Some attorneys say the case is decided before opening statements in a trial even begin. They believe the trial begins and ends during jury selection. Picking 12 people to decide what happens to Sean “Diddy” Combs. Some potential jurors come in - stating they’ve seen the hotel video of Diddy and Cassie. Others mention that they work at HBO - the same company that released a documentary on Diddy’s case. One juror mentions that they work at the very jail that Diddy is currently housed in. Diddy intently listens to the jurors getting questioned. At times - he shakes his head no, he smiles, he takes notes, and he jokes around with his famous attorneys. And sometimes…he looks back and stares at the members of the press. There are no cameras allowed in a federal courtroom. But we were there and we want to tell you what we saw. Full show notes at rottenmangopodcast.com
Chapter 1: What was the atmosphere like in the courtroom?
Tuesday, May 6th, I walk into this room in New York City. I'm already nervous. My plane was delayed. I was supposed to be here yesterday. The room itself is so daunting. It's huge. It feels like it could fit 100 people, 200 people. I have no spatial awareness. It feels like a cathedral church without the peaked ceilings. The ceilings are tall. They're made out of wood and everything about it.
feels like you cannot talk above a whisper. That's the energy of this room. So right when you walk in through the double doors, you've already walked through this like carpeted hallway where you can hang your coat. Double doors open up. There's two retired law enforcement officers next to you. They're wearing bulletproof vests.
They're retired.
Yes. And now this is their job. So all of them are retired law enforcement. So you walk in and the first thing you notice are church pews, just rows and rows of church pews. You got the left side and the right side. And then above that, and I'm just trying to paint the picture.
There are 10 massive chandeliers, huge lights, but chandeliers makes it sound very fancy and there's crystals hanging off of it. They look like the ceiling boob lights everybody hates, but they're huge. I don't even think I could hold it with my arms all the way stretched out. And there's 10 of them. So to give you scale of this room, it's grand.
Interestingly enough, magnifying these ugly ceiling boob lights tenfold actually does make them look prettier. So there's 10 of them lined up in rows of two right above the church pew. So five on the right side, five on the left side. And then you have this like wooden little barricade, like a little wooden fence. I mean, you could easily jump over it. There's a little door.
But beyond that, there's more rows and rows of seating. But they have computers and they have better chairs with cushions. And at the very front of the room, you have this podium and this rope painting. It's a massive artwork that takes up the whole wall and it's made out of rope that's been tied together and it's different colors. And it's probably two of me standing tall.
and you walk in and it is incredibly awkward. The church pews are just rock solid wood. You know it's good wood, but every time you inch your butt, you feel like the whole pew is vibrating. You can feel other people moving and by hour four, everybody's inching their butts because it's so sore from the solid wood pew. And it's awkward because almost everyone just sits uncomfortably on one side.
Now this is gonna probably change on Monday, but during jury selection, We're all seated pretty much on the right side.
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Chapter 2: Who were the key players in Diddy's trial?
Oh.
And so we get like a diagonal from behind view of Diddy.
I see.
So the court sketch artists are at the front. There's about two to three and they have, I didn't know it was this big because when I look online, it looks like a little thumbnail. I thought they bring in a little notepad. It's like two feet. It's not canvas. It's like a paper. And they have chalk. They have pastels.
They have the surgeon binoculars that they put on their head to stare into Diddy's soul. Yeah, I guess. They're trying to get all the details of every defense attorney, the judge, the prosecutors of Diddy. And then behind them, you have a few empty rows and then like a few scattered people. These appear to be people associated with Diddy's legal team.
or supporters of Diddy, aka his friend was there. So his family aren't there yet. They're going to show up for opening statements, but they're not here for jury selection. One friend is there. He was sitting two rows in front of us. And then you have the in-house.
Was he the one wearing the free Diddy shirt?
He was pleasant. He didn't really talk to anybody, but yeah, he was sitting there. And then behind him, you have the court reporters. And then behind that row, you've got us, members of the press. That's where I was sitting. And when you get there, you sit down and the place feels like 90% of church, 10% the backrooms. It feels intentionally uncomfortable.
And you're just sitting on this rock solid pew. And the one saving grace of this entire place is there's massive windows that are covered in sheer curtains. So you can't really see out. But if you do take a peek, it's the most beautiful view of New York City and the Hudson River. But nobody's looking outside. We're staring at this one door near the front of the courtroom.
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Chapter 3: How do attorneys select jurors?
Because a lot of the questions being asked during jury selection are very repetitive. Are you going to be able to not be biased? Yes, you saw the hotel video, but are you going to be able to put that aside and not be biased? The questions themselves don't say a lot, but attorneys say it's the way the jurors answer the questions.
