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- [00:00]
Joy Reid
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Katie Fang
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Joy Reid
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Katie Fang
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Joy Reid
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Katie Fang
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Joy Reid
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Katie Fang
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Joy Reid
See for yourself@botoxcosmetic.com Instead, they pointed to hundreds of texts and social media posts in which Ventura and Jane often expressed enthusiasm for those sessions, despite women later saying on the stand that they felt pressured and manipulated into playing and participating in them. Hold on, we're seeing. I'm seeing us live. Okay. I do believe we are live. I'm seeing that is not what happened. I do believe we have Katie Fang, Katie Fang of the eponymous Katie Fang show here to try to help us break down and explain what is going on. Katie, do we have you? There you are. Katie, explain what happened here because I think a lot of us expected that Puffy was going down, that he was going to go down on the sex trafficking charges. We've had Terray on multiple times to walk us through this trial as it has been going on. Explain what this split verdict is.
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Katie Fang
Yeah, it's kind of a bizarre one, but it boiled down to credibility, Joy, which all trials do. I mean, look, let's be really clear. Trials are always a gamble on both sides, either in a criminal or a civil setting. Clearly, criminal cases, your liberty is at stake. So there's more on the line. But yesterday, Joy, when we heard that the jury could not reach a verdict on count one, that racketeering, that RICO count, but they had reached a verdict on the other four counts, it led a lot of us to think, well, you know, what if they can't reach a verdict on that RICO count, does that mean that they didn't believe the victims in this case, Cassie, Ventura and Jane, or does that mean that they did, but they just didn't believe that Diddy was running some huge criminal enterprise where he was using his business to be able to traffic into abuse and to drug deal and all this other stuff. Right. So this bizarre verdict of Joy, the one that kind of like makes you scratch your head, is this the two sex trafficking counts. The jury came back not guilty, which suggests that they didn't believe Cassie, Ventura or Jane when it came to their testimony under oath that they had been forced or coerced or pressured into being able to participate in the sex acts. And yet at the same time, they believe the prosecution's case that Diddy did this for the purposes of being able to transport those two women across state lines to have these freak offs with male prostitutes and escorts. I mean, make it make sense, Joy, because you either believe them or you don't. And in this instance, you kind of believe them, only halfway.
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Joy Reid
So what is it? So then, yeah, what is he been guilty of? If they're saying it's not a RICO case and the jury, to your point, believed them kind of, but didn't believe them, what was he found guilty of?
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Katie Fang
So the easiest way to explain it is the following. Every day across the United States and every corner of this country, some person is popped for a prostitution. Prostitution count, right? You know, pulling up on the street, kind of old school prostitution kind of scenario. What they're saying here is Diddy took that and put it on steroids, meaning he did that, but he went across state lines with these women to be able to have freak offs in other places. And that's pretty much what they found him on. It's pretty much a prostitution charge. But I don't want to minimize this, Joy. He has exposure up to 10 years in federal prison on each of these counts. He may have been in custody and his defense team says that the sentencing guidelines suggest that maybe he'd only be looking at a few years here. He's been in custody for 10 months and he gets credit, time served for that, Joy. But look, the Mann act, the actual federal statute that was violated in this case, it has a, a real purpose, right? And the idea is to prevent women, men, boys, girls, it's to prevent them from being transported across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Right? When was the first time we heard this? I brought it up this morning with our friend Don Lemon. We heard it one of the first times with Matt Gaetz, when those allegations came out against Matt Gates, that he was flying chicks around to the Bahamas on private planes to be able to have orgies and other type of stuff. So the Mann act did its job, but expect to see an appeal joy on those counts. And the reason being the defense always said that the prosecution was not using that particular count or that federal statute the way that it was supposed to be used.
