Elizabeth Milner (2:55)

Then Garagos turned to the government's claims of coercion and abuse, not to deny them, but to defang them and to.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (3:03)

Answer to what the government had alleged in their opening statement. Tenny Garago says that the government has no place in his bedroom, he being Diddy. And that the defense admits Diddy did have a temper, especially when he drinks. And sometimes he would get so angry. And they admitted that he did lie to his girlfriends. He was kind of mean to his girlfriends. But. But he's not charged with being mean. He's again charged with RICO and sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Elizabeth Milner (3:32)

It was a deliberate strategy. Acknowledge the bad behavior, but draw a hard line between moral failings and a federal crime.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (3:41)

And so the defense says that the jury will see this possibly as a domestic violence case as opposed to a sex trafficking case, and even surprisingly, admitted that Diddy had a certain love for a certain product, and that product being baby oil, something that they've essentially talked about every single day of trial. But according to Tenney Garagos, it's not a federal crime to have this love for baby oil. And says that the victims were capable, strong women, that they were adult women. They were free to make their own choices. And those choices came with pros and cons.

Elizabeth Milner (4:15)

But with the infamous Intercontinental Hotel video on deck, the defense knew they had to get out ahead of what jurors were about to see.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (4:23)

They knew that a big piece of evidence was going to be introduced coming up, and that was going to be the really long played out version of a CNN video that we had seen nearly a year prior and that being at the intercontinental Hotel in 2016. But the defense really kind of had to drive home the point that Diddy is a flawed man. And they had to own up to that, because if they didn't own up to it and then the jurors would see this domestic violence at the hotel, then that could possibly ruin the case for the defense if they weren't forthcoming in their opening statements.

Elizabeth Milner (4:53)

But legal observers say this opening wasn't just a narrative pivot. It was a technical one. Garagos wasn't simply trying to humanize Sean Combs. She was trying to dismantle the government's entire legal framework piece by piece. Natalie Whittingham Burrell explains.

Officer Israel Flores (5:09)

They did the thing that almost all defense attorneys do. When you have bad facts that you can't overcome, you admit them and you minimize them.

Elizabeth Milner (5:17)

The defense concedes Combs may have been controlling, violent even, but they argue it was personal, not organized dysfunction, not conspiracy, private conduct, not enterprise level crime.

Officer Israel Flores (5:31)

They said that everything that the girlfriends, including Cassie, was doing was consensual. Right. And that it had nothing to do with. With Bad Boy. It was all about Diddy personally and his personal toxic relationships, but that it had nothing to do with the actual organization of Bad Boy records and therefore is not rico. Personal proclivities may make you, as an individual liable for things like rape, liable for things like the solicitation of prostitution, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's rico. You need that organization there in order to say that it's a corrupt organization committing multiple crimes. And so that's the distinction that they're making. It's a very technical legal distinction.

Elizabeth Milner (6:19)

And it's that distinction between personal wrongdoing and organizational corruption that will define the defense's case moving forward.

Officer Israel Flores (6:27)

What they're asking the jury to do, the defense, what they're going to be asking the jury to do throughout the trial is set aside his personal proclivities, set aside that you may not agree with his lifestyle and look and see whether or not these are individual failings or an organizational corruption.

Elizabeth Milner (6:50)

So the defense had drawn its battle lines. Admit what you must, minimize the rest and cast the crimes as personal failures, not federal ones. But now it was the government's turn to start proving otherwise. The prosecution's first witness wasn't a celebrity or a former insider. It was someone from the outside looking in. Someone who had no connection to Diddy's empire, but who saw firsthand the aftermath of one of its most disturbing alleged incidents.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (7:21)

So the first person who was called to the witness stand was Officer Israel Flores. Now he's a police officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, AKA the lapd. He had been working for LAPD for seven years, but he also was an army reservist. So I was kind of wondering, where is he going to go with this testimony? How does this relate to the case?

Elizabeth Milner (7:39)

His relevance was soon made clear.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (7:41)

He had talked about another job that he had previously had, and that was working security. Once he said security, I was like, oh, he must have worked for the Intercontinental Hotel in Los Angeles where we had all seen that video of Diddy brutally beating Cassie Ventura after she was trying to leave a freak off.

Elizabeth Milner (8:00)

Flores wasn't there to speculate. He was there to explain what the footage couldn't what happened just before the camera turned on.

Natalie Whittingham Burrell (8:09)

And we learned a lot more of kind of everything that happened after the video was cut off.

Elizabeth Milner (8:15)

According to Flores, a call came into the hotel's security office. A woman was in distress on the sixth floor. When he got there, the hallway was in disarray, flowers scattered on the floor, a dent in the wall, and Cassie Ventura, visibly shaken, standing outside the elevator bank. He testified that surveillance footage, although motion rigged and incomplete, captured combs dragging Cassie down the hallway. He documented the incident in a written report and took photos of the damage. His testimony may have seemed simple. A security call, a hotel hallway, a traumatized woman. But for prosecutors, it was crucial. It put jurors in the aftermath of alleged violence. It gave them a timestamp, a setting, and a witness with no personal stake in the outcome. But it also did something else. It gave jurors a physical scene, one that matched the emotional and graphic claims the government would lay out in the weeks ahead. While Flores didn't speak to racketeering or trafficking, he helped the government draw a through line from private violence to public consequence. And he offered something the defense couldn't easily explain away independent corroboration. Prosecutors would go on to call more personal, more graphic witnesses. But Flores presence on the stand sent a clear message early in the trial. This story doesn't just live in Cassie's words or Diddy's world. It lives in evidence.

Jesse Weber (9:43)

Listen to episodes of the Rise and Fall of Diddy. The federal trial, exclusively and ad free right now on Wondery. Start your free trial in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify.