CNN’s Elie Honig Says Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Could Spend the Rest of His Life in Prison Over Sex Trafficking Charge

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig noted that music industry mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs could spend the rest of his life in prison on Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after Combs was arrested by federal authorities.

Asked by Jim Acosta about the significance of the criminal charges against Combs being filed in the Southern District of New York, Honig dove into the stunning indictment.

“So first of all, this is a federal indictment, it’s been filed in the Southern District of New York, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx and some of the northern counties. So this will be a federal prosecution. Generally, federal prosecutions carry higher penalties, higher potential sentences than state prosecutions. And as I’ll get to in a moment, that is certainly the case here,” began Honig.

He continued:

So this is a three-count indictment against Sean Combs. Now, count one charges racketeering, conspiracy. And the indictment alleges that Sean Combs, along with others who are not charged but others, ran an enterprise, an operation, essentially a business that engaged in a series of crimes — here, those crimes relate to sex trafficking. In fact, the indictment names the racketeering enterprise, “The Combs Enterprise.” That’s the title that they gave the enterprise. So that’s count one.

Now, count two is- charges sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, meaning that Sean Combs participated in transporting women across state lines for illegal sexual purposes by force, or by threats, or by intimidation. That is an extraordinarily serious charge. If prosecution- the prosecution can prove that the minimum sentence there, if they convict Sean Combs on that, is 15 years and the maximum is life, 15-year minimum sentence. And then count three charges transportation of another individual to engage in prostitution. It’s sort of a lesser included of count two.

So we’ve got a three-count indictment, racketeering, sex trafficking by force, and then interstate transportation for the purpose of prostitution. It’s a very serious indictment, these charges are extremely serious. The Southern District of New York does cases like this. They do cases against powerful, famous individuals all the time. And soon Sean Combs will be in court and he will certainly plead not guilty to this. And then we’ll be underway with the proceedings.

Watch above via CNN.