Still awaiting a ruling from a trio of Appeal Court judges over his criminal case, the incarcerated Sean “Diddy” Combs got some bad legal news today.
A New York judge just threw out the Bad Boy Records founder’s over-a-year-old $100 million defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal.
In fact, Empire State Supreme Court judge Phaedra F. Perry-Bond didn’t just dismiss the February 25, 2025-filed action by the much-accused Combs, she backed up and drove over it several times. The judge said that there is no way Peacock‘s Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy documentary could have brought scorn on the Grammy winner because Combs’ reputation was already “tarnished by the numerous lawsuits, domestic violence video, press coverage, and a criminal indictment prior to the Documentary’s publication.”
Launched on the Comcast-owned streamer less than six months after Combs was arrested and indicted on racketeering, sex trafficking and prostitution charges by the feds, the January 14, 2025-debuting doc peeled back the layers on allegations of widespread violence and sexual abuse by Combs over the decades.
Peacock
At that point in the sordid Combs saga, which was receiving a deluge of media coverage at the time, not a lot of that seemed particularly new information. Perhaps more damning and personal for the “Missing You” producer, the 90-minute flick examined Combs’ role (or not) in the deaths of the iconic Notorious B.I.G. and Kim Porter, Diddy’s longtime girlfriend and mother of several of his children.
“Indeed, the entire premise of the Documentary assumes that Mr. Combs has committed numerous heinous crimes, including serial murder, rape of minors, and sex trafficking of minors, and attempts to crudely psychologize him,” the 17-page big bucks-seeking complaint states. “It maliciously and baselessly jumps to the conclusion that Mr. Combs is a ‘monster’ and ‘an embodiment of Lucifer’ with ‘a lot of similarities’ to Jeffrey Epstein.”
Judge Perry-Bond disagreed.
In her order Wednesday, the NY judge said that Combs and his lawyers never “establish a substantial basis regarding reputational harm.” She went on to spotlight that the Al B. Sure!-co-directed film was “carefully curated and nuanced” and made sure to make evident “interviewees’ biases and includes counterstatements to the allegedly defamatory statements”
Combs’ reps had no comment today on the ruling, but NBCU’s lead lawyer was very to the big picture about it. “This is an important ruling that protects filmmakers and journalists by dismissing this meritless complaint as barred by New York law and the First Amendment,” Gibson Dunn’s Ted Boutrous Jr. told Deadline.
In his criminal case, Combs was sentenced to four years in prison and a $500,000 fine last September by a federal judge after a jury convicted him of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Set now to be out of the low security New Jersey prison he’s in on April 15, 2028, Diddy was acquitted in the verdict of the much more serious charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking – which carried a potential life sentence for the now 56-year-old.
On April 9 in Manhattan, attorney Alexandra Shapiro argued before U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second District that U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian overreached and factored in charges Combs had been acquitted of in sentencing him. The three judges on the panel have not yet made a decision public on the appeal.
Combs had been seeking a seemingly not granted pardon from his old pal Donald Trump. He was also threatening to sue Netflix and old foe Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson over the successful Sean Combs: The Reckoning series — but that looks to have disappeared as much as this NBCU suit now.
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