The Rise and Fall of Diddy - Consent, Coercion, and Compliance: 5

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Before the jury heard from the women at the center of the case, the prosecution brought in a “blind expert” to reframe how their stories would be understood: Dr. Dawn Hughes. With insight from clinical experts, Shari Botwin, LCSW and Dr. Daniel Bober, a forensic psychologist, this episode explores the most uncomfortable question at the heart of the case: Why didn’t they leave?Featuring interviews with: Shari Botwin, LCSW and Dr. Daniel Bober—-Host - Jesse WeberReporter - Elizabeth MillnerExecutive Producer - Jessica LowtherWriter and Producer - Cooper MollAssociate Producer - Tess Jagger-WellsEdit and Sound Design - Anna McClainGuest Booking - Diane Kaye & Alyssa FisherAdditional Production Support - Juliana Battaglia & Stefanie DoucetteLegal review - Elizabeth VulajKey art - Sean PanzeraSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're listening to a long crime series available exclusively on Wondery Plus. To listen to the remaining episodes, join Wondery Plus and enjoy ad-free listening to over 50,000 episodes, including more thrilling long-crime series like new episodes of Karen the retrial and sidebar with Jesse Weber. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. This podcast is a long crime production. The content may include graphic descriptions of alleged sexual acts, violence, abuse, and drug use. These topics may be disturbing or triggering for some listeners. Listener discretion is strongly advised. The allegations discussed are based on court documents, public testimony, and media reporting. While normally we wouldn't spoil the ending of a story, the headlines were nearly impossible to ignore. On July 2, 2025, a jury convicted Sean

Combs of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, but acquitted him of the racketeering and sex trafficking charges. After the accounts of alleged abuse we heard in the last episode, it became clear. What matters isn't just what happened, but why it happens and how it affects the people who live through it. That's why the prosecution didn't wait. Before jurors ever heard from the other women at the center of the case, they brought in an expert, someone to shape how that testimony would land, not to corroborate their stories,

but to explain what those stories might mean and how that meaning might shape the way the jurors hear the rest of the case. Dr. Dawn Hughes is a forensic and clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience. Her specialty is interpersonal violence and trauma. She's testified in some of the most high-profile abuse trials in recent history.

But in this case, her role came with strict limitations. The jury wasn't allowed to hear her diagnose anyone. She hadn't interviewed the witnesses. she hadn't even seen the evidence. Dr. Hughes was what's known as a blind expert, called to speak only in generalities about how abuse operates and how it affects the people who live through it.

It was a calculated move by the government. Dr. Hughes wouldn't say what happened, but her job was to make sense of how it could. The prosecution laid out the scope of her testimony before she took the stand. She couldn't speak to patterns of coercive control, but she could define key terms, like emotional abuse, financial manipulation, and sexual exploitation. She could explain why some survivors maintained contact with their abuser, even express love for them.

She could describe how trauma distorts memory, why survivors forget certain details, fixate on others, or recall events out of order. The defense objected early and often. They argued the testimony was too suggestive, too tailored to the government's narrative. but Judge Suburmanian allowed it under tight scrutiny. If Dr. Hughes drifted too close to the facts of the case, the court would cut her off. Still, the implications were clear because everything she described, gaslighting, isolation, survival compliance, reflected back on the stories the jury had already heard.

Her testimony was less about what the witnesses said and more about why the jury might, or perhaps should believe them. Dr. Hughes gave the jury a broad and clinically grounded framework, but her testimony raised as many questions as it answered. What does consent really mean under pressure? Why would someone stay silent for years or speak out and still say they love the person who hurt them? How can memory be both a record and a defense mechanism?

I'm Jesse Weber, and this is the rise and fall of Diddy, the federal trial. The women who testified in this trial described alleged beatings, constant surveillance, and sexual assault. While each had their own unique experience, they all remembered fear. But none of them ran the first time.

Some came back. Most stayed. And that, more than anything else, became the quiet fault line running through this case. Why didn't they leave? It's the question that haunts nearly every survivor, one that gets passed around and whispers by jurors by defense attorneys and more often than not, by the public.

