Society Loves a Headline, Not a Survivor

On July 2, Sean Diddy Combs was acquitted of two counts of sex trafficking, bringing cries for justice alongside a visible wave of support for ”Diddy”, regardless of the acts of violence named and described. For many survivors, including us, it was painful to watch. It was a stark reminder of the lack of care and healing offered by the legal system, and a reminder that “justice” is merely a nice idea. It was a sad reminder that our country does not care about gender-based violence, especially towards women of color, our sisters, mothers, and communities. Reframe Health and Justice (RHJ) is a collective of queer women and femmes of color who each bring our professional and lived experience to our work and understanding. We carry experiences of sex work, trafficking, and exploitation in the sex trade, intimate partner violence, and of being failed, as survivors, by the legal system. Professionally, we have advocated for policies that strengthen protections and justice prospects, while pushing for divestment from harmful, counterproductive policies. We have supported survivors in their experiences of healing and perpetrators in their experience of accountability. We are, without question, Cassie stans. We see her and the ways the criminal legal system failed her. The Combs case is a clear example of how our system is ill-equipped to address anyone who doesn’t take a plea, and how our collective conscience is only interested in the most sensational forms of violence.

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The Combs Criminal Case

From the beginning, the case against Combs was unique. In 2019, New York state passed the Adult Survivors Act (ASA), which addressed the statute of limitations** for reporting violence, a significant barrier to addressing sexual violence (called ‘sexual misconduct’ in the law). Previously, the statute of limitations for victims of sexual violence had been three years for adults, which means that you can only press charges for something that happened within the last three years. As you can imagine, for victims like Cassie who had sustained years of threats, violence, intimidation, and control, escaping a violent situation is often the only goal. For many, revisiting the trauma in great detail is incredibly difficult. We carry deep empathy for survivors, including Cassie, who are having to do so within a process that is out of one’s control, especially when up against perpetrators who have more resources than God. It is not difficult to understand how that experience and process can directly upend a person’s experience of safety and healing after incredible violence. 

In 2019, the ASA rewrote that law and extended the statute of limitations to twenty years for criminal charges, but only for sexual violence committed after the statute was passed. The ASA also created a “lookback window”, allowing people to file civil charges against their abusers for conduct that happened over the last twenty years. This window gave Cassie the opportunity to file a civil suit against Combs, as their relationship ended in 2018. Cassie filed her suit in November 2023 just before the window closed, and it has since been settled. The civil suit then prompted law enforcement to look into the actions named - ‘sexual misconduct’ in the legal system, which in Cassie’s case were incredible, unthinkable, cruel, and sometimes sadistic sexual violence. The Southern District of New York, which is part of the federal Department of Justice, took on the case and charged Combs with two counts of sex trafficking, one count of racketeering, and two counts of transporting a sex worker across state lines to work; a charge under the White Slave Traffic Act/Mann Act.

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So why did they charge Combs with trafficking? 

Even in looking at the charges, what we see are flaws in our legal system, which have only caused harm to victims of violence. At the outset, Cassie was facing an expired statute of limitations because she had taken time between ending the relationship and finding justice for Combs’ actions. Especially for survivors of long-term, complex, and layered violence, escape and survival are a priority, and the process takes time. Escaping from a perpetrator who has held immense control and committed significant acts of violence towards you and those around you with impunity takes years of work and support to establish a basic feeling of safety. Combs committed these acts for over ten years. Cassie went through 132 months of violence, coercion, sexual abuse, and control. Cassie was given 36 months to rip the band-aid off and be ready to face her abuser's well-paid legal team, who were ready to destroy her all over again.

As a federal prosecutor, the Southern District needed to charge a federal crime, and there isn’t a federal law against domestic violence. The Court opted to charge Combs with two counts of federal sex trafficking, hoping that this federal statute could encompass elements of domestic violence. In reality, there was no trafficking. There was incredible, sadistic, sustained, horrific physical/sexual and emotional violence, but it wasn’t trafficking.. There was no exploitation of a sex worker or the commercial exploitation of another person’s sexual labor. There was simply extreme intimate partner violence against a woman of color - something the system has never cared about and does not have the tools to address. To conflate the two does a staggering disservice and disrespect to both.

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What is trafficking, then? What happened here?

In an effort to shoehorn acts into something chargeable, the Southern District made the error that most news articles and Facebook posts still make - they thought if there is sex work involved, there must be trafficking. Trafficking in the sex trade is the exploitation of another person to engage in commercial sex through force, fraud, or coercion. In reading the many court documents that lay out information and details about the case, you will see intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. Still, you will not see a person forced to engage in commercial sex. Cassie was coerced, time and time again, to engage with commercial sex workers, but no one is alleging being forced to engage in commercial sex. Even when Combs filmed the encounters to revisit his violence later, as arsonists and serial killers often do, these were not commercial exploits. Human trafficking is, at its core, exploitation through violence that happens in an array of sectors, and the way the law is written and intended was simply not the scenario presented in this trial. And a jury is not asked to judge whether a person deserves punishment or accountability, but only whether their conduct falls within the elements described in the statute, as argued by the lawyers before them. 

