The legal team of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, busy responding to criminal proceedings and countless sexual assault lawsuits, have now decided to go on the offensive, suing broadcaster NBC for defamation over a recent documentary called ‘Diddy: The Making Of A Bad Boy’ that covered the various scandals surrounding the musician.
In producing that documentary, which - among other things - accused Combs of murder and child abuse, NBC made “a conscious decision to line their own pockets at the expense of truth, decency and basic standards of professional journalism”, a new lawsuit claims.
The broadcaster exploited its own reputation as a credible news provider, and the “public’s insatiable appetite for content about Mr Combs”, to “line its pockets” by airing a salacious and defamatory programme, the legal filing adds.
Combs is currently in jail awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, of course, while the lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and other misconduct continue to pile up.
Public interest is high in the many allegations that have been made against Combs, who is accused of using his Bad Boy entertainment business to abuse and assault both men and women, and to cover up those crimes. It was with that in mind that NBC broadcast its documentary last month.
Combs’ lawsuit hones in on two of the biggest allegations made in the documentary, with the musician accused of murder and sexually abusing children. Those claims, it says, were based on mere hearsay and speculation, and were highly defamatory.
The programme “maliciously accuses Mr Combs of murdering the love of his life and mother to his children, Kimberly Porter”, the lawsuit states, despite the fact that the LA County Coroner’s Office has confirmed that her death in 2018 “was from natural causes and that there has never been any evidence of foul play”.
Building on that theme, the documentary “advances the false narrative that it cannot be a ‘coincidence’ that Ms Porter and others in Mr Combs’s orbit have died, in a malicious attempt to insinuate that Mr Combs murdered them”, the lawsuit continues.
But that narrative was then backed up by YouTube clips from a “known conspiracy theorist” and anonymous YouTube comments.
The legal filing then argues that the documentary’s allegations that Combs sexually abused minors were “based entirely on a false claim by an anonymous interviewee that he saw two girls follow Mr Combs into a room and his groundless speculation that, ‘for sure they were underage’”.
That story, the lawsuit insists, “has already been discredited by those adult women in their 30s … who have come forward to say that they were adults at the time”.
NBC broadcast these and other “falsehoods”, the lawsuit concludes, “without any regard for the truth and at the expense of Mr Combs’s right to a fair trial”.
Combs continues to deny all the allegations against him. The last time his lawyers pushed back it was against the prosecution in the criminal case, who they accused of violating attorney-client privilege by seizing notes relating to Combs’ defence during a sweep of the prison where he’s incarcerated.
But the judge overseeing the case has now formally rejected that claim. Although photos were taken of handwritten notes that had been made by Combs in prison, Judge Arun Subramanian concluded that prosecutors did not intentionally set out to violate attorney-client privilege.
He said that the notes that were photographed were not in a folder marked ‘legal’, as had been suggested. The photos were also screened by a filter team before being passed to the prosecution who assessed whether any privileged communications were contained in the images.
Plus, Subramanian wrote earlier this week, the prosecution “has already stated that it won't offer as evidence the notes, any fruits of the notes, or any evidence derived from any investigation it undertook based on the notes”.
All of which means Combs has not been prejudiced by the photos of the notes being seen by the prosecution.