P Diddy was met with a standing ovation from fellow inmates when he returned to jail after being acquitted from charges that carried a life sentence in prison. A jury found him not guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.

His lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, has said that the inmates were cheering Diddy on for succeeding in ‘beating’ a high-profile federal case. ‘They all said: “We never get to see anyone who beats the government,”‘ he explained during an interview with the Associated Press.

‘I said: “Maybe it’s your fate in life to be the guy who wins,”‘ he recalled during a telephone interview briefly interrupted by a jailhouse call from Combs. ‘They need to see that someone can win. I think he took that to heart.’

When his fate was announced in court, Diddy reportedly mouthed ‘thank you’ to jurors and smiled while his family and supporters applauded. He was then escorted from the room, and spectators cheered his lawyers on, with a few chanting: ‘Dream Team! Dream Team!’

‘This was a major victory for the defense and a major loss for the prosecution,’ Mitchell Epner, a lawyer who worked with Agnifilo, said. He called Diddy’s team ‘a dream team of defense lawyers’. Diddy will remain locked up in Brooklyn after being convicted on prostitution-related charges. This could see him imprisoned for several more years, but any sentence will credit time already served – and he’s already served 10 months.

Agnifilo also explained that he believed that ‘the government was going to confuse the jury into thinking [Diddy’s behaviour] was part of a sex trafficking effort’.

It was stated in court that Diddy had a drug problem, and was a jealous domestic abuser and participated in the swinger lifestyle through threesomes.

‘The violence was so clear and up front,’ he said ‘So we had to tell the jury what it was so they wouldn’t think it was something it wasn’t.’

Another lawyer of the music mogul’s – Teny Geragos – equated this behaviour to being ‘a bad boyfriend’, but not a sex trafficker.

‘You may think to yourself, wow, he is a really bad boyfriend,’ Geragos said to jurors in her opening statement. But that, she said, ‘is simply not sex trafficking.’
Agnifilo has said that Diddy ‘realises he has flaws like everyone else that he never worked on.’

‘He burns hot in all matters. I think what he has come to see is that he has these flaws and there’s no amount of fame and no amount of fortune that can erase them,’ he said. ‘You can’t cover them up.’

The lawyer also criticised the accusations of conspiracy. ‘They didn’t have a conspiracy, they just didn’t,’ he said. ‘They basically had [Diddy’s] personal life and tried to build racketeering around personal assistants.’

Diddy’s ex-girlfriend, singer Cassie Ventura, appeared in court earlier on in the trial. She  alleged that Diddy ‘would mash me in the head, knock me over, drag me, kick me. Stomp me in the head if I was down’. A video of Diddy dragging Ventura down a hotel hallway and punching and kicking her that surfaced last year was played in court.

She also alleged that Diddy constructed a pattern of control of abuse between them for a decade, and testified that he was jealous of performer Kid Cudi, (whose real name is Scott Mescudi) and their relationship. Mescudi and Ventura were introduced by Diddy, and they soon started making music together and dated. Even after breaking up, they remained close, allegedly leading to Diddy feeling threatened during his own relationship with Ventura.

Mescudi testified in court during the trial and stated that Diddy allegedly bombed his car with a Molotov cocktail – a handmade weapon made from flammable material and equipped with a fuse – back in 2012. The rapper alleged that Diddy ‘had something to do with it’.

Ventura alleged that Diddy coerced her into participating in the ‘freak-offs’ – which have been described by prosecuting lawyers as ‘elaborate and produced sex performances’ – through threats of blackmail and physical violence.

She stated that she ‘had to’ do the ‘freak-offs’, despite explicitly stating on the stand that she did not want to do them.

A former escort who worked for Diddy also testified during the trial about his experience of participating in ‘freak-offs’ with the couple at the time. He described what he felt Ventura’s place and purpose was within the freak-offs, and the idea that she wasn’t able to control the situation anymore, calling it a ‘beast’.

‘In my opinion, in that situation, she didn’t know if this was a beast she could control or not anymore. So she was along for the ride, because she had to, because who knows? Who knows where this beast is going, and there’s no way to tame it.’

Cassie gave birth to her third child with husband Alex Fine on 27 May. She was not in attendance for the verdict, but her lawyer was. He praised the singer for ‘paving the way’ for the trial against one of the music industry’s most powerful men.