If in any way they exhibit a tendency to challenge the question, strike them. Get them out. One jury consultant says, trials aren't completely won in loss injury selection, but all lawyers acknowledge it's a big part of winning. Pick the perfect jury and your job gets so much easier.
Make some mistakes in jury selection and you're essentially down 10 points with a minute to go because how jurors' brains work matter more than how you present the case. I believe that is the most important phase of the trial. To which one famous jury consultant says, jurors are not empty cups.
They're not little empty cups where lawyers get to pour their information in from both sides and see which one they like. Jurors serve as filters. The way they process the information distorts some of the evidence before arriving to their decision. Basically saying it doesn't really matter how good your case is.
If someone has such a strong fundamental bias against your case that you did not catch during jury selection, you might as well quit and move to Florida and change your government name because you're not going to be able to convince them. That's how these attorneys describe it. Surveys done on jurors, a lot of them, they actually start forming opinions on everyone in that courtroom.
I mean, obviously not people in the pews, everyone in the courtroom before the trial even starts. they're typically looking at, a lot of the times, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, and obviously the defendant. They're typically looking for competent, energetic, organized attorneys who seem appreciative, patient, sympathetic, good listeners. They're looking for a pleasant presence.
not the shrug presence that Diddy brought, but I don't think they care for that for him. Progressively, as the days go on, Diddy does seem to get a lot more confident. The first day that he walks in, he's wearing a white collared shirt, dark navy sweater on top. It's your very typical court defendant outfit. His hair is grayish white.
And the way that my researcher describes it the very first day, because his demeanor does change a little bit the second day, she says, she says, this is not Puff Daddy. This is a man named Sean Combs. This is a 55 year old man with probably a bad left knee. which I would say is very accurate.
There were multiple times throughout the first week of trial where either did he start slapping his left knee under the table, like just really slapping it. It's not loud, but you can see like he's slapping it or chopping it. Or where there's brief moments where everybody stands up and stretches to use the restroom, he will start stretching that specific left knee.
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Chapter 4: What strategies are used in jury selection?
Evil eyes are staring at me and I see it now. Shout out to Brian Steele. Take off the cuffs. We leaving now. The whole song is called Brian Steele. So who the hell is Brian Steele and why is there a song named after him on a Drake album? Brian Steele is one of Diddy's defense attorneys, but he's most well known for being Young Thug's attorney.
This is the man that with his full chest said, Your Honor, Young Thug? More like Young, Truly Humble Under God. That's what his name means. He didn't say it like that. He said it much more eloquently, but it was equally goofy. He also shows a picture of Young Thug that
supposedly shows him making the letter B with his hand, which I guess the prosecutors were trying to argue that means a gang, that like that's a gang sign.
Pretty much that's a B, which I think by a lot of netizens or really anyone with some ocular capacity could see that it does indeed probably look like a B. It's like an eye exam and you put the super clear slide and you're like, oh yeah, that's a B, right? I'm being dramatic, but Brian Steele disagrees.
He said, that is not a B. That is a P because my client, young thug, truly humble under God, is pushing positivity. P for positivity. Listen, I don't know. You know, I don't even want to get too deep into the Brian Steele lore and the young thug case because I might do a whole separate deep dive on that one. But now that same attorney is sitting on Diddy's left side.
He's sitting right next to Diddy for jury selection. And he is interesting. He's so fascinating. And this is the part where I feel like, please listen to the wording in all of this. I'm trying to describe exactly what I saw in that courtroom. And we went in with the idea of, especially for jury selection, we wanted to see how the jurors would react to the defense and the prosecutors.
So yeah, I could have walked in and been like, I personally don't like Diddy. So I personally wouldn't defend him if I were an attorney. So I personally don't like the defense attorneys. Like I could have just walked in like that, right? But I did want to see from a more neutral perspective of maybe how some of the jurors would feel. And I will say Brian Steele is very likable.
All of Diddy's attorneys are incredibly likable if you remain neutral.
How in what sense?
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Chapter 5: What makes Diddy's defense team stand out?
And I think we won't really understand what angle they're going for until the opening statements. Now, one attorney completely unrelated to all of this, slightly controversial, bizarrely comments. Generally speaking, I mean, there's all these other small things you can do to find the right juror. The heavy, rounded face, happy looking person is the most desirable. The undesirable juror is quite the
slight, underweight, delicate type. Features are going to be sharp and fragile, and he's got a very lean look. The athletic juror is hard to categorize. Usually he is hard to convince, but once he's convinced, he will go all the way with you. As for Linda Moreno, she's a juror expert on anti-Muslim bias in American jury trials.