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Joy Reid
Let me give you guys some background on the Man Act. As soon as you said that, I said, let me do a quick Google just to make sure that I had this correct. The first time that I heard about the man act, it was Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, one of the first black men to actually be able to be a prize fighter. Public meaning beat up white men in public without getting lynched. Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion, was convicted under the man act. And this was near the turn of the century. And it was because he was having sexual relations with white women and taking them across state lines. He was known as the Galveston Giant, a boxer who fought his way toward the first heavyweight title led by an African American. But in 1912, Jack Johnson became something else. A wanted man accused of violating the man act, which forbade transporting a woman across state lines for, quote, immoral purposes. Man's rel. Man's relationship with white women, his relationship with white women got him in trouble with the law in 2018. And this is going to be the irony of ironies. You will not. Well, maybe you won't be surprised by this. 72 years after his death, Donald Trump, then President of the United States, for the first time, posthumously pardoned Jack Johnson. The pardon took place during an Oval Office ceremony during which Trump referred to Johnson as an endurance, as enduring what many view as a racially motivated injustice. That is the pardon. In 2018, President Obama's administration had considered pardoning Johnson too, but declined to do so due to allegations that he physically abused women. So get this. Donald Trump pardoned Jack Johnson, the first heavyweight champion of the world. You know, he loved boxing and thought that was the best purpose for black men was sport. And pardon Jack Johnson for supposedly transporting white women across state lines under the Man Act. And now he has also hinted that he would actually pardon the diddler, that he would pardon the diddler for a sex trafficking allegation that he was taking women, not black, not white women, but taking women across state lines for the purposes of, quote, unquote, freak offs. Katie, you said that the two. The two convictions here, and I just Want for those of you who missed us at the top of this live, I want to reiterate, I'm reading the NPR headline sean Combs found guilty on two counts but acquitted of the most serious charges. A federal jury in Manhattan has found Sean Combs, the hip hop mogul, also known as Diddly or Puff Daddy or the Diddler, guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, but not guilty of one count of racketeering conspiracy and two counts of sex trafficking. So Katie, you were saying he could still face hard time for just these man act style prostitution cases. Talk about that for a moment because is, is that a common conviction in federal court?
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Katie Fang
It's, I mean it can be. And in this instance, you know, the fact that he's looking at test 10 years on each of those counts is a decent amount of exposure for anyone. I mean Joy, he's 55 years old and you know, I don't think he's going to get the, the max on it. But you never know. There is a process to go through for the sentencing. There's a pre sentence and investigation report that's conducted by probation and parole to determine whether or not, you know, he is appropriate for incarceration. He has been in custody since last year. He's been in custody for 10 months. The biggest question right now that's going to be tackled at 5pm Eastern today is whether or not he should be led out of custody while pending sentencing. His defense team says he's not a flight risk, he's not a danger to the community. The prosecution says that the defense is downplaying the importance and the seriousness and the gravity of the charges for which a jury found him guilty and is actually urging that he not be released. The defense is saying, look, he'll post a $1 million bond. It'll be co signed by his family members and he'll be surrendering his passport and limiting his travel to only certain states, New York, New York and Florida being two examples. I mean, the bond conditions that they're suggesting on the defense are not unreasonable. I would be surprised to see the judge actually not agree to let him out while he's pending sentencing.
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Joy Reid
Right. Because the thing is if you're Cassie or this person, Jane, he knows who you are, he probably knows where you are. And there have been other people, other hip hop artists, et cetera, who testified against him. And look, we're not going to go into the conspiracy theory realm here, but there, there is a lot of heat around Puffy and people who have met their demise who've been associated with him. People are afraid of him. People think of him as this sort of gangster. You know, he behaves in a sort of gangster manner. If you're Cassie, I'm not sure you feel perfectly safe with him out there. I don't know if that gets taken into consideration, the safety of the potential witnesses here.
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Katie Fang
Yeah, it always does. I mean, they're always going to be looking at safety to the community at large. I do know that Cassie's attorney is saying she is concerned, they are concerned about him being out at large. His defense team is saying he would never jeopardize the gift of the verdict that he just got and so he wouldn't do anything untoward. But you can't ever predict what people are going to do when they're out in custody pending sentencing. He's also, I still think, a flight risk, even though he turns in his passport. Joy. He has the financial means to go anywhere, frankly, at this point. So I would have a legitimate concern about whether or not he's a flight risk or not.
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Joy Reid
Yeah. And I'm looking in the chat and people are saying their audio is pretty low. So we will definitely try to get that audio up as much as we can. Look, we're, we're dealing with the limits of technology. Take it up with Google, not Google, with, with YouTube. So we're having a little bit of an audio challenge with Katie, but we'll just make sure that we get that audio as good as possible. For those of you who have missed the top of this, this is the Troy Reid show and I am here doing a co broadcast here with the Katie Fang show and the great eponymous Katie Fang, one of our fav. Favorite legal eagles. And so thank you so much for joining us. Just to get us to break this down so on, how does this case interact, if at all, with the civil actions that were filed against the diddler against Puffy by Cassie and others?
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Katie Fang
I'm going to try to see if I can fix some audio here. Standby for a second. I don't know if that helps. Did that help?
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Joy Reid
I think it. Look, it sounds good to me. I can hear it fine. So the chat, please keep chatting back to us. Let us know. There are lots of high Katies. There's lots of love for you in the chat right now, Katie. People are loving seeing you and loving seeing us together. It's like a reunion. It's like a family reunion. Me and, and, and, and my cousin Katie Fang here. So Katie. Yeah. Does this interact in any way with Those civil cases.
