The China Mail - Netflix airs Diddy doc despite imprisoned mogul's legal threat

The four-part "Sean Combs: The Reckoning" chronicles the career and dramatic fall of the 56-year-old rapper and record executive, who was sentenced in October to 50 months in prison for prostitution-related crimes.

During his trial, a New York court heard how he coerced his former girlfriend Casandra Ventura into performing so-called "freak offs" -- sexual marathons with hired men that Combs directed and sometimes filmed.

The Netflix series features interviews with other associates who detail his allegedly predatory behavior, as well as with two people who claim that the hip-hop star sexually assaulted them.

Combs's lawyers had sought to halt the show's Tuesday release, sending a cease and desist letter to Netflix a day earlier claiming an apparent copyright violation.

They point to footage in the show of Combs speaking with his legal team days before his September 2024 arrest, in which he urges them to "find somebody that will work with us, that has dealt in the dirtiest of dirty business of media and propaganda."

Juda Engelmayer, Combs's spokesperson, told AFP that the artist had been capturing the video to "tell his own story, in his own way."

"It is fundamentally unfair, and illegal, for Netflix to misappropriate that work."

Netflix, in a statement cited by the Washington Post, said the footage of Combs was legally obtained.

Engelmayer also complained that rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson was allowed to executive produce the documentary series, calling him a "longtime adversary with a personal vendetta who has spent too much time slandering Mr Combs."

The pair have a feud that dates back to the mid-2000s, when 50 Cent released a diss track accusing Combs of knowing who murdered famed rapper The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997.

Combs was convicted in July of two counts of transporting people across state lines for prostitution. But a jury acquitted him of the most serious charges: sex trafficking and racketeering.

He is currently being held in a low-security federal prison some 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of New York. He is due to be released in May 2028.

N.Wan--ThChM