The judge in the federal sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs threatened to remove the music mogul from court for looking and nodding at the jury during testimony on June 5th.
During a lunch break after the jury left the room on Thursday, Judge Arun Subramanian said that he saw Combs looking at the jury and “nodding vigorously” during the cross-examination of Bryana Bongolan, a former graphic designer for Combs and a longtime friend of Combs’s former girlfriend Cassie Ventura. The judge warned Combs’s lawyers that if he saw it again, it “could result in the exclusion of your client from the courtroom”.
Earlier on Thursday, Bongolan resumed the testimony she began on Wednesday. Bongolan previously testified about her friendship with Ventura and described an alleged incident from 2016 in which she says that Combs dangled her from the balcony of Ventura’s 17th-floor apartment in Los Angeles for 10 to 15 seconds, before throwing her on to some balcony furniture. She testified that the incident left her bruised and emotionally scarred and that she experiences nightmares and paranoia. During cross-examination, Combs’s lawyers challenged Bongolan’s credibility, citing inconsistencies between her current testimony and prior statements she gave regarding the alleged balcony incident.