The troubled music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs filed an official notice to appeal his conviction and 50-month prison sentence in the Federal District Court of New York on Monday. The filing comes amid media reports that President Trump is considering pardoning the disgraced hip-hop legend, or commuting his sentence, this week. 

Defense attorney Alexandra Shapiro filed an official notice of appeal on Monday contesting Combs’s guilty verdict on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, rendered by a jury on July 2 after an eight-week trial at the Southern District of New York. 

The jury acquitted Combs of the most serious charges federal prosecutors had brought against him, two counts of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. But it found that Combs transported male prostitutes across state lines to have sex with two of his former girlfriends — a singer and model, Cassandra Ventura, and, on separate occasions, a woman who testified under pseudonym Jane — during drug-fueled, hours-long sex marathons he called “Freak Offs.” Specifically, Combs was convicted of crimes that are embedded in the Mann Act, a federal law originally called the “White Slave Traffic Act” of 1910. 

On October 3, as the Sun reported, the presiding judge, Arun Subramanian, sentenced Combs to four years and two months in prison, with five years of supervised release and a $500,000 criminal fine. Combs, who was arrested in September 2024 and denied bail five times, has already served 13 months in Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center, bringing his sentence down to roughly three years. With good behavior he may get out even sooner. It’s a far cry from the potential life sentence Combs faced when his trial got under way this past May.

Nonetheless, his attorneys have appealed the verdict and the sentence, but did not provide specific reasons or arguments in Monday’s filing. A more substantial brief will probably be submitted within the next four to six weeks. 

During the sentencing hearing, one of Combs’s defense attorneys, Brian Steel — who previously successfully represented the rapper known as Young Thug, who was being prosecuted by a Trump foe, Fani Willis — urged the judge to consider the dangers Combs faced in custody, saying that he was a “trophy” inmate for other inmates who wanted to harm him. 

Combs, his attorney argued, had not slept more than two hours consecutively out of fear of being hurt, especially after one inmate tried to stab him with a shank. “The guards stopped a person who was armed with a shank who was right on top of Sean and was about to cut him. Every day he lives in fear,” Mr. Steel said.

The reports that Mr. Trump may issue a pardon for Combs were already circulating during the trial, when Rolling Stone reported that a well-funded effort was under way, on Mr. Combs’s behalf, to persuade Mr. Trump to set the music producer free.  

When reporters asked the president in the Oval Office on May 30, Mr. Trump said that he hadn’t been paying much attention to the trial, “although it’s certainly getting a lot of coverage,“ and said that he’d have to look into the matter. 

After the verdict, at the end of July, multiple reports in the Hollywood press, such as Deadline, said again that Mr. Trump may issue a pardon for Combs. And then, on Monday evening, TMZ reported that according to its sources, “the President is ‘vacillating’ on a commutation.” 

The outlet was also told that some of the White House staff members “are urging Trump not to commute the sentence. But, our source states the obvious — ‘Trump will do what he wants,’ and we’re told Trump could set Diddy free as early as this week.” 

On Friday, Mr. Trump commuted the 87-month prison sentence of George Santos, the fabulist former congressman who was found guilty of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

Perhaps looming even larger than the prospect of a possible Combs pardon is the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s paramour and confidant. Mr. Trump is believed to be considering a pardon for her, as well.

According to the Department of Juice, Mr. Trump has issued 66 pardons and commutations since he was sworn back into office in January, not including the clemencies granted relating to the events at or near the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In total, Mr. Trump has issued pardons for 1,600 people, the highest number of clemency grants by a president in the first year of his first term in history, as the Sun reported. 

Although Mr. Trump has pardoned other hiphop artists, most notably Lil Wayne and Kodak Black in January 2021, and NBA YoungBoy in May 2025, his sympathy for Combs may be tainted by critical remarks Combs made about him before the 2020 election. 

In an interview with a radio host and television presenter, Charlamagne tha God, Combs said, “I really think if Trump gets elected, I really do believe in my heart there’ll be a race war. … This man is really trying to turn us against each other.” Later in the interview he added, “White men like Trump need to be banished.”

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when Mr. Trump was a New York celebrity and Combs was at the height of his music career, the two men frequented the same exclusive circles. Mr. Trump even attended one of Combs’s famed “White Parties” with other celebrity guests such as the singer Mariah Carey and the actor Ashton Kutcher. 

“We don’t like to have things cloud our judgment, right?” Mr. Trump told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty in an interview that aired on August 1. “But when you knew someone, and you were fine, and then you run for office, and he made some terrible statements … I don’t know, it’s more difficult. It makes it more — I’m being honest, it makes it more difficult to do.”