Diddy on Trial: What is Sex Trafficking?
episodePreviously titled “Diddy on Trial - What is sex trafficking?” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 28, 2026
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What are the charges against Sean 'Diddy' Combs?
The rapper Sean Diddy Combs is currently inside the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, awaiting trial in May on charges of sex trafficking, transportation for prostitution and racketeering with conspiracy. He denies all the allegations. We're going to be examining what each of these federal charges means over the coming weeks, hearing from experts and people affected in cases separate to Diddy's. We're starting with sex trafficking. And to be honest, we've heard a lot about this offence in the media in recent years.
A jury in New York has found the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell guilty on five counts of grooming and trafficking teenage girls for abuse.
R. Kelly was one of the most successful recording artists of the 1990s. He won a Grammy, filled arenas and sold 75 million records.
Today, though, his reputation is lying in tatters and he could spend the rest of his life in jail after a jury in New York found him guilty of trafficking people for him to sexually abuse.
The BBC revealed claims that Mike Jeffries and his partner Matthew Smith sexually exploited and abused men at events they hosted in their New York residencies and hotels around the world. Lawyers for both men have previously denied any wrongdoing.
From conspiracy theories to convictions, sex trafficking cases make headlines and trends on social media. But how much is known about the actual offense and the different forms it can take? So today, we're going to be hearing from a woman who helps survivors of sex trafficking and the lawyer who successfully prosecuted R. Kelly. But my first guest is Dr. Marcel van der Wat, president at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in the U.S. Hi, Marcel.
Hi, Anoushka. Thank you for this time, for having this conversation.
So my first question to you is, what exactly is sex trafficking?
What is sex trafficking?
Well, sex trafficking at its core revolves around the use of fraud, force, or coercion to exploit people, usually for commercial sex. There's obviously also forced labor, but when you're talking about sex trafficking, there's always the commercial sexual exploitation component to that crime. so many of the victims in these crimes don't think they are victims or even consider themselves victims they are either parts of the definition of sex trafficking where it talks about the abuse of a position of vulnerability you know where people where a vulnerability is taking advantage of because of factors like social circumstances economic circumstances being pregnant being undocumented Some of it could be in a nightclub. It could be in a brothel. I've done work elsewhere in the world. Some areas' brothels are legal. In some places, they are not. So it could be a brothel, a strip club, definitely at house parties often where there's a very, very kind of a controlled way of knowing who enters and who doesn't.
and everybody at a venue like that has some value that can be extracted by the the criminal group and sometimes these are just social events in in the public eye you know depending on what the The purpose is of the party, is it part of a method to build a relationship, to build rapport with a possible investor or an asset, or is it really just to go all out and abuse, exploit, you know, usually women, and in the process entertain, and in the process, again, corruption, complicity, compromising people in order to extract value from them subsequently.
And as we've been sort of hearing about this over the past couple of years in different cases and more in the media, definitely a lot on social media, my view of sex trafficking, when I really sat down and thought about it, is kind of a lot based on the larger sex trafficking rings.
Well, sex trafficking can happen as linear as being trafficked from one house to another house in a street by an individual trafficker, right? It could be an organized criminal group. I mean, the nature of transportation systems and we're looking at technology, et cetera, has really made these groups very, very fluid, very dynamic. These relationships are often relationships of convenience.
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