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Katie Fang
So the real civil case that kind of got this all kick started was Cassie Ventura's civil case. She was attempting to try to reach some type of agreement with Diddy before she sued him. No agreement was reached. She sued him, and then within 24 hours, he settled with her. But it's not only that civil case, which had really terrible allegations and horrific facts that everybody in the public got to read in that complaint. But remember, this jury also got entered into evidence. They were able to see that terrible video of Diddy beating up Cassie Ventura. And so a lot of people are wondering, did the defense do the incredible job of instructing this jury to separate their emotions when it came to seeing a video like that, which is clearly hard to watch, to see him battering Cassie Ventura in that way? And did the defense, were they able to basically convince this jury that what P. Diddy has are sexual proclivities that may not be some that you and I share, but that are specific and personal to him and that Cassie and Jane were voluntary participants in that? I think it actually does a disservice, though, to Cassie and Jane and their testimony, Joy, because as you and I have talked about on previous occasions, you can be in a relationship, professional, personal, intimate, and you can be the victim of abuse, and you can stay in that relationship for a variety of reasons. And a lot of times, victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse delay reporting for whatever reason, and it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. So again, I scratch my head on this verdict because it's like the jury believed that, yes, they were used for purposes of the freak offs, but know that they weren't coerced or trafficked in any way to be able to be used for those freak offs.
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Joy Reid
What was the makeup of the jury, do you know?
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Katie Fang
The jury was made up of 12 people. It was eight men and four women. There's going to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking on whether or not there were enough women on this jury, whether the racial makeup of this jury was something to be considered. I formally prosecuted these types of cases as a prosecutor in two different jurisdictions. These are some of the toughest cases to prosecute. One and two, oftentimes, when you have a victim who is not white, a lot of times you have to deal with a lot of the jurors biases going in and kind of looking. So remember, Diddy had this huge public Persona of being a bad boy that everybody saw the kind of, you know.
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Joy Reid
I mean, it's the name of his record. Label. Right. It's bad boy, Bad boys for life. Right. So, yeah, that was his reputation.
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Katie Fang
Exactly. And so you had somebody who built his brand publicly on that being a bad boy music, the lifestyle, the.
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Joy Reid
The.
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Katie Fang
The gun charges at clubs in New York. And so a lot of people on that jury, if you were picking them, you'd have to make sure that they were able to separate him from those kind of public perceptions. But the reality, too, remember, he's had contact with the criminal justice system before this. And so sometimes, though, people are going to look at the women in his life and say, well, they knew going in that this is the kind of lifestyle that he was going to offer. But a lot of people then would be discrediting or discounting the testimony we heard, Joy, which was they co. They were coerced to stay. Their professional futures were at risk. Their personal safety was at risk. It's just galling to me that we had other people testify as to the level of violence that P. Diddy showed towards people like Cassie Ventura, even just personal assistance. Right. And people are like, well, you know what? I guess it just wasn't enough. I also don't want to shrug off, though, that this is our judicial system. This is our jury trial system. You pick a jury of your peers, you go to trial, Somebody has to win, somebody has to lose.
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Joy Reid
Do we know what the racial makeup is of the jury? We know it was eight to eight men, four women, but do we know the racial makeup?
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Katie Fang
I'd have to double check on that because I was following it during jury selection, and I don't recall the exact racial makeup of what it ended up.
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Joy Reid
Yeah, but I think just the fact that it's more men than women. And look, the jury process is. And I've. You know, I've never gotten to serve under. I keep wanting to serve on juries, but for some reason, I keep getting rejected. And. But I have served on grand juries, and I can tell you there is a coercive effect, and the demographics do matter. I remember sitting on a grand jury, and the thing that shocked me was, regardless of the race of the people in the room, and they were mostly people of color, there was a tendency to believe the prosecution to just automatically buy the prosecution's theory and to automatically lean toward indict, indict, indict, indict, indict. They were like hanging jurors in there. And so that's one of the other things that surprises me, is that the prosecution, in my view, tends to go in with an advantage because Jurors are sort of trained to believe that the prosecution is the people, the prosecution is. Right. And the defense has, like, a higher burden. So when you have somebody get acquitted in a case with this much vulgar, frightening, violent, awful testimony, I mean, the testimony was so gross, I literally just consigned it to Terray to tell me what happened and summarize it for me. I didn't want to even watch it. I just would literally go to Culture Fries and see what Therese said or look on his TikTok. I'm like, I couldn't even bear to even listen to the stuff. But when you think about it for the defense, and you can tell me, as a former prosecutor, if I'm right about this, they had the higher burden because he looks like a villain in every single piece of this testimony, and. And yet they seem to have met it.
