMAs.

And she said, you might not have seen it, but I was covering up bruises because I was assaulted two days before that, right?

You may have seen me where I had this record deal for 10 albums, which was massive because when she came out with me and you, we were all over that.

And that was a song that was not produced by Sean Combs, but in fact, draw his attention to Cassie.

And we thought she was going to blow up.

But there was never that blow up.

There were no further albums that came out.

And she alleged in that complaint that it was almost as if that deal was held over her head, that she had to commit to these sexual acts.

She had to have sex with male sex workers in order to please Sean Combs, that she would be assaulted and transported to different states at his whim.

And there was always this, you have to prove yourself.

And again, the juxtaposition of us seeing it in interviews where she had talked to radio stations of saying, my album's coming out.

I just have to prove myself to bad boy.

And at the time, you thought about it as like, yeah, you got to prove yourself to like show how great you are as an artist.

And that's how you really make it in this industry.

But now we're like, but your boyfriend was Sean Combs.

Like, what do you have to prove to him?

You had an absolute banger in me and you.

We know that you kind of flopped to some degree in the 106 and Park live performance, but what's the missing piece?

And I think for many people, Cassie's lawsuit provided that missing piece in the context of this is why this all happened.

And here are the allegations she put forward.

But he denied it.

And then they settled really quickly after that.

Like really quickly by any standards, literally here today, gone tomorrow, because it was filed, I think, on a Thursday or Friday.

And this is in 2023.

In 2023, I think in November of 2023.

And then the very next day, it was settled.

And for people who don't follow a lot of civil lawsuits, we often, as a community or a public, don't hear the details of the lawsuits, who had admitted to what, what the dollar amount was, what was negotiated, what was argued, what agreements go on going forward.

And so all we heard was from Sean Combs' legal team, we have settled this amicably and there's no admission of guilt.

And that was it.

why did they settle so fast?

The answer is we don't know.

No one's ever going to know.

In large part, because likely a part of that negotiated settlement is that the parties do not discuss.

But as a defense attorney and someone who also does a little bit of civil work, I can speculate, and this is absolute speculation.

You don't want to go through the process of litigating this type of case.

You don't want to have to sit down for depositions and potential evidence where Cassie is, because it's one thing to read a 34-page complaint.

It's another thing for Cassie to sit down for hours on end and be deposed.

It's a very other thing for Sean Combs to be compelled to sit down and be deposed.

Oh, and all the discovery that goes on.

You do not want.

any of that.

And when your brand is so attached to your livelihood, allegations like that against Sean Combs would destroy him.

And so I think there's a different calculus for someone like him that says, I pay the money, I make it go away, and I try to just move on and cover this up.

So, okay, so there's that lawsuit, explosive allegations, and yet it gets settled within a day.

Combs denies everything, and his lawyers, even at that point, said the settlement does not imply any wrongdoing whatsoever.

But then you start seeing more of these civil lawsuits pile up, right?

This seems like a tipping point.

Yeah.

Just to give the full breadth and the full context, New York, along with California, has created these laws that allow for a look back window is the best non-legal way to describe it.

Because for sexual assault and other sexual cases from a civil standpoint, there's what's called a statute of limitations.

You cannot bring typically allegations of sexual assault, harassment, things of that nature civilly if it's more than 10, 15, 20 years.

But because of these lawsuits that have a window that closes, I think the window is open only for a year.

Right, because New York State specifically had this one-time window, 2022, 2023, where people could file sexual abuse lawsuits even after the statute of limitations had expired, during which it sounds like a lot of civil lawsuits are filed against Diddy.

Yeah.

So we saw as that window closed, both Cassie's lawsuit and about three or four other lawsuits just before that deadline.

And so to some degree, we anticipated it, I think, in the legal community and a little bit for those at ABC who follow this type of stuff.

But for the most part, it was like, okay, they're going to get settled.

They're going to figure something out.

I don't think this is going to be a thing where Brad and I are sitting down talking about this at a podcast because they'll just get resolved and the next big thing will catch people's eyes.