The trial of Nora Solomon, the widow of the Pulse nightclub shooter, Linda Moreno got her acquitted. That was the first complete acquittal of terrorism charges in America since 9-11. Now, without getting too much into her cases, at least not in this moment, she does have a fascinating way of picking jurors. For example, in one case, she was representing a client that was charged with explosives.
She says it's all about picking a jury. So in that particular trial, one prospective juror talked about how her brother had served in Iraq and how she had grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. A lot of people on the defense team wanted to get rid of this juror because you're dealing with explosive charges. This is not this is not good. There's going to be a lack of understanding there.
They don't want her on the jury, but Linda Moreno wants to keep her. She's saying she had a clear, strong voice suggesting that she thought about a lot of things. And something she said really impressed me. You would have to live through the war in Vietnam to understand why people did what they did. She said, we're keeping her. She was firm.
She said, if selected, she's going to have the sensitivity to put herself in other people's shoes. That juror was one of the five leading the jury to an acquittal.
That is so fascinating. I feel like nobody talks about the deeper level of what these people will determine.
Oh, we're going to get into different... They have different methods. So one person describes Linda as having a very gentle persistence. That makes a huge difference. She does seem gentle. She's an older woman now. She seems very slender. She had on giant pearls, a pearl necklace. I mean, I think... She must have been very successful in her career because those pearls were crazy.
Yeah, they looked beautiful. Definitely not as strong as a presence, but maybe that's intentional. Maybe she wants to fly under the radar so she can analyze jurors without them feeling like she's analyzing them. And they're focused on the other attorneys so she can just watch. I don't know.
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Chapter 6: How does the judge's demeanor affect the trial?
And I am qualified.
Yes. But I don't think she's like overly eager.
Oh, okay.
I mean, I think a lot of people can interpret it different ways. So I don't want to put an interpretation out there because, you know, but you could, I guess some cynical people could say she wants to maybe write a book after. Hmm. She's in publishing. Maybe she wants to write a book. Maybe she wants the thrill. Maybe it's fun, right? Maybe she wants to take off work.
Or just simply the fact that the connection is crazy.
Yes. Or maybe some people are like, maybe she genuinely doesn't care about any of these people and in her head does not understand why it relates.
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
But the blurb is kind of crazy. The blurb continues. People called him crazy. Now back from the brink of death, he reclaims his power and truth in this incredible memoir about finding inner peace despite countless attempts to break him. The last lines of the blurb read, I'll be sure is one of the few still living to tell the whole story.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Diddy's charges?
I will say that the media is reporting a lot of jurors just didn't want to be there and didn't want to serve. I actually didn't necessarily get that being in the courtroom. I think the transcripts do kind of read that way. I'm sure a ton of that. A lot of them just looked annoyed to be in jury duty, but they didn't. It wasn't like they were coming up with a million excuses to try and leave.
They just seemed kind of like, I don't know if I can do eight weeks because I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to have financial hardship like I can't. A lot of people seemed relatively neutral, if not like, oh, yeah, I mean, I guess jury duty, right? But there was one juror where I felt, I'm like, I don't think this woman wants to be here at all.
She walks in and she tells the judge she has a new scheduling conflict. Her son is graduating high school and she wants to be there. It's the second week of June. Trial is supposed to go into July. The judge starts asking her, what day? I don't recall. On a Friday? I don't remember. Okay, what time of day is it? It starts, I think, around 10 or 12.
and you don't know the day, like it's a Wednesday, Thursday, I don't recall. Which week is it? I can't say, I don't remember. Okay, well you clearly thought about this after you did your questionnaire, but you didn't go look to see what the date was or what the time was or any of the details of the event? Well, I rely on my son to tell me these things and he didn't yet.
He says he didn't know it himself yet, but I remember when my first one was graduating, it was around this time. All right, where does your son go to school? Like, where is it? In the city? It's in Westchester. They move on and the judge asks her if there's anything else she needs to change from her questionnaire. She says, I think there was. I don't know.
So there were questions about violence and graphic. Yes. Images and stuff like that. So I don't think I can do that. Why? I'm battling depression right now, and I don't think that's going to help in my recovery. Which, side note, this is not me insinuating. I think that's a very real thing.
But then the next part, the judge says, all right, so in your questionnaire, why did you say that you did not have a problem looking at that type of material? I don't know. I was overwhelmed. I didn't realize. I didn't know about the case at all. All right, anything further that you wanted to change in your questionnaire? I didn't know about the case then. Now I do. What did you see? It was music.
It was a song that I heard about the case. How did you come upon hearing this song? It was on like a Russian comedy channel. She does get excused for cause. I did find the Russian comedy channel.
Wait, what?
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