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Katie Fang
Yeah, look, I mean, money can buy you incredible defense teams. Right? We've seen that happen. We saw that happen all O.J. simpson. Right. I mean, we've seen people with money being able to buy incredible criminal defense teams. I would say this, Joy, the burden of proof is always on the prosecution in a criminal case. It's beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt, the defense, from day one took the following tack when it came to theme. They got up and told the jury, through jury selection, through opening statements, and all the way through closing arguments, that Sean Combs lived a lifestyle that was not conventional, that his tastes were not conventional. They were not kind of the type of sexual taste that most people ascribe to. But they made it clear that every person who participated did so consensually. But then when you say what you said, Joy, which is when you look at that level of violence and that level of kind of depravity in terms of the way that he was living his life, it's kind of a big leap for a juror to say, you know what, that all of that was 100% consensual, because we all know that that's not the case. And so if you're a survivor, if you're a victim and you're a survivor and you look at what's happened now, you're probably going to pump the brakes when it comes to reporting, which is very sad. And I also think we can't ignore the measure of celebrity that played into this. I think that you had jurors that knew that they were going into a celebrity case. And I think when you have a celebrity case, Joy, sometimes jurors kind of militate towards Erring on the side of being super, super cautious so as not to look like perhaps that they're swayed either way because of somebody's celebrity when they're in a case. So I think that that played a lot into how they reach their decision.
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Joy Reid
You know, I think about, you know, the MeToo movement, which you and I, but we covered together on. At our old haunt on msnbc, dc, and we did a lot of these cases. And you think about it, Katie. And there was a certain point where the momentum seemed to be on the side of women. Harvey Weinstein gets convicted. Bill Cosby gets convicted. You saw these civil actions against Russell Simmons. You could go on and on and on. All of these people seem to be being exposed. What was the guy from pbs? It was like, him. Matt Lauer at NBC. What was the guy's name at pbs? I'm gonna forget his name now. But you're talking about people who. People were shocked in some cases because they seem like, you know, the most sort of nerdy on air person are all getting accused. And then you saw Eugene Carroll do the first of these cases when New York rolled back the Prohibition. And, you know, they essentially said, you can bring these cases back to life, you know, after decades. And Eugene Carol goes out and beats Donald Trump in a civil action. He now owes her $86 million, not just for sexual abuse, but also for defamation. And then, you know, ruled that it was added money to it because he kept defaming her. And so it felt like there was a certain amount of momentum at a certain point. And then it started to feel like it rolled back the other way, the Weinstein verdict. They have to now do the trial again because some sort of errors, I guess, on the prosecution side. Bill Cosby got let out. That didn't end up being a victory for those 52 some odd women who accused him of decades of alleged sexual abuse and drugging. It feels like a big rollback. And now Charlie Rose was the person that we forgot, right? Charlie Rose was the other one. You're like, Charlie Rose was walking out naked in front of. In front of people who were like interns in his. What is happening? Charlie Rose. We've reached this point where it seems that it's gone way back the other way. And now we have a Justice Department that is, per Donald Trump's executive orders, rolling back federal enforcement of Title 9, rolling back any sort of federal review when it comes to sexual abuse of women and claiming they're defending women, but only by preventing trans women from playing sports. But when it comes to sexual abuse of women. When it comes to women having bodily autonomy, they're like, we're out of that business. There seems to be no federal protection, and now the Southern District of New York can't even successfully prosecute the diddler. Do you feel just as an attorney or in the full backlash when it came, when it comes to me, too?
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Katie Fang
Well, they always say the pendulum swings pretty far either way, right. Sometimes they say that once a pendulum has gone one way, then it's going to heavy swing back the other. I think that we have seen a backtracking from the MeToo era, but I don't think that it was done as a course correction in the right way. I think that we've seen people now say, we don't believe the women, which is wrong. I think that we should always. Okay, let me be very clear. We don't, quote, always believe the women.
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Joy Reid
Right.
