The rivets in the DIDDY trial are for many reasons: celebrities, kinks, drugs, violence, guns, baby oil. You can almost hear Ryan Murphy calling FX immediately American Crime Story: Didi does this? Influential people are occupying the court, living with witness testimony updates and providing a Tiktok update called "Didi Reign." People are eating it.
Diddy (legally named Sean Combs) pleaded not guilty to the charges he faced for conspiracy and sexual trafficking. Many Americans have taken the comment section to provide full belief in his innocence. Despite video evidence of domestic violence, aside from photos of Comms guns with serial numbers, multiple witnesses proved that combs threatened to kill them, the group insisted that Diddy’s greatest sin was nothing more than becoming a supermale celebrity with a “liberal” sexual taste.
The trial is estimated to take eight to 10 weeks; we completed only two. No one can predict the results. But why are so many men (and surprisingly women) the necessity to defend this man? The jury has watched the surveillance footage of the comb that drags down the indictment star witness Cassie Ventura, whose collar of her sweatshirt passes through the hotel's collar, which is not even a thing he is trying.
I can't move Didi's trial away because it feels like a man's trial, but something bigger. The jury (composed of eight men and four women) will comb the decision on convictions, but in response to this trial, the broader culture is to decide whether #MeToo is a movement or a moment.
The center of the trial is a problem of stress. Did Ventura participate in hundreds of drug-driven sex with strangers who like to watch because she likes them? Or does the comb use his power to force her? When they met, she was 19 years old and a longing and ambitious singer. He is 17 years older and is arguably the most powerful person in the music industry. His record label Bad Boy signed her a very unusual long-term 10 Album deal. He was her boss and soon her boyfriend. The evidence provided by both parties was the Rorschach test. How you think it says a lot about how the #MeToo movement (or no) changes your horizon.
The facts seem to be clear. Ventura is a legal adult, but hardly any, when her career was effectively handed over to the comb in 2006. But in the mid-2000s, many artists were strictly controlled by their labels. Especially when the artist is a woman. The people who pay the bills not only determine the voice of these women, they determine their hair color and weight. You only need to watch an episode of Combs' MTV show Make a band Taste the climate he created. He had artists join singing battles to earn a bed to sleep and ordered them to walk a few miles from Manhattan to Brooklyn, bringing him a specific cheesecake. Behind the scenes, it's even worse. Diddy controls every aspect of her appearance, “until my toenails,” one singer said.
Of course, maybe Ventura loves him. But sometimes the hostage falls in love with the kidnapper. Even the ones who defeated them. Of course, women have all kinds of sex like men. But it is hard to imagine a woman who loves sex, as Ventura says in her testimony, suffering from a painful urinary tract infection. As the male sex worker said, he witnessed a comb to Ventura, it is hard to imagine feeling awakened after your partner throws a glass bottle at you. And, when people are having a great time, they don't usually try to sneak out of the room, barefoot (as Ventura does in the hotel's surveillance footage), can only let their partner catch them, grab them, grab them behind them, throw them on the ground, and kick them. repeatedly. Ventura said the sexual behavior made her feel "worthless". But, as the video shows, there is a price to try to extract your own price.
It’s been almost eight years since Harvey Weinstein’s story broke down and the #MeToo movement forced the reassessment of abuse and power. futureI remember thinking, We will not only oppose bad actors; we will refuse to participate in the system that protects them. Looking into the future, everyone will understand that in a world of power imbalance, the difference between what a woman chooses and what happened to her can indeed be very big.
Instead, something else happened in the following years. American women see our rights eroded and we have access to lifesaving health care. The defendant's sexual abuser is the president of the United States, and his administration works hard to convince more women to stay home and children. Many people are working hard to undermine the progress of the #MeToo movement. Just like following the comb of Ventura in that video, they try to drag the women back in, they can do what they like.
Recently, they have achieved great success.