May 12, 2025
Prosecutors are likely to call expert witnesses to the stand to testify about the behavior of victims in abusive or coercive relationships, two legal analysts said on CNN.
On the stand today, Officer Israel Florez, a security guard who responded to the altercation between Sean “Diddy” Combs and his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura at a hotel in 2016, testified that he didn’t call the police because no one pressed charges.
He said that when he spoke to Ventura, she didn’t respond to any of his questions and “just said, ‘I want to leave, I just want to leave.”
Expert witnesses for the prosecution will likely give “psychological testimony” about how victims typically “behave in these kinds of coercive relationships,” Areva Martin, an attorney and legal affairs commentator, told CNN. These experts could explain why some victims don’t go to the police right away, for example.
In its opening statement, the defense claimed Ventura willingly stayed with Combs for 11 years and left on her own terms.
“I think a lot more jurors these days are aware of sort of this dynamic — this power differential that can happen in a relationship where sometimes a victim is sometimes is asked very candidly, ‘Do you want to press charges?’ And they respond, ‘No,’ but because they they feel internally conflicted about that,” Richard Gabriel, a trial consultant, said.
Some background: Before the trial began, Combs’ attorneys said prosecutors informed them they plan to call Dawn Hughes, a clinical psychologist, who has previously testified as an expert witness in two other sex trafficking cases: the prosecutions of musician R Kelly and Lawrence Ray, who was convicted of preying on students at Sarah Lawrence college.
Combs said he would call his own expert, forensic psychologist Dr Alexander Barney, to counter the government’s witness.
CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed reporting to this post.
