“Domestic Violence is THE issue.” That sentence summarized Sean “Diddy” Combs’ argument in his recent trial.
Sure, he’d been violent towards his longtime girlfriend Cassie Ventura. But he wasn’t a sex trafficker. He hadn’t used force, fraud, or coercion—as the trafficking charge against him claimed—to get Cassie or the pseudonymous Jane Doe to have sex with escorts hundreds of times.
That was the case Combs’ attorneys made repeatedly, including during the trial’s closing argument. It worked: Diddy was acquitted on two counts of sex trafficking, while being found guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. His sentencing hearing is expected to be held on Oct. 3. His lawyer's are arguing he should get no more than 14 months. He wasn't completely exonerated, but that one sentence may end up saving him years of jail time.
Part of that sentence’s effectiveness is not what it says, but who said it: Cassie. She used the phrase in an Instagram caption she made when the video of Diddy beating her at Los Angeles’ InterContinental Hotel became public.
Diddy’s legal team used the sentence to bring some things together, and to separate them from others. “Domestic abuse” is conflated with overt physical violence, like what the world saw in the InterContinental Hotel video. That version of domestic violence, in turn, is separated from using not-overtly-violent means of control, like coercion, in order to get people around you to do things like have sex with people they don’t want to.
The problem is, none of this is true.
Diddy’s lawyers admit he was guilty of domestic abuse. That’s not what he was charged with, though: federal domestic abuse crimes have a five-year statute of limitations, so anything he may have done in the course of his relationship with Cassie, which ended 2018, wouldn’t be eligible. But the majority of domestic abuse, and the abuse that Diddy engaged in—if the testimony of Cassie and others in the trial is to be believed—is not limited to individual violent incidents. If you believe their testimony, Diddy engaged in an ongoing pattern of behavior, of which violence was only one part, specifically to control the behavior of his partner.
That pattern has a name: Coercive control. But the jurors in Diddy’s case weren’t allowed to hear it. Judge Arun Subramanian decided before the trial started that the name might be confusing to jurors, since “coercion” is a term that has a specific legal meaning, and was part of some of the charges. An expert witness was allowed to discuss aspects of coercive control in her testimony, but without a name to hang the concept on. Had it been allowed, the dynamics of the case may have been different.
“Coercive control” is a term first used by sociologist Evan Stark in his 2007 book of the same name. It’s when a perpetrator—usually, though not exclusively, a man—engages in an ongoing pattern of behavior towards a victim—usually, though not exclusively, a woman—with the intention of dominating them. (For this reason, and for clarity’s sake, I will use male pronouns for perpetrators and female pronouns for victims throughout, with the recognition that anyone can be a perpetrator or victim of coercive control).
Author and professor Lisa A Fontes, Ph.D. serves as an expert witness in legal cases of sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse, and coercive control. She broke down what coercive control consists of.
“Its tactics can include intimidation, micromanagement of everyday life, monitoring, mind control, and sexual, physical, verbal and financial abuse,” she wrote to Complex in an email. “Not all of these are present in every case, but at least two are.”
Fontes’ answer reads like a checklist of what Diddy was accused of. If testimony from multiple witnesses is credible, it applies not only to his relationships with Cassie and Jane Doe, but to his relationships with many people around him. We’ve already mentioned the sexual abuse, which was at the heart of the case—both women claim they were coerced (and in Jane’s case, also defrauded and tricked into), repeatedly engaging in days-long, drug-fueled, sleepless sessions of sex with escorts while Diddy watched and often filmed.
To take just a more few examples:
- Intimidation: This can be seen most clearly in Diddy allegedly having Kid Cudi’s car blown up in order to warn him and Cassie that she has no escape. Also, Diddy repeatedly threatened to make Cassie’s sex tapes public. That last example is something his own attorneys admit to, though they add the caveat that he would never actually have done it.
- Micromanagement of everyday life: This applies to Diddy’s “freak offs,” in which, according to trial testimony, he directed outfits, the order of events, and when and in what quantities his partner should do drugs. But it also applies, per the testimony of Cassie, to such things as how much time she was allowed to spend in the bathroom; which events she was allowed to attend and how she could act while she was there; and more.
