Opinion | Sean Combs and the Limits of the ‘Family Man’ Defense

On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”

Combs has pleaded not guilty to these charges. Last year, after being accused of sexual assault in four separate lawsuits, Combs defended himself in part by invoking his family: “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”

The latest charges are vile, describing years of sexual and physical abuse, enabled by Combs’s vast fortune and the pull of his celebrity. The government outlines the way Combs and his staff allegedly used their power to “intimidate, threaten and lure female victims into Combs’s orbit, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Combs then used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers.”

Combs was denied bail on Tuesday. His lawyers tried to appeal the decision with a letter to the judge. In this missive, Combs’s lawyers paint “victim 1” as simply a jilted, lonely lover. “That one person was an adult woman who lived alone, who never lived with Sean Combs. She had her own friends, she had her own life, as adults tend to do. Mr. Combs and this person were very much in love for a long time,” the letter states. “This one person often expressed anger and jealousy because Mr. Combs had another girlfriend, as will be testified to by many witnesses and as the written communications show.”

Despite the fact that the world has seen video evidence of Combs assaulting his ex-girlfriend, his lawyers seem to believe that pitting Combs, a “loving family man,” against an “adult woman who lived alone” would be an effective defense.

They’re trying it because, to some extent, we still assign a positive moral value to getting married and having children. It’s why Republicans keep using Kamala Harris’s lack of biological children to attack her character. Combs’s lawyers are also likely playing on built in prejudices against Black women in particular, who have always had a harder time being seen as respectable, aspirational or worthy of protection in the public eye.

For as long as we have had mass media, celebrities — both men and women — have used their families as a means of image rehabilitation, and a way to deflect from run-ins with the law and general bad press. As the cultural critic Leo Braudy explains in his seminal history of fame, “The Frenzy of Renown,” the “aura of social glory” that trails performers has its roots in the 19th-century “self-help belief that making money signified not the quantity of wealth but the quality of virtue.”

Perhaps the most famous example of the rot behind the facade of a happy family is Joan Crawford, who posed for glossy photo shoots with her children while privately abusing them, as described in her daughter Christina’s memoir, “Mommie Dearest.” Anne Helen Petersen, the author of “Scandals of Classic Hollywood,” explained in The Washington Post that Crawford was able to maintain her stardom and her relevancy by shifting from her flapper image in the ’20s to “a beautiful, glamorous woman who was also self-sacrificing as a mother” and that in general, “a star is their image. They have to match what we think the way we think a man should be, or a woman should be or a person of color should be.”

Sean Combs was able to stay relevant for many years, in part because he used his power to intimidate people in the industry, particularly women, who might say no to him. In an article for The New York Times Magazine in July, Danyel Smith, who was the editor of Vibe Magazine in the late 1990s, wrote about the “menacing encounters” she had with Diddy. He threatened he would see her “dead in the trunk of a car” if she didn’t show him a cover before publication. Smith describes the ethos of the music industry at the time: “To report sexual misconduct — whether it was to attorneys or law enforcement or even your supervisor — often meant losing your job. Being ostracized. Or being a girl that just didn’t ‘get it,’ or didn’t know how to fend for herself.’”

That’s the same culture that tries to cast doubt on a woman’s story because she is an “adult woman living alone.” And it insults the intelligence of the public and the legal system for Combs’s lawyers to try to pretend that he’s some stalwart family man, as if the fact of his procreation is remotely exonerating.

But maybe that culture is changing. On Wednesday, a federal judge rejected Combs’s appeal. He will not be granted bail, and will have to wait for his trial in a Brooklyn jail instead of at his $48 million Florida home. “His influence makes it so difficult for witnesses to share their experiences and trust that the government can keep them safe from him,” one of the prosecutors said. There are limits to the ‘family man’ defense no matter how many photos you take with your kids wearing matching pajamas.