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Katie Fang
We have to obviously be, you know, thoughtful, and we have to look at the facts and the evidence. And again, the burden is always going to be in the prosecution to prove these cases. But I do think we've seen things where, for example, the criminal cases maybe falter, but the civil cases prevail. I mean, that's a different burden of proof, but the facts and the evidence don't change. I think what's happening right now is you see the. You see the collateral damage from somebody like Donald Trump. You see somebody like Donald Trump who can say, you can grab him by the pussy and you'll be fine, right? And you see him become the President of the United States. And so the level of discourse being lowered has now become an acceptable bar for other Americans. Not for us, but for other Americans. And then I think you see, at the same time, when there's no accountability for somebody, then you start thinking, okay, well, then more and more things can be gotten away with. And I think what ends up happening is you start seeing people creating higher burdens than previously existed. So now it's even more difficult because you either have systemic barriers baked in now through an administration that wants to make sure that it's harder to protect civil rights, or they just don't even investigate violations of civil rights anymore. Or you have a climate or an atmosphere or an environment, Joy, where your jury pool is being picked out of that environment and that atmosphere of people. And if the general climate is one where tolerance is now so much higher for things that otherwise we would think would have been depraved in other times, when we see shit like we have down in Florida, with alligator Alcatraz, for example, and the official DHS account on X shows alligators wearing, you know, ice hats. When we see crazy stuff like that, then you kind of have to ask yourself, will the jury pool at large that I'm picking my jury out of have just thicker skin and a higher tolerance for stuff that they otherwise didn't have before? So again, I think that creates an artificial barrier or a higher burden that didn't exist before for people to believe, for people to look at victims and say, I understand you. And then it makes some jurors say, you know what, I don't have to come to a guilty verdict on that because she either wanted it or she, she asked for it or she stayed in it. I mean, those are the things though, that just historically we haven't been able to kind of bust that cycle of blame when it comes to victims of sexual assault.
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Joy Reid
Oh, absolutely. If we're going back to the, you know, they want to make America great again. If they want to go back to the 50s, almost no one prior to the 19, I would say 70s and even really going into the 80s, you know, and that was, it was just never believed. And so the reality is if we're going back to that era, but at the same time we have to balance it, as you said, because then you have the Carolyn Bryant situations where she literally just made up a lie about a 14 year old boy and Emmett Till winds up getting lynched. And lynchings, if you go back to the early 20th century, late 19th century, was just even a false allegation. You know, the, the, the, the burning of Tulsa was a allegation that an elevator man supposedly brushed up against a white woman in an elevator. And therefore we're now, you know, gangs of white men are going to burn Tulsa, Tulsa's black Wall street to the ground based on nothing. And so the reality is lynching and is the one extreme of this phenomenon where if you believe anything that any sort of affluent woman says about any person of color, you wind up with lynchings. On the other hand, you then had ironically, this shift as you get into the 20th century of believing no women at all and white women sort of losing that power to make those accusations, particularly when they were against white men, that they just weren't believed at all. If they made them against black men, sure. But if it's against a white man, they just don't believe it. But now we're in this weird kind of middle ground of that where you're right, there's this hardening of the hearts of Americans under Mag America. In this MAGA world, people don't even think twice about watching Latino women be tackled to the ground or snatched off the street in what we would normally say is a kidnapping. And people just brush it aside and say, well, you know, she shouldn't come here illegally. And so people literally are brushing aside like violence on camera against women because they don't like those particular women. And in this case, it definitely feels like saying, well, these women were in the hip hop world they asked for, this is what they wanted. It's a very weird place to be. And I'm sure for you, just as a legal analyst, it's a strange way to try. It's a strange thing to have to analyze because on the one hand, you do not want that lynching world back where you could just accuse any black man of anything and get them hung. But at the same time, you don't want women to be terrified to come forward because no one in the jury pool will believe them anyway. Because if they were trying to be an artist, trying to be a singer, trying to be a rapper, they're automatically disbelieved. Or trying to be an actress.
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Katie Fang
Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, remember the MeToo was the Harvey Weinstein jump off, right? And that was an ex of the Hollywood casting couch. And people were like, we've always known that it existed, but nobody. It was like the worst kept secret in Hollywood was the casting couch. And now finally there was accountability for somebody as big and as much of a king in Hollywood as Harvey Weinstein. Same thing happened with Bill Cosby, right? People that we think are untouchable because of their level of celebrity. I will say this particular trial was kind of interesting, Joy, because I don't know if people were following it as closely as they did for other things. I also.
- [27:16]
Joy Reid
It was too gross to follow it. Honestly, Katie, it was so gross. I couldn't. And I'm in the news. You and I were both in the news business. I couldn't follow it because it was so gross. And I think for a lot of people, they were just like, oh, I don't want to hear it. So you're right, I think. And also the people were getting tackled in the streets and kidnapped during the same time. So there's been so much chaos between the tariffs and Donald Trump unleashing these secret police in the streets of America and lying about Los Angeles and claiming it was on fire. So he had to send in the military, putting the marines on the streets of America, they're throwing so much bullshit every minute at Americans. I'm not sure anyone had the bandwidth to follow it. But you're absolutely right. Please continue your thought.
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Katie Fang
No, you know, because we live in an attention economy and in the attention economy we only have so much to go around. But you know, part of the reason that I think this case though has a bigger picture conversation to be had is because a lot of people are like, why are we talking about this case, etc. Etc. And I'm like, well, because one, it's a significant prosecution because he is somebody that's been in the public discourse for a long time, either music, tv, you know, film or whatever. But also, was this verdict now an indictment of a lifestyle? Was this verdict, you know, a pass for a lifestyle? Was this the, okay, if I have this type of public image, then it's okay that people who are in my sphere or people are in my world that they have to expect that this is going to be okay. I just don't understand. And maybe this is. The prosecution didn't do their job right. This was 34 witnesses, Joy. Some people in the chat suggesting that maybe this was an overcharged case. That's a great theory as well, going for rico. Should you have gone for rico? RICO is confusing. RICO is complex. RICO was, you know, Diddy was running a criminal enterprise like some mafioso, using his businesses to be able to further his criminal enterprise. Maybe it was an overcharge. Maybe you should have just kept it clean with just Cassie Ventura and no one else. But it wasn't just them, Joy. It was 34 witnesses. It was crime scene technicians, it was police officers, it was a security guard at the hotel stating that he was bribed by P. Diddy to get rid of that video showing him beating up Cassie Ventura. I mean, it's just one thing over another. The jurors had a gag order. They don't anymore. So it'll be interesting to see what they have to say to the media, assuming, argue window that they want to speak to the media. But you and I both know, hun, there's a pod coming, there's a book coming, there's something coming from some of these jurors and, and I'd be curious to see, you know, what their mentality was about this and their rationale behind why they came to what they did.
- [29:54]
Joy Reid
Well, we would love for you to reach out to us. Any jurors that were on that case. If you want to talk to us, send, drop us an email. You can email us at info at the joy re show.com we want to hear from you. If you're a juror and you want to talk about this case on this show, you are welcome to we are here your story. It does kind of matter because it does potentially cause future victims to think twice about coming forward. If with this set of facts, Cassie Ventura and Jane Doe could not get justice. If I'm just a regular person accusing a regular person, in my mind, I'm thinking twice. Right. Particularly now that the Justice Department is in the hands of someone like Pam Bondi who won't even release Epstein files. Right. And who's hesitating on giving full truth to to the American people about what Jeffrey Epstein is doing. What's the hesitation there? It seems that there is this protection for lascivious men and it comes from the top, particularly since you've got the grab them by the P word president in the White House. Literally the president of the United States has been accused not just by Eugene Carroll. And let us just be clear if you don't remember, Donald Trump said in 2006 in that video on tape that because he's a celebrity, he can grab women by their private parties parts. That's literally what he was accused by E. Jean Carol of doing. He literally. Please recall the case against Donald Trump that Eugene Carroll brought in civil court was that he went into a dressing room with her at Bergdorf Goodman's and literally grabbed her by the P word. That is what she accused him of, of digitally raping her, meaning raping her with his hands. That's what he then bragged years later. That was in the 90s. Then he bragged years later that he could do that. He was then accused by nearly two dozen other women of grabbing them on planes. Of grabbing them when a one magazine writer was doing an interview with him while Melania Trump was in the next room with their baby. He was accused by Stormy Daniels of not forcing her. She said she wasn't forced, but she felt pressured to have sexual relations with. And then he paid her off. So we have a lascivious man at the top. And of course, he denies all those allegations. I'm required to say that he denies all of those allegations, but he also denied he never met Eugene Carroll and then confused her for one of his ex wives when he saw a picture of her because he thought that was Tiffany's mom, but that that was E. Jean Carroll. So there's all of this sort of lasciviousness at the very top of our society with that guy in the White House and with that lady in the Justice Department who's like Epstein fils. Never heard of him, ain't releasing them. Maybe his, maybe the President's in him. I don't know if I would believe, Katie Fang, that I could get justice a woman today in the federal government.
- [32:42]
Katie Fang
No. And like I said, it's setting the tone, right? So the fish rots from the head down. And if the setting of the tone is this again, this climate or this environment that's being created where our tolerance level for certain levels of depravity has now been increased or it's, it's, it's gone higher, then maybe it makes it harder for the prosecution to be able to prove some of these cases. The prosecution will always carry the burden. That is exactly how our system was built. The defense has zero obligation to put on a case. In this instance, defense did not put on a case. So what you had was the evidence presented by the prosecution. You had effective cross examination from a very good defense team on behalf of P. Diddy. And then in the end, the jury, after six plus weeks of a jury trial, came to a very quick verdict that was a very fast one. What happens in these types of cases is no matter how objective you are instructed to be, when you go into this case, you go in with a pre existing mindset about this person's guilt or innocence and you do.
- [33:38]
Joy Reid
And just for. Go ahead, please continue.
