Inside the NYC prison that will house Diddy until his sex trafficking trial

Embattled hip-hop mogul, Sean “Diddy” Combs was remanded in federal custody on Tuesday afternoon, September 17, after a judge denied him bail as his s3x abuse case proceeds to trial.

Diddy pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution, and will be housed in pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The MDC holds around 1,600 inmates, all but a few dozen awaiting trial.

It has been New York City’s primary federal detention center since 2021, when the Bureau of Prisons shuttered Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Jeffrey Epstein died over the appalling conditions inside.

Combs’ lawyers even acknowledged the deplorable conditions in a motion for bail on Tuesday, noting that ‘several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention.’

‘Just earlier this summer, an inmate was murdered,’ the hip hop mogul’s defense attorneys wrote, according to the Daily Beast. 

‘At least four inmates have died by suicide there in the past three years.’

The attorneys were referencing the June 7 death of Uriel Whyte, who had been awaiting trial on gun charges for more than two years when he was stabbed to death.

The prison was put into a lockdown in the aftermath, ‘where essentially, we come out of our cell every three days for a 15-minute shower,’ one inmate told NY 1 at the time.

‘You’re literally in solitary confinement when you shouldn’t be,’ he said.

But just over one month later, another inmate, Edwin Cordero, died after being injured in a prison fight. 

His attorney called his death ‘senseless and completely preventable’ and said Cordero was ‘another victim of MDC Brooklyn, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is Hell on Earth,’ according to the New York Times.

Inmates and their lawyers have also claimed they found cockroaches on their food and mold in the showers, and in a number of recent legal cases, conditions at the prison were describes as ‘dreadful,’ ‘longstanding,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘inhuman’ and an ‘ongoing tragedy,’ Combs’ attorneys argued.

Diddy has pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution charges, and following the hearing on Tuesday, his attorney promised to appeal Tarnofsky’s decision to deny bail.

‘Mr Combs is a fighter – he will fight this until the end. He is innocent. He came to New York to establish his innocence. He is not afraid – he is not afraid of the charges,’ Agnifilo said.

‘He has been looking forward to clearing his name and he is going to clear his name. We believe in him wholeheartedly. He didn’t do these things.’

If convicted on the racketeering charges, Combs faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, and a sex trafficking conviction would carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars.