Trafficking Survivor Advocate Sinnamon Love Breaks Down the Diddy Trial: "It's a Model I See a Lot"

One of the thorniest and most confusing aspects of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering case is the actual sex trafficking. Diddy is charged with two counts of it. But what exactly is sex trafficking? How do his alleged activities meet that definition? And how different are his alleged crimes from sex trafficking when it’s done by someone other than a world-famous centi-millionaire?

To get a handle on all of this, Complex talked to Sinnamon Love. She is a sex worker and a survivor of trafficking. She is also a visual artist, a writer, and the executive director of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, which serves marginalized sex workers by expanding access to mental health care, labor advocacy, and one-to-one peer support for survivors of trafficking and domestic violence. On top of all that, she serves as an anti-trafficking consultant for several organizations and does policy work on all levels, including internationally.

Read our interview with Love below.

To start, what is sex trafficking?

The federal definition of trafficking includes the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by force, fraud, or coercion with the intent to exploit them for profit. That includes both sex and labor trafficking. Sex trafficking involves commercial sex acts through force, fraud, or coercion, or if the individual is a minor.

The thing that I find really interesting about this case is that the focus is on sex trafficking. But my opinion is that Diddy actually has a history of what appears to be labor trafficking—he has a long reputation of not paying people for their labor. [Edit Note: a similar crime, forced labor, is one of the alleged acts that is mentioned as part of Diddy's racketeering charge.]

When you think about withholding of wages, that is also considered a part of the human trafficking component. It's important for people to understand there are actually more instances of labor trafficking throughout the world than there is sex trafficking, but sex trafficking often gets all of the attention.

When we look at Cassie, her testimony reported that she viewed her relationship with Diddy and her sexual servitude as being directly tied to her contract. So there is a labor trafficking component to this, regardless of their relationship—the idea that her career was directly tied to the relationship, and the freak offs are a part of that. Her work was directly tied to her trafficking experience.

Take me back to when Cassie filed her civil suit. What were your initial thoughts?

I didn't really know much about their relationship prior, except that there was this age gap and that she was his artist. I was really hopeful that her suit would allow other survivors to see what is possible in terms of recuperating the financial loss.

The thing that I was immediately drawn to was—it usually takes a survivor decades for their lives to stabilize after any sort of sexual violence. Trafficking is considered a form of sexual violence. Cassie filing the lawsuit allows her life to stabilize. She lost income. She has to go to therapy. Therapy is expensive, especially when you're looking at very specialized therapy that is culturally competent.

As a woman of color, as a celebrity, as someone who has dealt with extreme sexual violence and sexual abuse at the hands of a partner, someone who had substance use addiction: these are all very specialized types of therapy that you need. You don't go to your average everyday therapist. The more specialized the therapy gets, the more expensive it is. And it's not a short term fix: you don't go to therapy for a year and you're suddenly better.

Being able to file that lawsuit to get the kind of financial remuneration that she needs to be able to thrive during this next stage of her life is something that not every survivor gets to have. I was really happy that she was able to do that, and hopeful that more survivors are prompted to come forward, not just naming the abuse but suing their abusers where appropriate.

In Diddy’s criminal case, four out of five of the charges deal with either sex trafficking or transportation in service of prostitution. What can you tell me about that?

When you're transporting someone across state lines for the purpose of commercial sex, it's a felony, and it's considered sex trafficking. Also, if he was hiring sex workers to cross state lines, that's considered trafficking.

The government has shared text messages in which Diddy talks about flying people to different cities, allegedly for freak offs.

Right. I think because sex work has become so normalized in our culture, people forget that it's illegal. Outside of parts of Nevada, there's no place in the country where prostitution is legal. So the hiring of people and moving them across state lines is definitely a felony. I think that's probably where some of the RICO charges come in—because of all the other people that were involved in moving them across state lines.

The force, fraud, or coercion piece comes in a couple different ways. The physical abuse has a lot to do with the force component. The drugs have a lot to do with the coercion piece of this conversation. Her contract also has a lot to do with the coercion piece if she believes, or he makes her believe, that her ability to work is directly tied to her participation in these acts. I think the relationship and the contract are a part of the fraud piece.

If I make you believe that the only way that you're going to be able to work is if you participate in these freak offs, then that's fraud. The contract is based on a fraudulent idea of being able to work and be a successful artist. I think she mentioned in her testimony that she only did one album, and she felt like she wasn't going to have a career if she didn't participate.

