Sean Combs’s New Home: A Troubled Brooklyn Jail

In a letter to the judge, his lawyers called the conditions at the Brooklyn detention center “horrific,” referring to reports of food contamination, a recent murder and at least four suicides there in the past three years. Other judges, they noted, “have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pretrial detention.”

But Judge Tarnofsky was persuaded by federal prosecutors who argued in the Manhattan courtroom that what they described as Mr. Combs’s history of substance abuse, violence and obstruction of justice made him an unfit candidate for release. They pointed in one instance to how he had denied claims of physical abuse made by a former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, until surveillance video emerged of Mr. Combs assaulting her inside a hotel.

“The sequence of events makes crystal clear that you cannot take the defendant at his word,” Emily A. Johnson, a prosecutor, said at the hearing.

Mr. Combs remained largely impassive during the debate, sitting between his lawyers in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants. Prosecutors have accused him of coercing women to participate in elaborate sex parties with male prostitutes and of using violence and intimidation to prevent them from exposing him.

His lead lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told the judge the sexual encounters were consensual and asked her to trust that he would be able to produce his client, as directed, were Mr. Combs to be released.

“I don’t know that I think you can trust yourself,” Judge Tarnofsky responded, referring to Mr. Combs. She cited a history of alleged violence linked to substance abuse and noted that some of the people cited by prosecutors as victims of Mr. Combs could be particularly “susceptible” to coercion because of the power dynamic.The detention facility in Brooklyn — which opened in 1994, following several years of neighborhood opposition — has been host to a number of high-profile defendants, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, R. Kelly and Ghislaine Maxwell. It became the primary federal detention center in New York when its sister jail in Manhattan — where Jeffrey Epstein died — was closed in 2021 because of poor conditions.