- Monitoring: According to the testimony of his longtime employee “Mia,” Diddy put a tracking device on Cassie’s car so he would always know where she was. He would also keep track of her when she wasn’t in his presence by having his employees spy on her.
- Financial abuse: Cassie and Jane both testified about Diddy using finances to keep them under control. In Jane’s case, it was by paying rent on a house for her and her son—where he didn’t live—and then, she testified, constantly threatening to take away what he referred to as “our” house if Jane didn’t do what he wanted. With Cassie, per her testimony, it was not only having control over her professional life and her housing, but also taking away her car and phone as punishment, and even demanding tens of thousands of dollars from her parents for what he viewed as Cassie’s misbehavior.
Coercive control is done by the perpetrator with the intent of breaking down the victim’s ability to make decisions. All of the perpetrator’s behavior, all of the countless things he does in the categories Dr. Fontes lists, feels like one continual pattern, rather than a series of individual attacks. This leads the woman to feel like she is, essentially, a hostage. Some of the earliest work that led to Stark’s theory of coercive control came from noticing the similarity between prisoners of war in Korea and women who were victims of abuse.
This dynamic—of the woman feeling like she’s trapped—leads directly into the often-asked question of why she stays. As Stark explains, underlying that question is the assumption that there’s “space between abusive incidents” to make a decision to leave. In coercive control, the incidents are unrelenting. If it’s not physical violence, it’s financial abuse. If not that, it’s monitoring or micromanagement.
Life becomes about keeping the abuser happy. With Combs, if he wasn’t obeyed, there was the underlying threat of violence. Inciting incidents for a beating of Cassie, she testified, were anything from leaving a “freak off” before Combs determined it was over (they would frequently last multiple days), to shrugging in front of his friends, to taking too long in the bathroom.
“If you’re afraid of someone, you will do your best to make them happy so they won’t attack you,” Fontes said. “It’s called ‘pleasing and appeasing’ or ‘fawning.’ Combs’ victims knew what they had to do to avoid his rage. Speak lovingly to him, participate in these forced sex marathons, and maybe even suggest one to get it over with before some other event.”
Lara Bazelan, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, told Complex that Cassie and Jane Doe’s testimonies laid out “the sum and substance” of coercive control.
“If you listen to their testimony, what they were saying is, ‘It looks like I’m happy. It looks like I’m participating. It looks like we were romantic partners. I sent these texts. And this was really about me being manipulated in this Svengali kind of relationship we had, and the power he was exerting over me,’” she said.
That assessment—that Cassie’s decisions were not her own—is actually backed up by Cassie herself. Combs’ lawyers shrewdly didn’t quote the next sentence of her IG message, when she says that domestic abuse “broke me down into someone I never thought I would become.”
How does this connect to coercive control? Well, that’s exactly what most domestic abuse is.
Coercive control is the most common type of reported abuse, particularly among young women. In a 2018 study, researchers found that coercive control was the most common type of abuse for young women, more common than relationships with just physical inter-partner violence (IPV) and no coercive control. Stark’s book cites the work of one sociologist who found that 68% of women who seek court assistance, and 79% of women who seek shelter, were subjected to control tactics in addition to physical abuse.
So when Cassie says, “Domestic abuse is THE issue,” that’s what she’s talking about. Domestic abuse is not limited to physical assaults. The most common form of abuse is using a variety of tactics to control a woman’s behavior and limit her choices. In that light, the argument Diddy’s legal team was making—that while he might be guilty of abuse, he didn’t coerce anyone into anything—falls apart.
Domestic abuse and coercion, in the majority of cases, are the same thing. This case, for all of its celebrity and media attention, was at heart no different than around 70% of other abuse cases: it was, if you believe the testimony, an abuser using whatever means he could to break down his victim and destroy her personhood. With acquittals on the most serious charges, it certainly appears as if Diddy mostly got away with it, and that society still has a long way to go before recognizing coercive control as the danger it truly is.