She described her music as busywork. She felt like being in the studio was a way for Diddy to keep control over her.

Right, exactly. It's a form of control. She didn't really have the option of being able to work with people she wanted to work with. She couldn't really take on other projects. He was checking in on a consistent basis, accusing her of having affairs with other people as a form of emotional and psychological control over her, and impacting her ability to work. There was also the financial abuse that goes along with it. That is something I think about a lot when I'm in these anti-trafficking spaces.

Let me back up: when people think about sex trafficking, they often think about strangers kidnaping people and forcing them into sexual labor. But the reality for a lot of people, particularly for young children and for women of color or people of color in general, is that often the sex trafficking is directly tied to domestic violence. For many people, the trafficker is not a stranger. It's usually a family member, a friend or a loved one.

People, particularly women of color, who are trafficked by a partner, often may not even view what they're going through as trafficking. They might view it as domestic violence. They may view it as financial abuse. Part of that is because we don't talk enough about the way that people are trafficked by partners.

When you look at—and I put the word “pimp” in quotes, because it's a very derogatory term that's directly tied to anti-Blackness—but when we look at that culture, often the women who work for these men view them as their partner. In Cassie's case, while she was surviving the domestic violence and the financial abuse, she may not have even recognized that she was being trafficked. Something that I didn't see, but I'm very curious about, is whether Diddy traded these freak offs with her for any kind of business dealings. It really does follow a lot of the classic lines, because he was transporting her and sex workers across state lines, and he also had people transporting drugs across state lines for his personal use for his freak offs, for his parties.

Let's say I was a sex worker: if I was going to see a client and they asked me to bring drugs and it happens to be a sting, the drugs become an add on charge. I've been very curious whether the feds are also looking to build a case around drugs. Because there's a lot of talk about drugs, and I think drugs are very pivotal to the sex trafficking, because you cannot consent if you're intoxicated.

There's a fine line there too, because chem sex plays a big part in queer and gay sex culture. I've known many people, including myself, who have had lots of sex consensually with drugs involved. The question becomes whether or not her consent was given autonomously, and did the drugs impair her ability to consent.

This case is different from just about every other sex trafficking case because the person at the center of it is world famous and has hundreds of millions of dollars. But other than the scale, is it anomalous? Or is it similar to a lot of other sex trafficking cases?

Obviously, the scale makes it very different because of his access. But I think that it appears to follow a pattern of manipulation that a lot of people go through when they are experiencing this kind of sexual violence.

But the thing is, sexual labor doesn't always have to be for money. People may trade sex for housing or their other basic needs. With Cassie, it fits even that framework because he paid for all of her housing. I'm assuming that there was some sort of a salary.

One of Diddy’s former assistants testified to having a conversation with Cassie where she talked about how Diddy gave her an allowance.

Right. So the money that she was earning to cover any expenses that she had, her housing, her basic needs, and her career were all directly tied to her sexual labor. So it does fit the definition.

I see it happen often with survivors. If they're unhoused, for example, their trafficker is paying for their hotels every night. Even if they're not earning money, they have a place to live. So when I think about the fact that Cassie’s housing was tied to the sexual labor she was performing for him—it's a model that I see with a lot of trafficking survivors.

One of the points of contention before the trial started was related to the transportation to engage in prostitution charges. Diddy’s legal team argued: this is a racist law.

There is some validity to the argument. The Mann Act [previously known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910] is directly tied to the criminalization of cannabis, and the first person who was ever prosecuted under the Mann Act was Jack Johnson, who was a Black boxer who had a white girlfriend.

There have been stories that she was underage or that she was a prostitute. But the bottom line was that she was a white woman and he transported her across state lines. So he was charged with facilitating prostitution and transporting her across state lines for this purpose.

But when you look at the actual statistics from the U.S. government on trafficking, the majority of people who have been charged with these trafficking laws have actually been white men. White men are arrested for trafficking at higher rates than Black and brown men, but they're not the face of it because it doesn't sell. But the statistics prove it. But is the White-Slave Act a racist act? Yeah, absolutely. It was designed to target marginalized communities.

So far, two people we've heard from who in the trial have been directly involved in freak offs were initially hired as exotic dancers. Then, according to their testimony, once they got to the hotel room with Diddy and Cassie, they were presented with this idea of sex with her. I'm curious what you made of that.