But that didn't happen because in those lawsuits, we saw similar allegations of sex trafficking, forced labor, allegations that they observed what happened to Cassie and even corroborations of some of her allegations as well.

And going to the phrase of where there's smoke, there's fire, I wouldn't say at this point we saw any fire, but we started seeing a lot more smoke.

One of those civil lawsuits that got a lot of attention was the lawsuit filed by music producer Rodney Jones.

Why is that one so important?

Rodney Jones.

He is one of the people in this litany of civil lawsuits who files a lawsuit.

And I think like Cassie's lawsuit, if Cassie's lawsuit is considered the spark to create this all, Rodney Jones' lawsuit is the roadmap.

Because in his lawsuit, he says, I saw this.

I saw that.

This happened to other people.

I was forced to recruit these people.

This happened to me.

Here are still shots.

And there's a difference here.

The civil lawsuit, you're looking for monetary damages for yourself.

But once you lay that stuff out there on the public record, that's when prosecutors might start looking through it and going, oh, there could be a criminal case here.

Yes.

So I am by trade a defense attorney.

I do criminal work.

Do I do civil work?

Yeah, but that's not my bread and butter, although it does pay a lot of bread and butter.

When I read Cassie's lawsuit, I'm like, oh, this is your standard civil lawsuit.

This is about damages to me, allegations about what this person did to me.

Rodney Jones' lawsuit read like a criminal indictment.

It read like,

and I'm like backing up a little from the microphone so you don't hear me yelling, Hey, SDNY, over here, look at these places because you can't start a criminal case.

Like I read that, and I think that's when I pitched the podcast to ABC.

And I said, something's going to happen.

Did he deny these allegations in Jones's lawsuit?

What happens next?

DHS and the federal government end up raiding Sean Combs' Miami home and his LA home.

They went exactly where Rodney Jones said the alleged material would be, and they did it simultaneously.

Why does any law enforcement do raids simultaneously?

Why do they do raids without people knowing?

And from my understanding, Sean Combs is standing on a tarmat in Miami, about to fly off somewhere.

He's not at these homes because they know he's not at the homes.

And they say, go, go, go, go.

They time it for when he's not there.

There's everyone's looking the other way.

And the reason why they do do this, number one, safety, right?

Law enforcement's going in and they don't want to come across someone who allegedly has guns in their homes and they fire at law enforcement.

So safety is a big thing.

The other major issues are the preservation of evidence.

They want to make sure that as they're bursting through the homes, and this is one of the few times that I say like TV sometimes gets it right when it comes to these legal cases, they don't want people flushing things down the toilet, swallowing things.

bleaching them, throwing them, destroying them, whatever.

They want to catch people off guard so they can collect as much evidence as possible.

Well, in this raid, huge escalation, right?

Like huge moment here.

Law enforcement says, you know, this is a justified raid as part of an investigation.

Diddy's lawyer said this was pure overreach.

And yet, so much of this case, you got to think at this point is about witness testimony, right?

People saying like, this happened to me.

But then this videotape leaks.

So if you have someone who's accusing someone of rape and it happens in the same day, same week, the person goes, gets a rape kit.

There's certain tangible evidence that you can say, hey look look it was a rape kit we can tell that this happened but when you say it happened years ago there's not that tangible evidence to prove it it becomes a he said she said but then the video comes out and any kind of reasonable doubt that people were willing to give sean combs of i know sean combs i've worked with him he's not that type of guy you know what maybe she really is just after his money you know what she was dating him so maybe this is buyer's remorse all those kind of explanations and excuses that people give give when you have these he said she says situations that video silenced them well and we are going to take a break right here when we come back ryan is going to walk us through what's on that video and we'll look ahead to diddy's trial coming up

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Okay, we're back with attorney and ABC News legal contributor Brian Buckmeyer.

So, Brian, May of last year, security video from a LA hotel hallway is leaked.

The video is from 2016.

What was on that video?

In the video released by CNN, and just a little shameful plug here, we talk about this in the podcast.

We actually have Elizabeth Wagmeister who comes on and describes the process by which they obtained the video and then the releasing of it.