- [33:40]
Katie Fang
No, I was just going to very quickly end by saying you go in with almost like a confirmation bias and then you start looking at the evidence through the lens of your confirmation bias. And so if you go in thinking he was guilty of either all or some, you start looking at the evidence and it kind of goes into your brain and kind of says, oh yeah, you're right about that, you're right about that. Or if you go in thinking he's not guilty, you go in and again, you're applying that evidence in your brain to justify your position. It is human nature. Which is why of all of the parts of the jury trial process, the least sexy is there are two things. Jury selection and opening statements. But Joy, those are the two most important parts of a jury trial. Because if you don't pick the right jury and you do not set the right theme to your case in your opening statements, you will lose your jury already. And so again, everything is set, the table is set from the very beginning of a jury trial. And, and I always say that the federal government is the biggest law firm in the world. It's the most powerful, but they don't always win. But I will say those two counts, they still have exposure. So don't count out Diddy getting a decent amount of federal prison time at the very least.
- [34:50]
Joy Reid
Yeah.
- [34:51]
Katie Fang
Those two counts.
- [34:52]
Joy Reid
Let me ask you very quickly before we wrap up here, the Southern District of New York, they call themselves the sovereign district. It's sort of the legendary district that most people really know about when it comes to the federal property prosecution in the world of the Department of Justice, is it the same SDNY as it was when. Because we know that he and Emil Bovet, who, by the way, was one of his lawyers in the failed attempt to not be convicted in the New York case, the hush money case. And just y' all, please understand, Donald Trump's lawyers from the hush money case that Katie and I both covered in New York City, the lawyers who failed him in that case now have DOJ jobs. The lawyers, that team of lawyers is now your Justice Department. They're part of your Justice Department now, including Emil Beauvais, who was like quickly firing people, as has Pam Bondi been firing people who worked on any case related to Donald Trump stealing classified documents. Any case related to January 6th prosecutions. They're gutting the Department of Justice of those lawyers because Donald Trump is mad at them for trying to hold him accountable for his crimes. Katie, is the Southern District of New York the same caliber as the SDNY was before Emil, Beau and Donald Trump and all of his friends got there?
- [36:09]
Katie Fang
No, because a lot of these line prosecutors are demoralized or they know that their loyalty is a test of purity test every day. And that's not how you're supposed to be a prosecutor. You're not supposed to be beholden to somebody as a prosecutor. They're still talented lawyers that are working in these offices, Joy. And I don't want to discredit them or discount their service.
- [36:31]
Joy Reid
Sure.
- [36:32]
Katie Fang
However, when again, the fish rots from the head down. If AG Pam Bondi is sending out memos threatening you with disciplinary action all the way to termination, if you don't do what they say that you need to be doing. As we've seen through the Emil Bovey, Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi times, how can you possibly think that you're doing your job as a federal prosecutor? It's the most important job that you can have as a prosecutor. You are the person that's supposed to be wielding that, that power so, so carefully because you can put people in jail for the rest of their lives. But if you're doing it in a time where lawlessness is now the norm, then all bets are off.
- [37:12]
Joy Reid
I want to read you guys a headline from the Associated Press. This is a headline from June 27, 2025. This just happened. The Justice Department on Friday fired at least three prosecutors involved in US Capitol riot criminal cases. The latest moves by the Trump administration targeting attorneys connected to the massive prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, according to two people familiar with the matter. Those dismissed, including, include two attorneys who worked as supervisors overseeing the Jan. 6 prosecutions in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, as well as a line attorney who prosecuted cases stemming from the Capitol attack. People said they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. The A letter that was received by one of the prosecutors was signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi herself. The letter did not provide a reason for their removal, effective immediately, citing only Article 2 of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States, according to a copy seen by the Associated Press. The bottom line is, and I, I am going to take this upon myself to say and not put it on. Katie, this is not the same SDNY you guys all love. Mr. Weissman, who appears frequently on MSNBC. He came from the SDNY, I believe Glenn Kirschner came from the SDNY, like the SDNY has produced prosecutors who you guys enjoy watching on cable news. These are brilliant prosecutors, but they're also the prosecutors who in some cases prosecuted cases related to Donald Trump and they prosecuted cases related to what Jack Smith was trying to do as a special prosecutor. And Donald Trump is mad at them and his former attorneys who lost in the case of the hush money that was paid to Stormy Daniels to cover up her affair. Her one nighter with Donald Trump, which he feared in combination with the grab him by the P word statement that he said on camera. Those things combined the Trump campaign feared would cost him the election against Hillary Clinton. And so, and so that combination was seen as lethal. So he paid Stormy Daniels off. He went to trial for cooking the books on that. The failed lawyers in that case, Todd Blanche and Emil Bovet, have been, have been rewarded despite their failure with Department of Justice jobs. And Pam Bondi, who was essentially his spokesperson while she was supposed to be attorney General of Florida, spent all her time on Fox. She's now Attorney General of the United States. And they are gutting the Department of Justice and gutting sdny. And that is the diminished SDNY that attempted to prosecute Diddy, the diddler who Donald Trump says maybe he'll pull A Jack Johnson and pardon him. Katie Fang, I appreciate you. Any final thoughts on this before we let you go?
