Sean Combs, the music mogul whose career has been upended by sexual assault lawsuits and a federal investigation, was arrested at a Manhattan hotel on Monday evening after a grand jury indicted him.
The indictment is sealed and the charges were not announced but Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said he believed he was being charged with racketeering and sex trafficking.
A statement from Mr. Combs’s legal team said they were disappointed with the decision to prosecute him and noted that he had been cooperative with the investigation and had “voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges.”
It is nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.
“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,” the statement said. “He is an imperfect person but he is not a criminal.”
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement posted on social media late Monday that “we expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
Mr. Agnifilo said Mr. Combs had been arrested by officers with Homeland Security Investigations at about 8:30 p.m American Time, at the hotel where he was staying, in New York. It is expected he will be held overnight and then arraigned on Tuesday.
The arrest of Mr. Combs, 54, makes him the highest-profile figure in the music world to face criminal charges for sexual misconduct since R. Kelly, the R&B singer who, after trials in New York and Chicago, was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for child sex crimes, sex trafficking and racketeering.
Mr. Combs, 54, who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, was a key figure in the global rise of hip-hop as a commercial force in the 1990s and 2000s, helping to make stars of rappers and R&B singers like the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige. But he has been under intense public scrutiny since a former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, filed a lawsuit last November accusing him of years of sexual and physical abuse.
Homeland Security Investigations, which often investigates sex trafficking cases, led the inquiry into Mr. Combs. The March raids were announced to the world in television news footage of agents converging on Mr. Combs’s sprawling Los Angeles mansion and carrying out electronics; the mother of one of his sons later shared footage of agents pointing guns at Justin and Christian Combs while they were being detained inside their father’s home.
Since then, federal prosecutors have been silent, quietly delivering subpoenas to potential witnesses as they built their case against Mr. Combs.