In the video, you have Sean Combs in LA chasing down Cassie,

beating her, kicking her.

She's on the ground, curled up.

It appears that she had left a room and went towards the elevators from the positioning of the cameras.

Sean Combe seems to assault her, go back, come back, assault her again, throw a vase at her, kick her.

You can see, like, running down the hall, him wearing a towel around his waist, half naked, her, her kind of like running out.

So something happened in this, in the room, but you can't see what happened in the room.

You can only see what's happening in the hallway and just outside the elevator.

Because as people who go to hotels can tell, there's a lot of cameras where the elevators are, and there's often cameras kind of pointing down the hallways and things of that nature.

And

this video got to me for a number of reasons.

Now, full context, I'm a former public defender here in Brooklyn.

I think my last two or three years at the Brooklyn Legal Aid Society, I was in their homicide defense task force.

I've represented 55 to about 6,000 cases.

I've had to walk to the DA's office because they can't send certain video across email because they're so bad.

I've seen bad videos of rapes, assaults, homicides, but this one took me back because

this was truly, as it appeared to me, an individual who saw another individual as not being human.

It reeked of vileness when you watched it.

I was going to say, it's not just you.

Like there was a public reaction to this video.

Yes, there was an absolute public reaction.

I think the conversations before this video got released were,

maybe she's lying.

Maybe this didn't happen.

Maybe all these lawsuits are people just trying to get money.

Sean Combs is not that person.

I mean,

he made Biggie.

Like he made Mace.

He made all like he's not that person.

And then that video came out and everyone's like, I was wrong.

I think people publicly came out and apologized to Cassie because not only did we see this video, but this video was directly referenced in Cassie's lawsuit.

She mentioned this assault.

And so now you get this situation of, all right, Sean Combs, you settled the civil lawsuit.

You said all of this was a lie, that you said there was no admission of guilt.

But a thing in this civil lawsuit is now seen by us all.

And it's not like a small thing like,

oh, you had an argument.

Like, no, this was a beating.

How did Combs respond to that?

So Sean Combs comes out talking about how he was in a dark place, how he has gone to therapy, how he has changed, how he was disgusted by what he did at the time.

And that's pretty much it.

And you can go back and you can see people's public responses.

It's not too different from mine.

I know the women at the View had their response as to this is a non-apology apology.

He's not mentioning who he's sorry to.

He's not mentioning what he's sorry for.

Social media, everyone blasted him about this response, we'll call it, rather than an apology.

The reason why this response was like this is because in large part, and I would have told, well, I would have told Sean Comba something very different to do here, but any lawyer would have told him, abide by the rules of that civil lawsuit when you settled it.

Part of that civil lawsuit, I believe, are that both parties cannot reference or speak of each other.

And so he's abiding by that lawsuit in a sense by doing that.

And if he didn't, he could have faced civil litigation.

He could have been sued for violating that.

That could have opened up the case in a way that he didn't want.

So smart, don't mention her name.

Legally.

Legally.

But probably smarter is to don't apologize.

Because if you're going to do something halfway, it's not enough.

So don't do it, maybe.

Well, then, which takes us to September of last year.

Combs is indicted.

He's arrested.

These are federal charges.

I mean, can you just walk me through then what he's actually charged with?

So September comes around, and we all see that Sean Combs is in New York,

his native home, because he's born in Harlem.

He's at Central Park hanging out.

I think he's like playing hacky sack, doing things that people do in Central Park.

A couple hours later, he gets arrested in the lobby of his hotel.

And we find out that there's an indictment.

And the indictment gets released when he is in the southern district of New York and he's pleading not guilty.

Within the indictment, the original first indictment, we see there are three charges.

Racketeering conspiracy, which most people would hear about as RICO, sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.

as well as transportation for the purpose of prostitution.

Three counts.

The most serious of the counts has a possible sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

And so these are serious.

These are wide-ranging allegations because within that racketeering charge, and you'll hear it as there being a criminal enterprise, there are underlying crimes within that criminal enterprise.

Sex trafficking.

forced labor, arson.