A lot of sex workers tend to work across the spectrum of sexual labor. People may work as dancers, they may do bachelor parties, they may do webcam, they may have OnlyFans, they may do porn, they may do street based work.

There may be a coercion piece there as well. Sometimes when people are going to do a job, they may be going with the intention of doing one thing and, depending on their financial situation, if they’re presented with the opportunity to earn more money, or an opportunity that is either this or nothing, they may choose to do the thing that they're being presented with in order to earn money.

I think about people who may show up in a taxi and not be able to afford to get home, for example. Their acquiescence to the work that is being presented to them is directly tied to their ability to leave.

They also may autonomously decide that they're going to do this thing. It's not unusual for people to say, "OK, yeah, I'm going to stick around and earn the money that I came to earn plus a bonus," if that's already a part of the type of work that they're normally doing.

In some cases, people testified that they were getting escorts through an agency.

Yeah. And because of the trafficking laws, the agencies cannot provide people for sex. Sex for money is illegal, but companionship or dancing is not. So they can protect themselves by only hiring out people for a particular type of labor that is legal.

Often, people at the agencies will tell the workers, don't do these things; or, what you do in your own time is your own business, but that's not what we're hiring you out for. Then if the person makes this agreement directly with the client, that's between them. The agencies protect themselves because they don't want to get shut down for hiring someone out for an illegal activity.

Assuming that the government’s take on Cassie’s relationship with Diddy is true, and she was coerced into hundreds of sexual encounters over the course of nearly 11 years: what would be a reasonable next step for a person who went through something like that?

I'm very curious whether she will get involved in any kind of advocacy, or if she'll write a book about her healing journey. Not about the abuse, but about what it took for her to heal. She is such a high profile person, and it is such a high profile case.

I'm also very curious what she will do to advocate for young people who are looking to get into the business. I hope she might be involved in creating social safety nets for young artists who are coming into the business around recognizing abuse, because we do see a lot of young people coming to the business who are taken advantage of.

I think about Aaliyah. We never got to hear her story of exactly what happened when she was with R. Kelly. That situation was very different because she was still a child, but even then, transporting her across state lines for sexual labor basically was a form of trafficking. It's very clear that R. Kelly married Aaliyah in order to avoid being hit with a trafficking charge. My hope is that because Cassie's case happened in such a public way, at some point in time she will, when she's ready, advocate for some failsafe for young artists.

I would really love to hear her talk more about what she needed to do to reset her body from substance use and how she worked through and continues to work through her trauma. Even though she's married and she has children, the healing isn't over. She has a long journey ahead of her. I hope that when she's ready, when she feels supported, that she can advocate for changes within the industry that are directly tied to the way that she was treated.

We've still got many weeks of this trial left. What do you want people to know as they are following these proceedings?

I've talked a lot about the most marginalized people, but it's important for people to know that even people with privilege can be trafficked. Trafficking is not limited by marginalization. It's not limited to someone who is destitute and being hidden away. If people can look at the specific behaviors that Diddy exhibited and look at the definition of the law, it'll make it easier for them to understand how the government is framing this case.

That force/fraud/coercion piece is being laid out so specifically, and I hope that people can continue to view it through that lens. I see people say, "oh, they're just trying to take a Black man down," and that's not it. This is being portrayed as a very calculated, manipulative way of roping someone into performing sexual labor in exchange for housing, for privilege, for work, for a contract. I want people to remember that these things fit the exact definition of what the law says trafficking is.

I want people to understand that there are no “perfect victims.” The idea that someone’s ethnicity, education level, socio-economic background, career, disability, sexual history, relationship or citizenship status, or experience in criminalized labor somehow erases their sexual autonomy is a harmful falsehood. It’s rooted in profoundly racist and patriarchal beliefs—ones that have long denied the reality that Black and Indigenous women, men, and boys can experience sexual violence.

The statistics are staggering: 1 in 4 men, 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 5 Black women report experiencing sexual violence. One in three girls will experience sexual assault before the age of 18. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, about half (51.1%) of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner. In fact, nearly 40% of all trafficking survivors are trafficked by a partner.

No survivor should have to be retraumatized to receive justice, support services, or compassion.

My hope is that as people continue to engage with this case, they remember that at the end of the day, Cassie standing in front of a global audience and speaking her truth is nothing short of brave. And if people can stand alongside survivors who have sued the Vatican for sexual abuse, they can stand with survivors like Cassie who are suing their abusers as well.