Sean Combs acknowledged abusing his girlfriends. That makes the verdict in his trial more painful for survivors of sexual assault.
The message is clear: Even when survivors find the courage to come forward against powerful figures, they will often still be disbelieved.
In my years as a sexual assault nurse examiner and trauma healing specialist, I’ve held space for survivors as they learned that their cases wouldn’t go to trial, that charges were dropped, that juries didn’t believe them.
I’ve watched strong, resilient people be weathered by the disorientation of institutional disillusionment.
Wednesday’s verdict in Sean Combs’ federal trial, acquitting the music mogul of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking while convicting him on lesser charges, represents another devastating setback to survivors everywhere. The damage from the verdict extends far beyond the walls of the Manhattan courtroom where jurors heard testimony from roughly three dozen witnesses over seven weeks.
To be clear, Combs’ lawyers never denied that he was abusive toward two of his girlfriends — the singer Casandra Ventura and a woman identified in court only by the pseudonym Jane.
“We own the domestic violence. We own it,” Marc Agnifilo, one of Combs’ lawyers, told the jury during closing arguments.
The message sent by the split verdict in the Combs case is clear: Even when survivors find the courage to come forward against one of the most powerful figures in entertainment, even when they endure public scrutiny and character assassination, and even when there is an acknowledgment of the abuse by the abuser, they will still often be disbelieved.
What happened in the Combs case isn’t just a legal outcome. It’s a wound inflicted on every survivor watching, a confirmation of their deepest fears about speaking truth to power.
The survivors I work with often describe feeling more damaged by institutional responses than by the original harm. When systems fail them, it creates a secondary trauma that can be more devastating than the initial assault. The Combs verdict is a textbook example of this phenomenon on a national stage.
Consider what survivors witnessed: Coercive sexual encounters that survivors shared in their testimony were presented as evidence of sex trafficking. Yet, the jury essentially said, “No, this doesn’t rise to that level.”
The implicit message that these harms and violations of human dignity somehow don’t qualify as “serious enough” is devastating.
For survivors watching from home, this verdict feels personal. They see themselves in those allegations as they grapple with the gradual erosion of boundaries and the confusion between survival and consent.
When a jury says those experiences don’t constitute the worst forms of sexual violence, survivors hear, “What happened to you wasn’t that bad, either.”
The acquittal on sex trafficking charges reinforces harmful myths about what trafficking “looks like.” Many expect trafficking victims to be chained in basements, not checking into luxury hotels, making choices under coercion.
The failure to convict Combs on the sex trafficking counts sends the message that if you had any agency, any ability to leave, any moments of apparent cooperation, then any exploitation that occurred doesn’t count.
What makes this verdict especially harmful is the stark display of how power and privilege operate within our justice system.
Combs had access to some of the best legal representation money could buy, a team that could challenge every piece of evidence and create reasonable doubt where survivors saw clear patterns of abuse.
Meanwhile, survivors faced the impossible task of proving their victimization to a standard that rarely accounts for the psychological complexities of power-based violence.
They had to overcome not just Combs’ legal team, but centuries of victim-blaming myths embedded in our cultural consciousness, leading their credibility to be automatically questioned.
The implicit message that these harms and violations of human dignity somehow don’t qualify as “serious enough” is devastating.
This isn’t justice. It’s a systematic tilting of the scales that ensures the powerful remain protected while the vulnerable remain exposed.
The Combs verdict joins a long list of high-profile cases where powerful men faced accusations of sexual violence, yet survivors often felt like it was their credibility that was on trial.
I’ve seen how this reality affects survivors’ willingness to report. They watch cases like Combs’ and decide silence is safer than speaking out.
The true toll of verdicts like the one handed down Wednesday is immeasurable. Every acquittal on serious charges emboldens other perpetrators, sends survivors back into hiding, and reinforces the power structures that enable sexual violence. When the system fails to hold powerful abusers fully accountable, it becomes complicit in future harms.
The survivors who came forward deserved better than what they received in the Combs case. They deserved a system that could see their full humanity and respond to how fully they were harmed.
Instead, they received another lesson in how justice remains elusive for those who need it most.
Laura Sinko is an assistant professor of nursing in Temple University’s College of Public Health and the director of research and survivor support at Our Wave, an online platform for survivors of sexual harm.