When you talk about a RICO case, what you're really saying is that this person has a criminal enterprise, and that criminal enterprise is moving towards a singular goal.

In Diddy's case, the allegations are the freak-offs, right?

The thousand bottles of baby oil, the elaborate recording of sex acts that allegedly lasted for days, where people had to get IVs, where sex workers were flown in to have sex with individuals who were drugged.

There was allegedly GHB in

the baby oil.

But in order to maintain that criminal enterprise, certain things need to allegedly have been done.

The arson is a big one for me, and I think also is a connective thread throughout a lot of the allegations.

Because if you go to Cassie's lawsuit, she says that at one point in time, her and Sean Combs were on a break.

And during that break, she was talking to, dating, whatever vernacular you want to use, Kid Cuddy, another rapper in the industry.

And her her allegations is that Sean Combs threatened Cassie

to make him go away.

And he, according to Cassie's allegations, said, I will make sure that his car blows up and that his friends or people around him are there to see it, to show the extent of power that he has.

in order as the allegations in the indictment would be to control Cassie because in order to keep her doing the freak offs, which is what the criminal enterprise does, he needs to control her through means of threats and force.

That's how the arson plays into the racketeering conspiracy.

I see.

So the indictment's saying, like, not only is he doing the crime, but he's doing all these other crimes with the intent of this crime that we're all talking about here.

To make sure that that criminal enterprise still works.

That's why when you read the racketeering charge and you see or hear all these little allegations underneath it, it's not that he's being charged with all those little allegations.

It's that he did these crimes to make the enterprise work.

That's the allegation behind it.

So now again, you're hearing the feds almost or pretty much corroborate an allegation from Cassie's civil lawsuit that was settled.

You now know that Cassie must be a part of this federal indictment, even though the name wasn't released when the indictment happened.

And now, at least for me,

we travel into a different territory because there are people who sexually assault people.

There are people who rape people.

There are people who have criminal enterprises that feed into that.

If you want to think of the allegations or now the conviction against Harvey Weinstein or R.

Kelly.

But there's a very unique type of person who blows up cars in order to keep the rape going.

To me, it racketed it up another way.

You're willing to do anything in addition to the horrible crimes we're accusing you of, the freak offs and everything.

Diddy's lawyers have said he had nothing to do with the car bombing, but this indictment is basically saying like you're willing to do anything to keep all this going.

Yeah, that's within the indictment.

The sex trafficking, that's, I think, pretty self-explanatory.

It's a, because it's a federal crime, it's an allegation that the

person compelled an individual to participate in sexual acts through force.

So, like, blowing up someone's car, fraud, or coercion.

You have to stay at Bad Boy or keep doing this.

And then transportation for purpose of prostitution.

That's self-explanatory.

And then it's not even just Diddy.

Like, he's not even just doing all this solo.

They're saying, like, this is lots of people involved in one big criminal enterprise.

Yeah.

So the very definition of a RICO is where two or more people conspire.

You can't have a RICO by yourself.

And that has had some pushback as well as to why is Sean Combs the only defendant?

There has to be, by definition of a RICO, someone else who participated in it.

The person who traveled to go get the sex workers at the airport and brought them to the freak offs, the person who set up the bed and the room knowing that the freak offs was going to happen.

The person who cleaned up afterwards to hide the allegations that a freak off was happening, the person who supplied the drugs.

All of this is, in essence, a criminal enterprise.

So there has to be more people.

And I agree with people when they criticize this and say, well, why aren't there more defendants?

And I said, well, the more accurate thing to say is, why are there not more charged defendants?

Because you can be a cooperating suspect or defendant who's not charged.

You can be a person who got a deal.

If they think they've got a bunch of defendants, but some of them will cooperate to get combs behind bars, then why charge those people?

Yeah, because at the end of the day, and again, I always give this a disclaimer because TV often gets it wrong, but this is one where they get it right.

If you can go after the big fish, why are you looking at tadpoles?

Which takes us then to this trial, right?

So the trial is about to get underway.

Like, what happens next?

So what happens next is jury selection.

It's the process by which both the defense and the government or prosecutor have the opportunity to question prospective jurors about whether or not they're right for this case.

