Sean 'Diddy' Combs gets standing ovation from inmates after court victory, his lawyer says

NEW YORK (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs got a standing ovation from fellow inmates when the music mogul returned to jail after winning acquittals on potential life-in-prison charges, providing what his lawyer says might have been the best thing he could do for incarcerated Black men in America.

“They all said: ‘We never get to see anyone who beats the government,’” attorney Marc Agnifilo told The Associated Press in a weekend interview days after a jury acquitted Combs of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.

Combs, 55, remains jailed at a federal lockup in Brooklyn after his conviction Wednesday on prostitution-related charges, which could put him in prison for several more years. Any sentence will include credit for time already served. So far that's almost 10 months.

After federal agents raided Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area in March 2024, Agnifilo said he told the “I'll Be Missing You” singer to expect to be arrested on sex trafficking charges.

“I said: ‘Maybe it’s your fate in life to be the guy who wins,’” he recalled during a telephone interview briefly interrupted by a jailhouse call from Combs. “They need to see that someone can win. I think he took that to heart.”

The verdict in Manhattan federal court came after a veteran team of eight defense lawyers led by Agnifilo executed a trial strategy that resonated with jurors. Combs passed lawyers notes during effective cross-examinations of nearly three dozen witnesses over two months, including Combs' ex-employees.

The lawyers told jurors Combs was a jealous domestic abuser with a drug problem who participated in the swinger lifestyle through threesomes involving Combs, his girlfriends and another man.

“You may think to yourself, wow, he is a really bad boyfriend,” Combs’ lawyer Teny Geragos told jurors in her May opening statement. But that, she said, “is simply not sex trafficking.”

Agnifilo said the blunt talk was a “no brainer."

“The violence was so clear and up front and we knew the government was going to try to confuse the jury into thinking it was part of a sex trafficking effort. So we had to tell the jury what it was so they wouldn’t think it was something it wasn't,” he said.

Combs and his lawyers seemed deflated Tuesday when jurors said they were deadlocked on the racketeering count but had reached a verdict on sex trafficking and lesser prostitution-related charges. A judge ordered them back to deliberate Wednesday.

“No one knows what to think,” Agnifilo said. Then he slept on it.

“I wake up at three in the morning and I text Teny and say: ”We have to get a bail application together," he recalled. “It’s going to be a good verdict for us but I think he went down on the prostitution counts so let’s try to get him out.”

He said he “kind of whipped everybody into feeling better” after concluding jurors would have convicted him of racketeering if they had convicted him of sex trafficking because trafficking was an alleged component of racketeering.

Agnifilo met with Combs before court and Combs entered the courtroom rejuvenated. Smiling, the onetime Catholic schoolboy prayed with family. In less than an hour, the jury matched Agnifilo's prediction.

The seemingly chastened Combs mouthed “thank you” to jurors and smiled as family and supporters applauded. After he was escorted from the room, spectators cheered the defense team, a few chanting: “Dream Team! Dream Team!” Several lawyers, including Geragos, cried.

“This was a major victory for the defense and a major loss for the prosecution,” said Mitchell Epner, a lawyer who worked with Agnifilo as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey over two decades ago. He credited “a dream team of defense lawyers” against prosecutors who almost always win.

Agnifilo showcased what would become his trial strategy — belittling the charges and mocking the investigation that led to them — last September in arguing unsuccessfully for bail. The case against Combs was what happens when the “federal government comes into our bedrooms,” he said.

During an eight-week trial, Combs’ lawyers picked apart the prosecution case with mostly gentle but firm cross-examinations. Combs never testified and his lawyers called no witnesses.

Sarah Krissoff, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 2008 to 2021, said Combs' defense team “had a narrative from the beginning and they did all of it without putting on any witnesses. That’s masterful.”

Ironically, Agnifilo expanded the use of racketeering laws as a federal prosecutor on an organized crime task force in New Jersey two decades ago, using them often to indict street gangs in violence-torn cities.

“I knew the weak points in the statute,” he said. “The statute is very mechanical. If you know how the car works, you know where the fail points are.”

He said prosecutors had “dozens of fail points.”

“They didn’t have a conspiracy, they just didn't,” he said. “They basically had Combs' personal life and tried to build racketeering around personal assistants.”

Some personal assistants, even after viewing videos of Combs beating his longtime girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, had glowing things to say about Combs on cross examination.

For Combs, Agnifilo sees a long road ahead once he is freed and resumes work on personal demons, likely reentering a program for domestic batterers that he had just started before his arrest.

“He’s doing OK,” said Agnifilo, who speaks with him four or five times daily.

He said Combs genuinely desires improvement and “realizes he has flaws like everyone else that he never worked on.”

“He burns hot in all matters. I think what he has come to see is that he has these flaws and there’s no amount of fame and no amount of fortune” that can erase them," he said. “You can’t cover them up."