And it's the one Dr. Dawn Hughes was brought into answer after Cassie's harrowing testimony, but before similar stories were shared by other witnesses. To unpack her reasoning even further, we also spoke with experts. Sherry Botwin is a licensed clinical social worker and author of Thriving After Trauma. She spent more than two decades working with survivors of sexual violence and trafficking.

You can both love and hate the person you're with at the same time. You can accept mistreatment and also find ways to rationalize why that person is mistreating you, which often comes back to feeling like you're the one that's the cause of the abuse. I've never worked with somebody who's left an abusive relationship. where they say to me, whether it's months or years later, you know what, I realize I don't love this person. Every single person that I work with, whether it's somebody that I knew 20 years ago or somebody that I just saw a couple hours ago, that's one of the most difficult pieces is that they feel a love towards that person that they never necessarily can let go of.

And Dr. Daniel Bowber is a forensic psychiatrist who's testified in complex criminal trials and has worked directly with trauma survivors. So what this case comes down to for me and for a lot of people who I think are watching it, and that includes people in the jury and the public, is what is the true nature of consent? And consent is something that is a very nuanced and complex issue. Botwin and Dr. Bober told us that when someone is abused by a person they're emotionally attached to, it doesn't just affect how they behave, but also how they think,

what they believe they deserve, and what they think they're allowed. to want. When you think of the word trauma bond, it's an attachment that victims will feel towards their abusers. The idea of being bonded to somebody who could be causing you harm and really mistreating you, where the bond comes in is that a lot of times victims develop an attachment that doesn't really match the nature of the relationship. The attachment becomes more about a dependency see a feeling of, but I won't be okay without this person, almost like you end up needing the person in ways that maybe we need our parents when we're growing up. According to Batwin, the damage isn't always visible.

When you're in the relationship and you are trauma bonded, you lose sight of all that. You forget that you're an adult. You have your own feelings. You have your own talents and gifts that you can bring into the world. world, you lose sight of all of that and you become almost like you're not even a full person at that point. That kind of dependency isn't always obvious. Sometimes it masks itself as love.

Other times it's a survival instinct buried under shame, fear, and self-blame. Where the conflict often wins is feelings of shame, feelings of worthlessness, feelings of insecurity, they will override when you're in that situation and that those feelings end up usually dictating the choices that someone's making when it comes to leaving or staying in the relationship. And that's why I think survivors struggle so much to actually leave. It's a pattern Dr. Bober has seen in trauma survivors across all kinds of settings, from military to domestic to institutional. And he says it plays out in predictable, painful ways. In trauma bonding, the victim develops intense emotional ties to their abuser forged through

a cycle of abuse. And very often, they mistake the absence of abuse with the good times, quote unquote. Well, it's not so bad. But at the end of the day, there is still fear and coercion. If I don't do this, maybe he's going to physically hurt me. Maybe he's going to financially cut me off. Maybe he's going to damage my career. And as the cycle, deepens, even the idea of leaving can feel out of reach. That kind of thinking, what Dr. Hughes called survival logic, was at the center of her testimony in the trial of Sean Combs, and it set the stage for everything that followed, because the question wasn't just, why didn't she leave? It was what happens when leaving doesn't feel like an option. Some people could make the

argument, well, maybe they were doing it to get ahead in their career, or maybe they were seizing upon that power for their own gain. But it's certainly not a black and white argument. And that's why it's such an interesting case when you look at the presentation on both sides. In this case, the women who testified describe sexual encounters they said they didn't want, encounters they didn't initiate, moments where they said yes, even when they didn't mean it. For the prosecution, those moments were evidence of coercion. For the defense, they raised a very different argument. Consent. Consent. If she didn't say no, if she stayed in the relationship, if she accepted the gifts and money, if she flew on the private jets, wasn't that consent?

Essentially, their argument is, well, it must not have been that bad because after she was raped, she had sex with them a bunch of times after that. Why would she go along and do that? Because they're looking at it, I think, from a very concrete perspective, and they're not diving into the nuance of the psychology of these types of situations. And that's why it's not so clear cut. system has long treated consent is binary, a clear yes or a clear no. But in abusive dynamics, that line gets distorted. That's what Dr. Don Hughes tried to explain to the jury, that people don't

always fight back when they're being hurt. Sometimes they placate or freeze. And sometimes they do exactly what they're told just to make it stop. And in those moments, what looks like consent is something very different. Consent is voluntary, it's informed, it's enthusiastic, it's ongoing, and it's given with a person who has both capacity and autonomy. It's free from coercion. In court, the defense argued that witnesses had assented, that they participated, that they didn't say no, but Dr. Bober draws a line between agreement and consent. Contrast consent from a sense, which is agreement or compliance, that falls short of consent because it's not necessarily informed or voluntary.