And I know oftentimes with cases like this, people say, well, how can you find a juror?

Like, everyone's heard about Diddy.

Everyone's heard about this case.

Everyone's heard about these allegations.

Everyone's going to be biased to some degree.

Well, the standard actually is, regardless of whether or not you've heard this information, can you put that information aside and listen and only judge based on the information that you have?

Now, is it still a difficult thing to do finding those people in the Southern District of New York?

That's going to be difficult.

So you find 12 and potentially, I would imagine you got to find at least four or five alternates because this is scheduled to be an eight-week long trial.

And if the trial does begin, because there's always 11th hour stuff that happens that could push it back, if the trial does begin with jury selection on May 5th and then starts on May 12th, which I think is very ambitious to find a jury in five days, don't forget, like

there's Memorial Day, there's the 4th of July.

You've got to ask people to miss out a lot of these potential dates and sit for this trial.

Makes it that much more difficult.

Well, and just last week, the judge rejected the attorney's request from Diddy for a two-month delay.

So it seems like for now, jury selection would be on May 5th.

Trial would start on May 12th.

And this trial is just going to be so in the spotlight, Brian.

So how are prosecutors going to position this?

How's the defense going to do this?

Like, you're a defense lawyer by trade.

Yeah.

So the government or the prosecutor is going to position this as the facts speak for themselves.

They're going to put up witnesses who say,

I was told to go pick up this person.

I was told to bring this person here.

Did you know that this person was a sex worker?

Yes, I did.

It was very clear from where I went.

I mean, even looking at Rodney Jones' lawsuit, where he alleges that he was told to go to strip clubs with a specific hat, that people knew that it was like a bad boy hat.

Oh, almost a signal, like the guy from the Diddy group is here.

Yeah, he's here.

I know I'm going to go to this party.

I'm going to get paid.

Like, I need to go.

Rodney Jones tells us about this recruiting process through his allegations.

Whether or not they're true, that's going to be up for the government to prove.

But that's how the government's going to work this out.

Then they're going to say, well, these people could not have consented because, again, as the headlines were, look at the baby oil.

Look at the GHB within the baby oil.

You cannot consent when you are intoxicated.

Look at how this...

traversed over state lines, making it a federal case because it affected interstate commerce.

Look at people being forced into this through fraud or coercion.

All of that is the government's position.

For the defense, they're taking the standard of,

well, everyone was asking for it.

Everyone was in on it.

The government are just very much prudes.

They like to have sex like a very prudish way.

Like a freak off, by its nature, is not illegal.

You can have people having big sex parties.

I think Diddy's lawyers characterize this as like private sexual activity between fully consenting adults.

What's the problem with that?

If everyone shows up to a sex party and we all say, hey, everyone's of age.

We all want to do drugs before this.

Is everyone okay with that?

We're good.

Then, yeah, whatever you do in the privacy of your home is not a crime.

And that's what the defense is arguing.

And that's not an argument that works when you have dozens of people saying otherwise.

There are like amended indictments in all this, right?

How have those kind of evolved?

Yeah.

So since the original indictment, there have been what we call superseding indictments.

And what superseding means is just like this one replaces or takes over the other one, right?

And so as those indictments have come up, it's evolved the case in the sense of first indictment or the indictment, sorry, only three charges, and we only believe to be one alleged victim and who we believe to be Cassie from the way that you can kind of like.

It's like she's not named, but all the details would match with her case.

Yeah, okay.

Like going again, going back to the arson, like arson in the indictment, arson in her civil lawsuit, it seems like the allegations.

And then as the superseding indictments came out, there were more allegations within the RICO or the racketeering conspiracy.

There was forced labor in there.

We went from one alleged victim to four alleged victims.

We went from a three-count indictment to a five-count indictment because now we have two sex trafficking charges and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution.

And so I would say the highway in the mind of the government, the highway towards a conviction is moving in the same direction at the same pace, but there are more lanes now.

It's kind of expanded.

Is it still moving forward with the same type of charges?

Racketeer and conspiracy, sex trafficking, transportation.

