Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your courthouse line sitter of music news and criticism.

I'm your host for the week, Joe Koscarelli, sitting in for John Caramanica.

I'm joined today by Ben Cessario and Julia Jacobs, culture reporters at the New York Times,

and we're going to discuss the ongoing trial of Sean Combs in federal court in Manhattan, which the three of us, but especially the two of them, have been covering in depth for months, years, weeks, and trial. We're coming up on years for the whole saga. Thank you guys for being here, Ben. Back at it.

Happy to be here. Julia, thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me. So I think anyone who follows any form of music or news or crime or

everyone in the world knows this trial is going on. If you're on the internet. If you're on the

internet, you know that this trial is happening.

You know that there's been a huge buildup to this, beginning with the lawsuit against Sean

Combs filed by Cassandra Ventura, better known as the singer Cassie, back in the fall of

2023.

And from there, the dominoes have fallen every week, every month. I think we're at,

what, dozens now of civil lawsuits against Sean Combs. That's Puff Daddy. That's Diddy. That's

love. If you've been following his music career in recent years, and those civil lawsuits seem to have kick started a federal law enforcement

investigation, as far as we can tell. Did he had his house rated, multiple houses rated in the spring

of 2024. Later that year, he was indicted on federal charges. And Julie, I was hoping maybe you could start by just catching

us up a little bit on what exactly Sean Combs is being charged with. What is he facing in court

every day now in Manhattan? I've been trying to think about the charges in two buckets, one,

the racketeering charges and one bucket

being the sex trafficking charges, but they're very interrelated. So the racketeering conspiracy

charge, and this is a very serious federal charge that you could be looking at life in prison

if you get convicted on, it essentially, the government is accusing Sean Combs of running a criminal enterprise

...