Autonomy doesn't just disappear when someone is physically restrained. It can erode long before that through power and balances, fear of consequences, and psychological control. Coercion is not just, if you don't do this, I'm going to kill you or I'm going to hurt you, but it can be, much more subtle. It can involve manipulation, fear of consequences, the denial of something. That line matters, especially in relationships where power and dependency are sometimes blurred. Shari Botwin says compliance in that context is an agency. It's conditioning. One of the hardest things to do for survivors is to really break free from dissociation and placating. They're unconscious. So these are defenses that sort of of our automatic in nature.

So when someone has left the relationship, but they find that they're still dissociating or they're still flakating, whether it's with the abuser itself, if they're still having contact with the abuser or other people. That subtlety was everywhere in the prosecution's case. We talk about things like learned helplessness, which is it's easier to just go along with it

because resistance is futile. It's just going to make it worse. and then self-blame and shame. Maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed. What did I do to bring this on? And then you start minimizing the behavior, right? And then we get into cognitive dissonance,

which is two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, you think, how could this person force me to do this? But on the other hand, you think to yourself, but they love me, so it must be okay. So I think what this case really comes down to is that nuanced and complex issue of consent, which I think is not only applicable to the verdict in this case,

but I think it has far-reaching implications in society and how we act to each other and interact. Some of the most harrowing testimony in this trial involved sex acts. Some, the witnesses said they agreed to. Others, they said they didn't. And still other times, well, they couldn't say for sure. So the drugs just further complicates the, experience because if someone is taking drugs or being forced to take drugs, the drugs will

literally wipe out pieces of the memory. That's what drugs do. Whether a survivor is using that for a coping mechanism or the abuser is using that as a way to further debilitate the survivor to use that against somebody and say, well, that would make this person not a credible witness. That's a bunch of crap. That makes it even more abusive. If the abuser, knows that the person that they're with is incapacitated because of the drugs either she took or the drugs that he put in her, whether it was through force or in a coercive way, that makes the situation even more criminal because then there's no way that someone can consent to what's happening. And there's also no way that that person's ever going to remember what

happened because there's going to be parts of the memory that they'll never get back. When someone dissociates sometimes over time and through therapy, their brain and their minds, they find a way to get the memory back. When there's drugs involved, you can't get the memory back. It doesn't matter how much therapy you do or how much journaling or insight-oriented conversations you're having. The drugs take that memory away completely. And there were drugs. Lots of them. But the witnesses also say there was pressure to do them. There was a fear of what would happen if they said no and there was a desire to keep the peace sometimes people who go through trauma will then subject themselves to similar events and it's not so much about consent as it is about survival

it's a behavior botwin says is common especially among those who've been manipulated or traumatized over time to an outsider the survivor might look compliant even willing but inside they're managing risk. They're trying to control the damage. These forms of coping are part of how people survive when the abuse is happening. I think that what Dr. Hughes was trying to explain to the jury is why it's so difficult for a survivor to leave and not just leave the relationship, but leave and then empower themselves to understand, wait a minute, what he was doing to me was awful. It's criminal, it's mean, it's abusive. And that realization, when it finally comes, can take months, sometimes years.

Because when survival becomes the goal, the body stops asking what it wants. It learns to go along. I think she was trying to explain to the jury, it's very complicated and it's not something that can be done in a day or even in a month or a year for some people. There's a lot of back and forth that goes with these types of relationships, a lot of leaving and a lot of staying, if that makes sense. It takes, you know, on average, seven times for somebody to leave their abuser for good. Dr. Hughes is trying to explain to the jury why that is. In the courtroom, those dynamics were on trial too, because what the prosecution wanted the jury to see wasn't just the alleged absence of consent. It was the presence of control the victim's safety.

they felt, the kind that works quietly and buries itself deep. Some of the most aggressive moments in the trial didn't come during testimony. They came after, on cross. The defense pushed hard on what the witnesses remembered and what they didn't, what came first, what came next, who was in the room, what time it happened. They called it unreliable, inconsistent, even convenient. But Botwin says the way trauma shapes memory is rarely clean and almost never linear. I have never met somebody who's gone through trauma who doesn't have fragmented memories.

So the fact that's still being used in court as a cross-examination, it's enraging because that's not what trauma is. And that's what makes coming forward so difficult because survivors, they feel like they can't trust themselves and they can't trust themselves. and they can't trust themselves in that they know the truth because they don't remember everything. It's impossible to remember everything. The example I would use is almost like if anybody's ever been in a car accident, you know how right before an accident you can go, oh my God, I'm about to get hit by a car, like you can feel something bad is about to happen. Just knowing something that's about to happen, the memory starts to almost shut off

because in order to get through the car crash and be able to, if you survive physically, to be able to get out of the car after and then continue to live your life, you would have to forget parts of it or you won't be able to live because your brain and your emotions would literally drive you insane. Witnesses stumbled over dates. They recalled events out of order. They forgot some details and remembered others in vivid color. To a jury, that might look like confusion or worse, fabrication.

But to trauma experts, it looks familiar. When you're going through trauma, if somebody got on the stand and said, this is what happened first, then this happened, and then I remember this, then I would think, oh, I wonder if that really happened. I've never met somebody who has been through trauma who can actually recount the experience or have memories come back in from the beginning to the end. Fragmented memories is what trauma is. The brain doesn't record traumatic experiences the way it records a normal day. When something overwhelming happens, especially repeatedly, it doesn't always store the full picture. Fear can trigger a survival response, and the brain will prioritize remembering threats to avoid them in the future. And this has to do with the neurobiology of a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in the fear response, and the hippocampus.

And stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol will sharpen focus and cement traumatic events in long-term memory. So these memories are stored a little bit differently than other types of memory. And with long-term memories can come distortion and fragmentation. Dr. Bober highlights that the brain under stress doesn't record events the way we think it does. And when trauma is revisited, the act of remembering doesn't just retrieve the truth. It reshapes it. We can have what's called reconsolidation errors, which means that every time you remember something, the memory becomes unstable. If you recall it in a different context, you may merge it or conflate it with other details.

And so it can become very difficult to recall the actual details of something, the more you go back and the more you try to remember it. Memory is notoriously unreliable. That instability doesn't mean the core truth isn't real. Making these mistakes aren't necessarily attempts to be duplicitous or fabricate things. I think sometimes it's just an honest mistake from someone trying to recall something that happened within the context of a traumatic situation. This isn't a flaw in memory. It's a function of trauma, a defense mechanism that protects the mind from being overloaded. It's why a witness might break down recalling a single hallway, but forget what city they were in.

It's why the act itself might feel vague, while the emotion around it feels unbearable. What the fragmented memories do is they help people know that. something happen, but they also help survivors stay sane and be able to at some point tell their story, even if they can't tell it from beginning to end. For prosecutors, this made Dr. Hughes testimony crucial, because it gave the jury a different framework for evaluating credibility, not based on consistency, but on psychological plausibility. She explained that trauma doesn't organize itself neatly, and when survivors testify, they're not always recalling a linear story. Sometimes, they're just putting together what they've managed to hold on to.

In a courtroom, that can be dangerous because jurors are taught to prize certainty, but survivors often live with something else. Scattered memories that may never come back in full. One of the more chilling takeaways from this trial was that the abuse didn't happen in secret. It didn't only happen behind closed doors. The prosecution didn't just argue that Combe, abused women, they argued that he built a system to keep them in place, a world where abuse didn't stand out because nothing else did either, where silence wasn't enforced, it was assumed,

and where the people around you weren't trying to help, they were following orders. A common refrain from the women who testified was that no one stepped in. Dr. Dawn Hughes talked about coercive environments, places where the abuse isn't just personal, it's structural, where people around the survivor aren't neutral bystanders, but part of the machinery. Dr. Bober said this phenomenon isn't just about fear. It's about adaptation. He finds people that are particularly vulnerable. He can exploit. And then pretty soon, before you know it, he's surrounded by a whole group of these people. And the people who might have spoken up learned to stay quiet.