Yeah.

Is it still women and potentially men going to talk about freak offs?

Yeah.

But now instead of one, there are four, and instead of three counts, there are five.

How are you going to handle this on your podcast, Brian?

This is coming at us like a freight train, and usually these sort of true crime podcasts are like, hey, here's an episode every week or every month, and there's a beginning and an end.

Step one, ask my wife if I can be at ABC like 24-7 to cover this.

Step two is for the podcast.

So we have an episode and I think an episode just dropped now.

I believe it would be the fifth episode called Downfall.

And so we've had one episode come out every week on Tuesday, kind of following the case.

But when the trial starts, we're going to do two episodes a week to give you the updates.

What I love about ABC Audio.

Aside from the people and everything that they do, is that they facilitate my craziness.

And what we're doing is not only reporting about the case, but we're giving about like, oh, this person testified and this, and this is what happened, but we're also going to give you that analysis of,

remember when, so this person said this statement.

This is how it connects to the indictment.

This is how it connects to the civil lawsuit that came from here.

This is how it's going to come together.

This is how the defense is going to potentially cross-examine on this.

This is how it's going to like play into the, I want that, and ABC is doing a great job of this as well.

And I think they want it as well.

We want that after you listen to one of our episodes, you get to go to the water cooler at work and be like the greatest expert of this case.

You're going to know this as best, if not better than most, because you know better than anyone else.

We can't put cameras everywhere.

And so unfortunately, we just have to sometimes use our voice to tell the story to reach the most amount of people possible.

Which, again, there are lots of big trials this year.

I don't know if anything is going to really rival this for the sheer spectacle that it's about to create.

Like the jury has to decide whether Diddy's guilty or innocent.

But when we're just talking about the witness list and the people involved and the people in Diddy's orbit and like the sheer suffering that's being alleged by the people around him, it's just going to be so high stakes for everyone.

Brian Buckmeyer, host of Bad Rap, the case against Diddy.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

I know I made it because I'm here with you now.

So thank you for having me.

Now let's check in on the other big true crime stories of the week.

First up, the high-stakes re-sentencing hearing for the Menendez Brothers has been delayed after a dramatic day in court.

The Menendez Brothers attorney Mark Garragos faced off against LA County DA Nathan Hawkman, who's trying to keep the brothers behind bars.

A new hearing is now set for May 9th to determine whether the brothers' re-sentencing path should be factored into this newly completed parole board's risk assessment.

That assessment was conducted as part of a separate clemency path for the brothers.

This May 9th hearing will also determine if DA Hawkman and his team will be removed from that case.

Next up, Harvey Weinstein has been moved from Rikers Island Jail to a New York City hospital after a judge approved his request to remain there during his retrial on sexual assault charges.

Weinstein's lawyers argued in court papers that the sometimes freezing jail cell at Rikers was exacerbating Weinstein's health issues.

That judges set to hold a hearing to discuss the matter further.

Lastly, authorities say a 31-year-old New York City woman has died after a man posing as a plastic surgeon botched a procedure to remove her butt implants.

According to a criminal complaint, the man allegedly performed the operation, quote, without a license to do so and while not in a medical facility, end quote.

That man, Philippe Hoyos Ferranda, was arrested and charged with second-degree assault and unauthorized practice of profession.

He's currently being held at a correctional center in East Elmhurst, New York, according to custody reports.

No plea has been entered.

All right, that will do it for this week's episode of The Crime Scene.

So glad you're here with us.

The Crime Scene Weekly is a production of ABC Audio, produced by Nora Ritchie.

Our supervising producer is Susie Liu, mixing by Shane McKeon.

Special thanks to Lizzie Lessie, Tara Gimbal, Sasha Aslanian, and Emily Schutz.

Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming.

Laura Mayer is our executive producer.

I'm Brad Milke, and I'll see you next week at the crime scene.

In March 2017, police in Ketchikan, Alaska got a worried call.

And I haven't heard from them, so I'm getting worried.

It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia.

When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch.

Is it a suicide?

Is it a murder?

What is it?

From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska is out now.

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