To be clear, we are invested in a world beyond the carceral system.  The carceral system is ill-equipped to provide justice to survivors and is its perpetrator of harm. We advocate for accountability and restoration. In the aftermath of this case, there will be many who want to loosen legal restrictions and/or expand sex trafficking statutes to be easier to prove. As survivors of violence, including systemic violence, we do not wish to expand or lighten the boundaries of the system. Turning sex trafficking into a catch-all for violence denigrates violence against sex workers and survivors of intimate partner violence. By making sex trafficking a wider catch-all, we lose a central focus on the exploitation of labor and violence against people in the sex trades. Violence against sex workers, including intimate partner violence against sex workers, is an important issue that requires a deeper understanding and a commitment to end. Furthermore, making sex trafficking the sensationalist catch-all for violence confirms that we as Americans just don’t care about intimate partner violence. With the disproportionate attention towards sex trafficking, it is alluring to take all of the other issues we care about and force them under the larger umbrella, capitalizing on the public awareness that loves outrage and hates substantive information. We have seen how often this happens in practice and in legislation - zip tie on your car? Sex traffickers. Want to pass your bill? Add a line about sex trafficking. Want to mark someone as pure evil? Say they are in the Epstein files. When we do this, we don’t care about trafficking; we care about the sensationalism and social capital that “sex trafficking” has to offer. If law and sociopolitical discourse collapse sexual violence into trafficking, we give up on demanding that we care about sexual violence and intimate partner violence. We stop making the system work for victims of violence and instead force them into a wholly different experience that carries the stigma of sex trafficking: anti-sex work stigma, white supremacy, transphobia, anti-migrant stigma, and misogyny.

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How can we make the cultural shift necessary to care about gender-based violence?

We call for accountability for Combs’ actions. We hope that the settlements from his victims are paralyzing and end his reign of violence and abuse towards those around him. We hope that there are actors and levers of power around him with enough of a soul still intact to feel remorse and have enough integrity to hold him accountable every day. More than anything, we hope that his victims feel seen and heard, and have the resources and support to find safety, healing, joy, and love. We hope that Cassie is proud of coming forward and knows the gratitude that other survivors have for her bravery and strength. And we hope that this is a moment to reflect on the systems we need to build to find a better resolution. The two counts Combs was found guilty of were the Mann Act, initially passed as an anti-sex work law known as the White Slave Traffic Act, and used regularly against sex workers and people in mixed-race relationships. This is a resolution that only a lawyer could be satisfied with.

What is needed is a culture change around the way our society views and responds to interpersonal violence and gender-based violence, including emotional and financial forms of violence. Cultural change and collective healing can only come through collective answers and the transformation of our systems and culture. This case - nor any legal case - is about collective healing. It might be about the need coming from a survivor of violence, and we still don’t know how Cassie feels about it. But we can never point to a case and ask it to stand in for our pain, trauma, or cultural decisions. It’ll never be enough, and it’ll never change the collective sentiment. Collective change starts with survivor support. If Cassie had more money and power than Combs, she would have had more opportunity to leave. Community models of survivor support include Mutual aid funds for survivors, Housing First-model housing for survivors and their children, and Community Accountability support that acknowledges that, in this imperfect world, sometimes the police and legal system are required to be involved (or are). Ultimately, we need to move away from a reliance on the criminal legal system, which is itself a violent and exploitative system, when addressing violence and exploitation. On a policy level, this appears to involve defunding the police and allocating resources for care. On a personal level, this looks like resourcing yourself to deal with the emotional impacts of violence. Talk about violence, break the isolation, and believe survivors. 

‍This is all slow and hard work, and Reframe Health and Justice is here to help. We support organizations with a heart in world building, accelerating programming that supports survivors through alternative justice, and stewarding cultures of care via healing-centered harm reduction. Healing-centered harm reduction (HCHR) informs practical strategies and movements aimed at addressing harm perpetuated by an unjust society through increased accountability, community mobilization, and the redistribution of resources. It is a continuum between surviving and thriving, between harm reduction and healing. Join us on Wednesday, July 23rd, from 1:00-3:00 PM EST for a free webinar to learn more and shift away from violence. Check out our Services for more about our customized technical assistance, policy support, and community care stewardship.

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** A statute of limitations is the length of time that the state has to file charges against a person for their conduct. For example, in New York state, the statute of limitations on prostitution is one year. This means that if you trade sex for money on January 9, 2024, the state has only one year to charge you for that crime, and on January 10, 2025, you can no longer be charged with a crime.