Ben Sisario and Julia Jacobs
Sean Combs, the music mogul whose career has been upended by sexual assault lawsuits and a federal investigation, was arrested at a Manhattan hotel on Monday evening after a grand jury indicted him.
The indictment is sealed and the charges were not announced but Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said he believed he was being charged with racketeering and sex trafficking.
A statement from Mr. Combs’s legal team said they were disappointed with the decision to prosecute him and noted that he had been cooperative with the investigation and had “voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges.”
“Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man, and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children, and working to uplift the Black community,” the statement said. “He is an imperfect person but he is not a criminal.”
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement posted on social media late Monday that “we expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
Mr. Agnifilo said Mr. Combs had been arrested by officers with Homeland Security Investigations at about 8:30 p.m. at the hotel where he was staying, the Park Hyatt New York on 57th Street. It is expected he will be held overnight and then arraigned on Tuesday.
The arrest of Mr. Combs, 54, makes him the highest-profile figure in the music world to face criminal charges for sexual misconduct since R. Kelly, the R&B singer who, after trials in New York and Chicago, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for child sex crimes, sex trafficking and racketeering.
Mr. Combs, 54, who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, was a key figure in the global rise of hip-hop as a commercial force in the 1990s and 2000s, helping to make stars of rappers and R&B singers like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige. But he has been under intense public scrutiny since a former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, filed a lawsuit last November accusing him of years of sexual and physical abuse.
Mr. Combs settled the suit with Ms. Ventura — an R&B singer known as Cassie, who had been signed to Mr. Combs’s record label — in one day, and denied any wrongdoing. But legal pressure mounted over the next nine months, with the filing of five lawsuits by women alleging sexual assault and three other sexual misconduct suits, all of which Mr. Combs’s lawyers are fighting in court.
Mr. Combs’s legal team said in the statement that “these are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court.”
In March, federal agents raided Mr. Combs’s homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla., stopping him at a Miami-area airport and confiscating his electronic devices. The authorities made no announcements at the time, but a federal official said the inquiry was at least in part a human trafficking investigation. Federal prosecutors in New York had by that time interviewed a number of witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Combs, according to a person familiar with the interviews.
Mr. Combs has vehemently denied the accusations in the civil suits, calling them “sickening allegations” from people looking for “a quick payday.” His lawyers have sharply criticized how the raids — which involved agents from Homeland Security Investigations brandishing guns — were carried out, calling them a “gross overuse of military-level force.”
That tone of defiance shifted after CNN published hotel surveillance footage in May that showed Mr. Combs physically assaulting and kicking Ms. Ventura in 2016. Mr. Combs posted an apology video to social media in which he called his behavior “inexcusable” and said he had sought out professional help.
