There’s a name for what Diddy allegedly did to Cassie — but you won’t hear it at trial

Among all the lurid details and allegations that have surfaced in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s trial on federal charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, one potential aspect of the music mogul’s relationships has flown under the radar. What we haven’t heard on the witness stand is a concept crucial to understanding intimate partner violence and how individual incidents can form a pattern of abuse over time. That pattern, described by sociologists as “coercive control,” may have played a major role in Diddy’s relationships — but it won’t play a major role in the trial. Generally speaking, “coercive control” is a pattern of controlling behavior, manipulation, and emotional abuse over time. It is criminalized in the UK, and seven states have passed laws that say coercive control is a form of domestic violence, though how they’re applied varies by state. US courts have been slow to adopt the concept, and Judge Arun Subramanian, overseeing Combs’s trial in New York City’s federal district court, blocked the prosecution’s expert on domestic violence, or intimate partner violence (IPV), from testifying specifically about coercive control. That leaves the prosecution and all witnesses walking a very interesting line in their presentation of the evidence against Combs, who has pleaded not guilty. While “coercive control” isn’t a widely recognized legal concept in the US, “coercion” as an individual act is. Typically described in the US legal code as being compelled, forced, or threatened to act in a specific way, it’s a crucial pillar of several of the legal charges being brought against Combs. Additionally, if the jury can’t hear testimony about the impact of long-term abuse and toxic environments on survivors over time, will they be able to understand why so many of the people testifying against Combs now spent years, even decades, working for him and/or entertaining positive relationships with him? The case serves as a reminder that, despite having been known to IPV prevention researchers for decades, “coercive control” is still a little-known term to the public. While it’s an important concept for expanding how we think about intimate partner abuse beyond acts of physical violence, some experts say its highly murky legal status is warranted. That ambiguity, however, makes it hard to talk about ways an alleged abuser might exert control over survivors that aren’t always obvious. Many of those methods have surfaced in the Combs trial. That gives us a major opportunity to understand what coercive control is — and the ways in which it’s being tried and tested in court. What even is “coercive control”? The term “coercive control,” reportedly first coined and promoted by the late social worker Susan Schechter, has existed in the fields of domestic violence prevention and feminist circles since the ’80s. “There is no single word to describe the full range of controlling behavior,” Schechter and her co-author Ann Jones wrote in their 1993 book When Love Goes Wrong in a section indexed as “coercive control.” They write that many controlling abusers “never use force” and note controlling behaviors, such as “deliberately throwing a partner into mental confusion and anxiety, and tearing a partner down emotionally.” If you or anyone you know is struggling with intimate partner violence (IPV), there are people who want to help. Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 (or text BEGIN to 88788). Since the late 20th century, the phrase “battered woman syndrome” has been used in court to describe the psychological effects of IPV on women, which can include trauma and cognitive defects. While still in wide use in courtrooms as a legal defense, the concept has long been a source of debate, with many experts framing it as part of general PTSD or using the gender-neutral phrase “battering and its effects” instead. Legal advocates have argued for decades for a better descriptor, one that emphasizes nonphysical forms of abuse as well as physical abuse. Enter “coercive control.” Experts like Schechter and the late Evan Stark have helped mainstream the phrase as an alternative concept, one that more clearly acknowledges the ways abusive partners often use nonviolent abusive tactics, such as emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, threats, and unpredictable behavior, to influence and control their situations. Research has shown that coercive control is present in up to 58 percent of relationships where IPV occurs, and even nonviolent coercive control engenders PTSD, depression, and ongoing fear in survivors. Understanding that such patterns exist helps us understand intimate partner violence, especially in answering questions like “why didn’t the victim just leave?” when “just leaving” is not so simple. But because coercive control is coercive, and coercion is often hard to pin down, it’s also a somewhat slippery legal concept. There’s not much precedent in the US court system for a discussion of coercive control as an ongoing pattern of abuse. There’s also debate among experts about whether trying to codify it is ultimately helpful or harmful — manipulation and gaslighting can be harder to identify than physical abuse or explicit threats as well as easier for abusers to turn around and use to accuse their victims. What “coercion” — and “coercive control” — have to do with the Diddy trial The charges against Combs are a bit tricky, which isn’t unusual for a racketeering case. Combs is charged with two counts of sex trafficking, two counts of transporting people across state lines for sex work, and one count of “racketeering conspiracy,” which is a broader charge than racketeering itself and merely requires the guilty party to have agreed to participate in any of a litany of crimes that fall under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization ACT, commonly known as RICO laws. In this case, those alleged crimes include forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, sex trafficking, and obstruction of justice — all acts that witnesses have testified to having seen Diddy commit or experienced themselves while with him. In all three charges, the legal concept of coercion plays a major role. It’s part of the criteria that must be met to prove illegal sex trafficking: Per the federal statute under which Combs is charged, any use of “force, threats of force, fraud, [or] coercion” to induce people to engage in sex work violates the law. Similar wording and logic apply to the transportation charge. If Combs used coercion to get people to travel across state lines for the purposes of sex work, he could be guilty. But an understanding of coercion can be very different based on different contexts. In the case of this trial, Judge Subramanian seems to be allowing discussion related to alleged individual moments of actual physical coercion, violent coercion, or the implied threat of physical harm to a target or others close to them. The prosecution’s domestic violence expert, clinical and forensic psychologist Dawn Hughes, was able to discuss elements of IPV on the witness stand, such as trauma bonding and reasons why survivors stay with their abusers — but she was prohibited from discussing how long-term coercive control can impact them and their reasoning. “There’s so much physical violence in this case, and I think it’s easy to extrapolate how fear of physical violence could coerce somebody into making choices,” Courtney Cross, who runs a law clinic for abuse and IPV survivors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told me. “But coercive control itself as a dynamic is way less about the physical violence and so much more about that web of nonphysical tactics of abuse.” Since testimony in the case kicked off May 12, we’ve already heard plenty of evidence pointing to physical coercion or the threat of it. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when 2016 surveillance footage surfaced in 2023 showing Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway. Ventura testified over several days on the witness stand that during their 11-year relationship, Combs frequently physically assaulted her, threatened her with violence, and dangled the possibility of leaking filmed sex footage of her to the public (which might be considered “revenge porn” or a form of image-based abuse). Multiple witnesses have corroborated Ventura’s testimony with their own accounts of having seen or heard Combs abuse Ventura. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura’s, testified that Combs once threatened her in Ventura’s 17th-story apartment by hoisting her to the balcony ledge. After yelling at her, he allegedly threw her into the balcony furniture, causing wounds and bruises to her legs. What’s perhaps even more striking, however, is the bigger picture that emerges from all of this witness testimony: an environment, in both Combs’s working relationships and his intimate ones, of fear, paranoia, and unpredictable outbursts of temper. One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that Combs issued a death threat to her on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point kidnapped her, forcing her to come with him to track down Ventura’s boyfriend. (The boyfriend was musician Kid Cudi, whose Porsche Combs is also accused of firebombing.) She as well as another former staffer have each testified to having been required to take polygraph tests by Combs to keep their jobs. Another former staffer, testifying under the pseudonym Mia, recounted being pressured to reside mainly with Combs at his residences, where she said she was then not permitted to lock her bedroom door or leave the property. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him. The physical abuses that Combs allegedly inflicted are covered in the trial and are on their own horrific enough. But what’s left unexplained is the mental and emotional anguish that a pattern of coercive control creates. Having rules about where and how to live, the implicit invasion of privacy that comes with a forced polygraph test or not being allowed to lock a door; these things could add up to a sense that a person does not have agency over their own life. All of these moments arguably create a pattern of abuse and manipulation by Combs — the hallmarks of coercive control that the witnesses seem to have lived with and experienced, even if they can’t refer to it by name in the courtroom. “Coercive control” has a long history but a tricky legal status — perhaps for good reason So far, the only area of the legal system where coercive control has made inroads is the family court system — and the few states that do have laws on the books often have harrowing stories that put them there. Take Jennifer’s Law, for instance, the 2021 Connecticut law criminalizing coercive control. It was named in part for Jennifer Magnano, a mother of three who was shot and killed in 2007 by her estranged husband. The murder occurred shortly after a judge ordered Magnano, who had fled the state, to return with her kids for a custody hearing, ignoring her claims of having experienced over a decade of abuse. The Connecticut law now defines coercive control and increases protections for people experiencing it while ensuring they don’t have to testify in person before someone they are being protected against. Yet even with these stiffer types of legal protections in place, problems abound. To someone experiencing coercive control, it’s often the nonphysical meanings of “coerce” that can exert the most power and have the longest-lasting psychological effects. But courts may fail to recognize highly individualized acts of coercion because they’re looking for signs of physical violence or threats. Additionally, just as abusers often use DARVO tactics (in which an abuser paints themselves as the wronged party using a strategy of “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”) to get authorities on their sides, coercive control patterns can be used against survivors in similar ways. Abuse victims can and often do react to their abusers with self-defense, or reactive violence. Their abusers will often use this reactivity to their advantage with authorities, rendering abuse victims vulnerable to being targeted by the same laws put in place to protect them. Think of it like a zero-tolerance policy in a school that punishes the bully and their victim equally without questioning who has the power and who is the target of abuse. Cross has argued against passing laws criminalizing coercive control in favor of expanding resources to empower survivors who are trying to escape abusive situations. She points out that, unlike the UK, the US lacks a system of robust resources, rigorous risk assessment, and training around the issue that could help authorities identify it when they see it — and seeing it at all is the first challenge. “You would need professionals to be able to see it differently in different people and validate that and understand how to respond to that,” Cross said. Rather than the courts trying to address coercive control after it’s already established as a pattern, Cross explained what we need is “a wholesale societal reorganization to be able to take care of people.” And most of all, what we need is money. “People are trying really hard to meet this massive demand, but there aren’t nearly enough supportive resources for anybody, including DV survivors, especially the most marginal DV survivors,” she said. One thing that makes coercive control particularly complicated, Cross said, “is that to recognize and respond to it, we have to see it in ourselves” — and culturally, many of the traits that often comprise an abusive personality begin as highly lauded attributes, such as confidence, forcefulness, or invulnerability. “We don’t want to see that sometimes we do shitty and manipulative things and that maybe that crosses a line,” Cross said. “We don’t want to see that we may have and take advantage of power differentials with our partners and people we love. I think to really understand coercive control, we have to be willing to look inside of ourselves, and people don’t want to do that.” Cross pointed out that while coercive control isn’t under discussion on the witness stand, it is on full display throughout the Diddy trial itself. “There is such an obvious analogy to me between the idea of this enterprise and the way that it relies on power and control and using fear to regulate and enforce the enterprise,” she said. “It may not be fraud, extortion, and bribery per se, but the emotional and psychological abuse amounts to a pretty similar outcome on an interpersonal level.” Essentially, organized crime and similar organized illegal systems exert pressure on their members, at scale, that resembles coercive control. While this context may not be made explicit in court, it’s hard to ignore the similarities — and harder to ignore the possibility that this approach to relationships may have helped Combs hide in plain sight all along.