When we listen to testimony, if God forbid anybody even alluded to the idea that they may say, something or that they weren't okay with something that he was doing, the fear he instilled in them, it silenced people in ways that I think there are people still that are walking around knowing things about him that we're never going to find out because of the fear that he instills in those people. In testimony, some women said they were watched, followed, and questioned. They described rules at a rotating cast of collaborators, recruiters, fixers, silent enforcers. Even that, Dr. Bober says, serves a purpose.

When you come into the fray, you see that all these people are going along with it, and that becomes your reference point and that type of behavior becomes normalized. And you become even further removed from what is proper being unable to exercise your independence and your autonomy because you're surrounded by people who have fallen into this trap, and that normalizes it all the more. It's what Dr. Hughes called a climate of control. Botwin and Dr. Bober recognized instantly. It wasn't just about one man and one victim.

The prosecution argued it was a system, one that reinforced itself through money, status, fear, and silence. For survivors in that kind of world, there are no good choices. Speak out and risk retaliation, or stay quiet and stay safe. But whatever they chose, the rules were already written. and they weren't the ones writing them. By the end of Dr. Hughes' testimony, the jury had been given a map, a way to trace the progression of abuse from emotional dependency to coercive sex,

from fragmented memory, to delay disclosure. But the final chapter of that map wasn't about what happened. It's about what comes after. Because trauma doesn't end when the violence stops. It leaves its mark on the body, on the mind, on the survivor's sense of self. Dr. Hughes called it cumulative harm, and she told the jury that for many survivors, the effects of abuse don't just echo. They compound.

Here's Dr. Bober again. You have to think about things like complex PTSD, depression, anxiety, and then, you know, all the symptoms that go along with that, that feeling of never feeling safe, hypervigilance, nightmares, replaying the trauma, a risk of substance use disorders. These are all the long-term consequences of having to live. that way. We asked Sherry Botwin what that toll looks like in real life. The anxiety and the hypervigilance that comes with that, they're going to need to be working on that for the rest of their lives. They're never going to be completely free of that because that's what PTSD is. It's a condition

that we have to learn how to live with and manage, but it's not something that you can cure. It doesn't ever go away. It can show up as panic attacks, chronic insomnia, disassociation, but more than anything, It shows up in how someone sees the world, how they trust, the way they function, and who they believe they are. It may take months, if not years, to recalibrate and to get back to a place where you're able to trust again. Botwin says survivors often struggle with identity, especially when their abuse is entangled with love or aspiration or success.

You try to stay in the fairy tale of the story because you don't want to know the truth. When you let yourself know the truth, then you have to come to terms with, I thought that I was telling people he was like the best thing that ever happened in mirror. I told people my mom was my best friend. And now I realize she was actually my abuser. That's really painful to go through that process. Recovery, she says, isn't about going back to who you were before. It's about figuring out who you are now and who you want to become. It's painful, but it's also really empowering.

and it opens up space to then live your life in relationships that are healthier and safe. It's how you break the cycle of abuse. Next, on the rise and fall of Diddy, the federal trial, guns, drugs, hundreds of bottles of baby oil. Homeland Security agent Gerard Gannon found the physical evidence. Then, Special Agent Joseph Circello mapped it out. When it's a major enterprise, you are going to see. keywords that are being used, you're going to see major transactions. You will see really detailed communications because there's so many moving parts. And then look for proof of videos

and location to say, okay, every single time, this is exactly what's happening. But proving a system exists isn't the same as proving who ran it. You still have to show that that person had care and control over that contraband. They have to tie them directly to him. And that was the big problem is he had literally hundreds of people streaming through these properties at all times. This has been a long crime production. I'm your host, Jesse Weber. Our executive producer is Jessica Lauer. Our writer and producer is Cooper Mall. Our associate producer is Test Jagger Wells. Edit and sound design by Anna McLean. Guest booking by Diane Kay and Alyssa Fisher. Additional production support from Juliana Bataglia and Stephanie Doucette. Legal review by Elizabeth Vuli.

key art designed by Sean Panzera and special thanks to Elizabeth Milner for her in-depth reporting on this case. Follow long crimes the rise and fall of Diddy, the federal trial on the Wondery app. You can listen to more episodes exclusively and ad free right now on Wondery Plus.

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