Last week, on the day he was sued for at least the ninth time in less than a year, Sean Combs was determined to get a message through to one of his protégées, prosecutors in his federal criminal case said.
The music mogul, who was indicted by a federal grand jury this week on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, is alleged to have called or texted Kalenna Harper 58 times in four days.
The outreach started, prosecutors said, on the day that another of his protégées, Dawn Richard, who was Harper’s bandmate in the since-disbanded group Diddy — Dirty Money, sued Combs, alleging that he groped and threatened her and at times failed to pay her while he oversaw her career.
And the communication stopped, they said, after Harper took to social media to deny that she had witnessed some of the things Richard’s complaint alleges.
The allegation of communication between Combs and Harper is one of several examples of “witness tampering” and obstruction of justice prosecutors laid out for a judge Tuesday in New York as they argued that Combs was too dangerous, violent and dismissive of the federal case against him to be allowed to return home before his trial.
“This incident is just one way of making clear that this defendant has the ongoing ability to keep witnesses, even witnesses who might have been around for very distant-in-time abuse, in his pocket and at his disposal,” one of the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson, told a judge Tuesday.