The district judge presiding over the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex-trafficking trial denied a mistrial motion by the defense on Tuesday over alleged “prosecutorial misconduct.” But, in a victory for the defense, he also denied a request by the prosecution to call a key expert back to the witness stand. 

“This is not fodder for a mistrial,” Judge Arun Subramanian ruled on Tuesday. “This is the adversarial process at work.” He added that there “was absolutely no testimony from the witness that was prejudicial in any way shape or form.”

Over the weekend, the defense had submitted a mistrial motion claiming that testimony given by a close friend of Mr. Combs’s longtime former girlfriend, Cassandra Ventura, was prejudiced. The woman, the designer Bryana Bongolan, who was and still is close friends with Ms. Ventura, claimed that Mr. Combs dangled her off a 17th-floor apartment balcony in Los Angeles in late September 2016.

Federal prosecutors showed the jury a photograph of Ms. Bongolan’s bruised neck. The metadata of the photograph dates the picture to September 26, 2016. During cross-examination, however, the defense pulled up hotel receipts that proved that Mr. Combs was staying at the Trump International Hotel in New York betweeen September 24 and September 29, 2016, because he had a concert in New Jersey on September 25. 

“You agree that one person can’t be in two places at the same time?” Mr. Combs’s attorney, Nicole Westmoreland, asked Ms. Bongolan during cross-examination last week. 

“The government knew or should have known this testimony was perjured, and that Ms. Bongolan could not possibly have been injured by Mr. Combs on a Los Angeles balcony in the early morning hours of September 26, or even the day before that,” the defense wrote in its mistrial motion. “And it has had other evidence in its possession for some time showing Mr. Combs’ travel schedule and proving that he was on the East Coast when it told the jury he dangled Ms. Bongolan over a balcony in front of Ms. Ventura.”

The defense further complained that Ms. Ventura’s testimony about the incident was also flawed, because contrary to Ms. Ventura’s own statements, a text message she sent indicated that she did not in fact see the alleged incident.

“Thus, the government left the jury with the false impression that Ms. Ventura saw Mr. Combs dangle her friend over the balcony and that this made her fearful of him, when in fact—if there was any incident—Ventura merely heard about it afterwards, considerably lessening any probative value as to her state of mind,” the defense argued in its motion.

The defense pointed to a text message, which the prosecution had introduced to the jury, in which Ms. Ventura expressed that she had heard about the incident but not actually seen it. The message, sent by Ms. Ventura to Mr. Combs’s chief of staff, Kristina Khorram, read: “I just found out some crazy s—. … He [Mr. Combs] came into my house while my friends were here and we were all sleeping and they woke me up because he was ringing the bell crazy at 3 am. and when he came in I went to my room and he went at Bona choked her and then dangled her feet off the balcony. This is crazy.”

Prosecutors intended to use the text message to show that the incident occured. But the defense argued that the message proved that Ms. Ventura did not see the incident with her own eyes. 

As the Sun reported, Ms. Bongolan testified that she was not sure whether Ms. Ventura saw her ex-boyfriend dangle her friend off the balcony or if she arrived once Ms. Bongolan had been, as she claimed, thrown onto the balcony furniture. 

Prosecutors opposed the mistrial motion, arguing that Ms. Bongolan never gave a specific date when the incident happened, and that it could have happened on September 23, a day before Mr. Combs left to attend his concert on the East Coast. 

The judge reasoned that the defense had ample time to cross-examine the witness, and did so successfully, and there were no grounds to stop the entire trial. He said Mr. Combs’s defense attorney, Ms. Westmoreland, who led the cross-examination, “had a real Perry Mason moment.”

Then, in a key victory for the defense, the judge, ruling from the bench on Tuesday, denied a request from the prosecution to call back an expert witness, Dawn Hughes, so she could explain to the jury why domestic violence victims stay with their abusers. 

Core to Mr. Combs’s defense is that the women who gave testimony about abuse stayed in relationships with him for months or years. Dr. Hughes had previously testified about the traumatic effect that the 11-year on-and-off-again relationship with Mr. Combs had on Ms. Ventura. 

Now the prosecution wanted her to explain why another alleged victim, known to the court by the pseudonym Jane, continued to date Mr. Combs after he allegedly beat her, dragged her through her house by her hair, and then forced her to have sex with a male prostitute while he watched and pleasured himself. The judge denied the prosecution’s request. 

On Tuesday, defense attorney Teny Geragos, daughter of a celebrity attorney, Mark Geragos, began her cross-examination of Jane by asking the witness, who dated the rapper between 2021 and shortly before his arrest in 2024, if she still loved the defendant.

“You love him currently?” Ms. Geragos asked. 

“Yes,” Jane said.  

The defense also asked how Mr. Combs had defined their relationship, and Jane testified that he had been up front since the beginning and told her that he considered himself to be “polyamorous,” which involves having multiple intimate and romantic partners at the same time. 

Jane said she felt hurt when she saw him appear in public with another woman (while their relationship was private), saying it looked like “a monogamous relationship.” 

The defense also, in an attempt to prove that the couple’s “hotel nights” or “freak offs” — the drug-fueled sexual encounters Jane had with other men, while Mr. Combs watched and pleasured himself — were consensual, played a voice message for the jury, during which Mr. Combs called Jane his “crack pipe.”  

“Eh, baby. It’s all good, get your rest. You are the crack pipe,” Mr. Combs could be heard saying. “Should I call you CP (crack pipe)?” 

Jane replied with a voice note to Mr. Combs, which the jury also heard, where she said: “‘Crack pipe’ is so real for both of us, it’s definitely mutual.”

In another attempt to blame his drug addiction for the alleged actions, the defense asked the witness if she saw the drug use have physical effects on Mr. Combs.    

“I felt he was developing jaundice,” Jane testified regarding Mr. Combs’s appearance in 2021. “His gums were gray, probably from drug use,” she said. “I felt that his hands were shaky, probably from over-consuming alcohol.”

She remembered asking him to consider going to rehab.  

Ms. Geragos also asked whether Jane knew he was taking anti-depressants and sedatives. “Yes,” the witness said. 

“You wanted him to get off the Xanax and Prozac,” Ms. Geragos said.

“Yes, as you listed them, I didn’t even know all that,” Jane replied. 

The cross-examination will resume on Wednesday. The witness is expected to be on the stand until Thursday afternoon.