Sean “Diddy” Combs, the music mogul at the center of a bombshell sex trafficking trial in New York, has been behind bars for nearly 300 days.
Combs, 55, was arrested on September 16, 2024 and faces charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. The music mogul’s weeks-long trial has centered around the testimony of women who described years of physical and sexual abuse by Combs.
Combs has spent the last nine months at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City. The prison, which has been described as “hell on Earth,” has held several high-profile individuals. Accused United Healthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione is being held there, and so was disgraced crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried until March.
Other detainees have included convicted sex trafficker R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein’s former associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Here’s what we know about what life is like for Combs behind bars:
Combs is being held in a low-security dorm-style unit
Combs is being held in a unit referred to as 4 North. He is there with about 20 other men in dormitory-style conditions, which means they aren’t held in cells, The New York Post reports. The floor is often used for high-profile inmates — like Bankman-Fried — or other people who need more protection.
4 North has fewer restrictions than most floors and more amenities, including an air hockey table, a gym and board games, the Post reports. The men also have access to televisions and a microwave, and can buy tablets in the commissary, according to The New York Times.
Tiffany Fong, an influencer who has interviewed Bankman-Fried about his time in the detention center, said the men are often woken up early on 4 North.
“There are head counts during the day and they typically wake up early,” she told the Post. “Typically, they are up at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. I think the lights go on and off early.”
The men being held on 4 North sleep on small twin beds with thin mattresses and no pillows, and shower in communal bathrooms with only thin curtains for privacy, according to the Post.
Combs met with his attorneys regularly in a conference room within the unit
Combs met with his attorneys regularly in a conference room off the common area of 4 North, according to the Times. There, he’s allowed to use a laptop without the internet from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. to sort through evidence.
The men in 4 North are also allowed to have 15-minute phone calls. However, prosecutors previously accused Combs of buying other men’s phone privileges to extend his time, making three-way calls to talk with people outside his approved list of contacts and discussing public statements that could swing potential jurors’ attitudes, the Times reports.
Combs’s attorneys maintain that his calls were never illicit.
The Metropolitan Detention Center has been described as ‘hell on Earth’
An attorney for Edwin Cordero, a man who was killed in a fight at the Metropolitan Detention Center, said his client was “another victim of…an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth,” in an interview with the Times last summer.
Around the same time, the Federal Bureau of Prisons settled a lawsuit compensating 1,600 inmates about $10 million for a January 2019 power outage that resulted in freezing cold and inhumane conditions, CNN reports.
The prison is also the only federal correction center in the city after the Bureau of Prisons shut down a Manhattan detention complex in 2021 — the same facility where Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in 2019.
Combs’s attorney Marc Agnifilo said in court last year that the detention center is “a very difficult place to be an inmate.”
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told CNN the agency “takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody.” The spokesperson added that the agency “review[s] safety protocols and implement[s] corrective actions when identified as necessary.”
The Independent has contacted Agnifilo for comment.
