EXCLUSIVE: Sean Combs‘ beef with Netflix and 50 Cent over Sean Combs: The Reckoning could add another court date to the All About the Benjamins performer’s already pretty full calendar.
Amidst the abundance of sexual assault civil complaints the incarcerated Diddy is currently fighting plus a December 23 filed criminal case appeal, and new prison release date, the Bad Boy Records founder may soon be coming through on his threats and taking on the Ted Sarandos-run streamer and longtime rival rapper too.
“Sean Combs and his team are still pondering their legal options over the Netflix docuseries and the stolen footage,” a spokesperson for the Bad Boy Records founder told Deadline today about the chart topping The Reckoning and series’ revealing BTS scenes of a scheming Diddy in the days leading up to his September 2024 arrest.
Currently behind bars at the low security Fort Dix in New Jersey, Combs escaped the big ticket sex trafficking and RICO charges on July 2, but was found guilty by the jury on two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Facing literally dozens and dozens of civil suits across the nation, and a new sexual battery probe opened last month by the LA County Sheriff’s department, Combs was sentenced to 30 months in early October
With time served taken into account, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had him originally set to be let out on May 8, 2028, if there were no incidents or citations. Then, once Combs was transferred to the far cushier Garden State facility, he wasset to be released on June 4, 2028.
Now, unless his fast-tracked appeal proves a winner, Diddy is getting out on May 25, 2028, according to the latest info from the FBoP.
No reason was given for this latest change and why just over a week was shaved off Combs’ time in the joint. Fact is, like so many things in life, it sometimes takes authorities a bit of time to get the math correct in incarceration matters for both high-profile convicts and regular ole bad guys.
Even before the four-part Alexandria Stapleton-directed Reckoning was launched on the global streamer on December 2, lawyers for Diddy tried to have it shut down. Calling Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson EP’d The Reckoning a “shameful hit piece,” that December 1 cease and desist letter proclaimed the footage of Combs in a NYC hotel rooming ranting at his defense lawyers was “stolen” and illegally obtained.
Accusing co-CEO Sarandos of “corporate retribution” from allegedly being rebuffed by Combs on a 2023 docu project, the letter went on to say: “As you are undoubtedly aware, Mr. Combs has not hesitated to take legal action against media entities and others who violate his rights, and he will not hesitate to do so against Netflix.”
Earlier this month, the streamer offered its own version of events to what the often hyperbolic Combs claimed was really going on. “The project has no ties to any past conversations between Sean Combs and Netflix,” a spokesperson for the streamer said of Sarandos and Diddy’s professional relationship and any other docu project. “The footage of Combs leading up to his indictment and arrest were legally obtained. This is not a hit piece or an act of retribution. Curtis Jackson is an executive producer but does not have creative control. No one was paid to participate.”
Perhaps unintentionally providing some degree of legal coverage to Netflix, so-called “Sean Combs’ documentarian” Michael Oberlies on December 10 offered up how the hotel footage ended up in The Reckoning. “The footage in question was not released by me or anyone authorized to handle Sean Combs’ materials; it was by a third party who covered for me for three days while I was out of state,” he said.
It should be noted that Netflix has been in a similar situation before over what was called stolen footage and the streamer came up the winner in court. Attempts in 2022 by members of orgasmic meditation organization OneTaste to shut down the docu Orgasm Inc over “misappropriated” footage failed. The streamer successfully argued in LA Superior Court that they had come across the video of training session legally and that a lot of what Orgasm Inc showed, with faces blurred, was out in public already.
Undoubtedly with the OneTaste case in mind, Combs’ The Reckoning lawyers must be weighing the odds of court victory with that precedent. Certainly, the stakes that are so much lower now the well watched douseries has been online almost a month.
On a parallel track, Diddy’s attorneys in his much hyped and already expedited appeal finally got around to putting an official document in the court docket just before Christmas. Trashing trial judge Arun Subramanian for supposedly acting like the “thirteenth juror,” the filing wants the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to spring Combs outta free one way or another ASAP.
“If this Court does not overturn Combs’s conviction, it should release him immediately and instruct the district court to resentence him only for the conduct of which he was convicted,” the Alexandra Shapiro signed 84-page appeal says.
Even though Combs admitted in the opening days of his trial in May that he had a serious drug problem and inflicted domestic abuse upon various women and men in his circle, the appeal lays it on thick and describes the Grammy winner as “an extraordinarily successful self-made businessman, artist, and philanthropist, and one of the most accomplished black men in this country.”
Let’s see if the same language is used in a lawsuit against Netflix and its brass, if it ever happens.