For Agnifilo, a final surprise awaited him after Combs' bail was rejected when a man collapsed into violent seizures at the elevators outside the courtroom.

“I'm like: ‘What the hell?'” recalled the lawyer, who has experience in treating seizures.

Agnifilo straddled him, pulling him onto his side and using a foot to prevent him from rolling backward while a law partner, Jacob Kaplan, put a backpack under the man's head and Agnifilo's daughter took his pulse.

“We made sure he didn't choke on vomit. It was crazy. I was worried about him,” he said.

The man was eventually taken away conscious by rescue workers, leaving Agnifilo to ponder a tumultuous day.

“It was like I was getting punked by God,” he said.

FILE - Music mogul and entrepreneur Sean "Diddy" Combs arrives at the Billboard Music Awards, May 15, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Defense attorney Marc Agnifilo, speaks outside Manhattan federal court after Sean "Diddy" Combs was denied bail after being convicted of prostitution-related offenses but acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Defense attorneys for Sean "Diddy" Combs, including from left, Brian Steel, Alexandra Shapiro, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Garagos, Anna Estevao, Nicole Westmoreland and Xavier Donaldson, far right, line up for a group photo outside Manhattan federal court after Sean "Diddy" Combs was denied bail after being convicted of prostitution-related offenses but acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

JERUSALEM (AP) — Over two dozen families from one of the few remaining Palestinian Bedouin villages in the central West Bank have packed up and fled their homes in recent days, saying harassment by Jewish settlers living in unauthorized outposts nearby has grown unbearable.

The village, Ras Ein el-Auja, was originally home to some 700 people from more than 100 families that have lived there for decades.

Twenty-six families already left on Thursday, scattering across the territory in search of safer ground, say rights groups. Several other families were packing up and leaving on Sunday.

“We have been suffering greatly from the settlers. Every day, they come on foot, or on tractors, or on horseback with their sheep into our homes. They enter people’s homes daily,” said Nayef Zayed, a resident, as neighbors took down sheep pens and tin structures.

Israel's military and the local settler governing body in the area did not respond to requests for comment.

Other residents pledged to stay put for the time being. That makes them some of the last Palestinians left in the area, said Sarit Michaeli, international director at B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group helping the residents.

She said that mounting settler violence has already emptied neighboring Palestinian hamlets in the dusty corridor of land stretching from Ramallah in the West to Jericho, along the Jordanian border, in the east.

The area is part of the 60% of the West Bank that has remained under full Israeli control under interim peace accords signed in the 1990s. Since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted in October 2023, over 2,000 Palestinians — at least 44 entire communities — have been expelled by settler violence in the area, B'Tselem says.

The turning point for the village came in December, when settlers put up an outpost about 50 meters (yards) from Palestinian homes on the northwestern flank of the village, said Michaeli and Sam Stein, an activist who has been living in the village for a month.

Settlers strolled easily through the village at night. Sheep and laundry went missing. International activists had to begin escorting children to school to keep them safe.

“The settlers attack us day and night, they have displaced us, they harass us in every way” said Eyad Isaac, another resident. “They intimidate the children and women.”

Michaeli said she’s witnessed settlers walk around the village at night, going into homes to film women and children and tampering with the village’s electricity.

The residents said they call the police frequently to ask for help — but it seldom arrives. Settlement expansion has been promoted by successive Israeli governments over nearly six decades. But Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has placed settler leaders in senior positions, has made it a top priority.

That growth has been accompanied by a spike in settler violence, much of it carried out by residents of unauthorized outposts. These outposts often begin with small farms or shepherding that are used to seize land, say Palestinians and anti-settlement activists. United Nations officials warn the trend is changing the map of the West Bank, entrenching Israeli presence in the area.

Some 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war. Their presence is viewed by most of the international community as illegal and a major obstacle to peace. The Palestinians seek all three areas for a future state.

For now, displaced families of the village have dispersed between other villages near the city of Jericho and near Hebron further south, said residents. Some sold their sheep and are trying to move into the cities.

Others are just dismantling their structures without knowing where to go.

"Where will we go? There’s nowhere. We’re scattered,” said Zayed, the resident, “People’s situation is bad. Very bad.”

An Israeli settler herds his flock near his outpost beside the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja in the West Bank, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

A Palestinian resident of Ras Ein al-Auja village, West Bank burns trash, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Palestinian children play in the West Bank village of Ras Ein al-Auja, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Palestinian residents of Ras Ein al-Auja village, West Bank pack up their belongings and prepare to leave their homes after deciding to flee mounting settler violence, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Palestinian residents of Ras Ein al-Auja village, West Bank pack up their belongings and prepare to leave their homes after deciding to flee mounting settler violence, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)