The raids of Sean Combs’s homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area this week raised a barrage of questions about the nature of the inquiry, which a federal official said was at least in part a human trafficking investigation.
The government has said little about the basis for the search warrants, but the raids came after five civil lawsuits were filed against Mr. Combs in recent months that accused him of violating sex trafficking laws. In four of the suits women accused him of rape, and in one a man accused him of unwanted sexual contact. Mr. Combs, a hip-hop impresario known as Puff Daddy and Diddy who has been a high-profile figure in the music industry since the 1990s, has vehemently denied all of the allegations, calling them “sickening.” Officials have not publicly named him as a target of any prosecution.
As the civil suits against Mr. Combs illustrate, the term human or sex trafficking has a broader meaning in the law than perhaps the more popularly understood image of organized crime and forced prostitution rings.
“Traditionally you think of trafficking as a pimp who has a stable of victims and then is trafficking them in the traditional sense of the word, for money,” said Jim Cole, a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who oversaw human trafficking cases, “but there are lots of forms of trafficking.”
The breadth of trafficking investigations has grown with the recent uptick in sexual abuse claims and the use of the internet by traffickers. Homeland Security Investigations often leads such criminal investigations, although the department is most commonly associated with immigration and transnational issues.
In the current inquiry, federal investigators in New York have been interviewing potential witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Combs for several months, according to a person familiar with the interviews. Some of the questions involved the solicitation and transportation of prostitutes, as well as any payments or promises associated with sex acts, the person said.
The search warrants were executed this week by Homeland Security, which has carried out such investigations since it started operations in 2003. In 2020, the agency created the Center for Countering Human Trafficking in an effort to better coordinate their anti-trafficking work across the department.
With the #MeToo era and its aftermath giving rise to sexual abuse allegations against scores of powerful men, prosecutors have turned more frequently to federal sex trafficking laws to prosecute cases. Those laws allow for federal prosecution of sexual assault — typically a crime handled on the state level — and they have longer statutes of limitation than some abuse charges, allowing prosecutors to try to convict a person on allegations dating back years.
Homeland Security took a leading role in investigating the case that led to the first criminal punishment against the R&B artist R. Kelly. It came in a federal trial in Brooklyn that ended in his conviction on a count of racketeering and violations of an anti-sex-trafficking law known as the Mann Act. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on sex trafficking and other charges for conspiring to sexually exploit underage girls with Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in his jail cell as he awaited his own trial on similar charges.
And Keith Raniere received a 120-year prison sentence in the Nxivm sex cult scandal for sex trafficking and other crimes. He was convicted after the prosecution overcame an argument from his lawyers that his was not a legitimate sex trafficking case because the charges did not involve sexual exploitation for profit, but rather sex coerced through promises of increased status, among other claims.
“More recently prosecutors have been more aggressive with prosecuting trafficking cases to the fullest extent that they can,” said Elizabeth Geddes, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won the…
This article was originally published by a www.nytimes.com . Read the Original article here. .