NEW YORK (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs was not treated differently because of his race by prosecutors who brought racketeering and sex trafficking charges against him, a judge ruled Friday as he rejected a request to dismiss some charges three days before opening statements in the hip-hop mogul's trial.
Judge Arun Subramanian said Combs had shown no evidence of discriminatory effect or intent based on his race, when his lawyers made their arguments in Manhattan federal court in February. In a separate written opinion, the judge also refused to suppress evidence in the case.
The lawyers had written that the prosecution was unprecedented because, “most disturbingly, no white person has ever been the target of a remotely similar prosecution.”
The judge agreed with arguments by prosecutors that the extent of criminal conduct by Combs from 2004 to 2024 — when he was alleged to have overseen a racketeering enterprise that enabled him to sexually abuse women — was enough to separate the case against him from other prosecutions.
“It's the severity of what Combs allegedly did — not his race — that mattered,” the judge wrote.
Subramanian noted that lawyers for Combs had alleged that the government sought to humiliate him through its news releases, the way search warrants were executed at his home, the refusal to let him surrender and alleged leaks to the media.
“However, Combs doesn’t point to any evidence that racial bias played a role in the Government’s actions, that the prosecution team was responsible for any leaks to the press, or that the way Combs’s homes were searched bespeaks a discriminatory purpose,” the judge wrote.
He added that the government's press releases and refusal to allow Combs to self-surrender were in keeping with how it has handled cases with defendants of other races.
The ruling came as opening statements were scheduled to occur Monday immediately after the final stage of jury selection, which defense lawyers say will take only a matter of minutes.
Prosecutors allege that Combs, 55, used his fame and power at the top of the hip-hop world to sexually abuse women from 2004 to 2024. He pleaded not guilty after his September arrest and has been held without bail at a Brooklyn federal lockup.
At a hearing Friday, Subramanian cancelled plans to finish picking the jury for the trial, saying he was worried that some jurors might get “cold feet” and back out of the case by Monday if they had the weekend to think about it.
One juror who sent an email to the court's jury department on Thursday night expressing concern about her “well-being” was dismissed from the panel of 45 jurors, from which 12 jurors and six alternates will be chosen on Monday.
Combs was in the Manhattan courtroom on Friday, but jurors weren’t required to be there. The trial is projected to last two months.
Would-be jurors were asked questions earlier in the week to help the judge and lawyers determine if they could be fair and impartial. And they were also questioned to ensure they could decide the case on the facts — even after seeing explicit videos of sexual activity that some might find disturbing.
If Combs is convicted on all charges — which include racketeering, kidnapping, arson, bribery and sex trafficking — he would face a mandatory 15 years in prison and could remain behind bars for life.
An indictment includes descriptions of “Freak Offs,” drugged-up orgies in which women were forced to have sex with male sex workers while Combs filmed them.
The charges against him also portray Combs as abusive to his victims, sometimes choking, hitting, kicking and dragging them, often by the hair. Once, the indictment alleges, he even dangled someone from a balcony.
His lawyers say prosecutors are trying to criminalize sexual activity between consenting adults. They concede that Combs had abused various substances but say he has since undergone treatment.
A centerpiece of the evidence against him are recordings of Combs beating a longtime girlfriend in a Los Angeles hotel hallway in 2016.
After a video of the encounter aired on CNN last year, Combs apologized, saying, “I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”
Numerous prospective jurors told the judge they'd seen the video and some were deemed too affected by it to be impartial.
Sean 'Diddy' Combs, far left, looks on from the defense table with his attorneys, as a prospective juror, far right, answers questions posed by Judge Arun Subramanian, center, at Manhattan federal court, Monday, May 5, 2025, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