- [39:47]
Katie Fang
I mean, I just want to underscore this is the system. This is how it works. There are injustices baked into the system. I think I don't have to tell you and your viewers. I am curious to see if any of the jurors will speak up about what this experience was for them and what kind of led them to decide what they did. But as a general opinion, I'm disappointed with this verdict. I thought that the objective evidence militated towards a guilty verdict on all counts, including the RICO count, by the way. And I think the evidence was presented by the prosecution, and that's not with me, with any type of slant or bias towards the prosecution. It just felt like that was what was there. So I'm disappointed with this verdict.
- [40:26]
Joy Reid
I think a lot of people are disappointed. But we are living in Diddler land. We are living in Diddler America. Mag America and Diddler America. Same place, y' all. This is a whole new world, and it's a whole new world for women. Watch your backs out there. Katie Fang, my friend, my sister. Thank you as always. Thank you. And I want to thank you all for jumping on this live. We jumped on sort of spontaneously as soon as we saw this verdict come through because we figured we might as well give you guys some bonus content because this is breaking news that is happening as we speak. And we want you guys to know that you can count on the Joy Reid show for that kind of breaking news. When bad things happen, you can feel free to come right back here to this YouTube channel. We appreciate your support. I want to thank everybody that's been in the chat. Lots and lots of folks on the chat right now. Lots of good points being made about how difficult it is to prove rico. One person here. Let me see. Who is this? This is Ori. Ivo says Diddy will get everything he wants in jail. He loves jail. I don't know that he loves jail. No one loves jail. Let's be clear about that. We have here. It says here, felon 45. This is Le Blount says felon 45 is going to pardon Diddy because I'll bet Diddy got something on him for back in the day. We don't know. I cannot prove. Do not know if Donald Trump partook in the freak offs or hung out in the freaky deakies that were going on. But we do know that the diddler, that Puffy was a mar A lago partier he did party there at Mar a Lago. Lots and lots of hip hop related people did party at Mar a Lago with Donald Trump. I need to get Luke Luther Campbell to come on here because I spoke to Luke, interviewed him back in 2015 when Donald Trump first announced for president and he talked about the fact that Donald Trump used to allow a lot of hip hop artists and rappers to party at Mar a Lago because he was seen as sort of a Robin Hood at that time because in that Tony Palm beach neighborhood, they didn't really like having Jews and blacks around at the other clubs in the neighborhood. Donald Trump opened his up and let hip hop artists, black people, athletes, Jewish folks hang out and party with him. But I can tell you that Luke told me that at some point gun parties were too much for him. And if it's too much for Luke, that's a scary party. So I don't know what the relationship was beyond a. You know, you could see them in pictures together. The Diddler and Donald. The Diddler and the Donalder. But we don't know if there is any reason why he might want to pardon him. Who knows? But he has said that he may think about pardoning him. We'll go forward and see how that works out. We're also waiting to see if Pambani is going to release the Epstein files. I think she should do that. The American people deserve to know what's been going on, who else has been diddling in addition to the Diddler. And we also are going to try to get Terray back on. We weren't able to get him today because he is living his life apparently today, but we will, I promise you, get him back on. Because I want to know if somehow Puffy is able to not get sentenced to 20 years in prison, what is his future and how does hip hop deal with him because he is such an embedded part of hip hop culture. I believe for the, for the detriment of hip hop, I don't think he contributed in a positive way to hip hop, but he's still a part of it. And what does that do to hip hop culture and what does this whole storyline about him and Russell Simmons and all the other allegations do to that? Those are big questions. We'll be covering them on the Joy Reid Show. We want to thank you all for jumping on this live and if there's any other excitement or any other news that we feel you need to know, we will jump back on and go live again. Thank you all. Please be sure to like and share. Make sure that no one has ever misses a moment of the Joy Reid Show. So please, like this channel, consider becoming a TJRS member. We are planning our first members only, TJRS and readers also who are people who are paid subscribers. Over at Substack, we're going to do a live just for you guys. So that is being planned right now. So consider joining up. It's not super expensive, but we can always subscribe for free. Free. Free on this and also on the substack, which is called Joann reed.com thank you all for liking subscribing and sharing. We appreciate y' all. See you on the next Joy Read show and also we'll see you tonight. We'll see you tonight at 7pm for our proper Joy Reid show, regularly scheduled Joy Re show tonight at 7pm Eastern Standard Time. See you then. Bye bye.