In a new filing seen by The Independent, his lawyers are seeking to have the latter charge dismissed on the basis that the law in question, the Mann Act of 1910, has historically been used to “target Black men.”.
Combs’s lawyers claim that “the government has concocted a criminal case based primarily on allegations that Mr Combs and two of his longtime girlfriends sometimes brought a third party - a male escort - into their sexual relationship.”.
They further state that claims that Combs carried out murder and had sex with minors are false, and allege that NBC sought “only to capitalize on the public’s appetite for scandal without any regard for the truth and at the expense of Mr Combs’s right to a fair trial.”.
They go on to argue that “the use of escorts, male or female, is common and indeed widely accepted in American culture today” and that Combs has been “singled out because he is a powerful black man, and he is being prosecuted for conduct that regularly goes unpunished.”.
The filing argues that the Act has a “long and troubling history as a statute with racist origins, used to target Black men and supposedly protect white women from them.”.
