The most prominent of the six prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York handling the case against Sean Combs is Maurene Comey, who has extensive experience on complex racketeering cases like the one brought against the music mogul.
A prosecutor for nearly a decade, Ms. Comey was also involved in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell, the former socialite who conspired with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls. Ms. Comey was also one of the prosecutors in charge of the criminal case against Mr. Epstein, until he was found dead in his jail cell.
At Ms. Maxwell’s trial in 2021, Ms. Comey delivered the prosecution’s final argument, in which she implored jurors to believe the women who testified against the defendant. Ms. Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking and other counts, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Ms. Comey, a daughter of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, has spent much of her time at the prosecutor’s office handling gang violence and drug-trafficking cases. She also prosecuted the case against Robert A. Hadden, the former gynecologist who was convicted of luring women into his office to sexually assault them.
Other members of the prosecution team also have experience with the federal racketeering law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — that underpins the case against Mr. Combs.
Another lead prosecutor, Emily A. Johnson, has several gang-related racketeering cases on her résumé, including one involving a Trinitarios gang leader who was sentenced to life in prison last year.
Ms. Johnson led the prosecution team during hearings last year at which Mr. Combs was denied bail. She described him as a “serial abuser and a serial obstructer,” reading aloud text messages from alleged victims to help secure his incarceration.
During hearings, the prosecutors have presented information about their case bit by bit, keeping the vast majority of details out of public view until the trial. Although they have signaled that their star witness will be Casandra Ventura, Mr. Combs’s former girlfriend, they have not uttered her name in public court so far.
Christy Slavik, who arrived at the Southern District office in 2019, is currently prosecuting a racketeering-conspiracy case involving an accused member of the Crips gang. She has experience in drug cases, including the prosecution of crack cocaine dealers in Times Square.
A fourth prosecutor, Meredith Foster, has been involved in a sprawling bribery and extortion case against former employees of the New York City Housing Authority.
Another prosecutor, Mitzi Steiner, worked with Ms. Johnson on the prosecution of a woman who blocked patients and staff members from entering a reproductive health center in Manhattan. Ms. Steiner was also involved in the prosecution of people who profited from a “romance scam” based in Ghana that targeted older people.
The final member of the prosecution’s team, Madison Reddick Smyser, has prosecuted robbery and fraud cases, and recently secured a sex-trafficking indictment of a man from the Bronx.
In the months before the trial, the prosecutors have bristled at public statements by Mr. Combs’s lawyers that they considered inappropriate. They pushed back when Marc Agnifilo, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, framed the prosecution as a “takedown of a successful Black man” in an interview with TMZ, saying that the accusation of a “racist prosecution” was baseless.
And last week, they alerted the judge in the case to a podcast episode in which Mark Geragos, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Combs in the past, commented extensively on the case. Their complaint led to a tense meeting in Judge Arun Subramanian’s robing room, during which the judge, according to a transcript of the exchange, admonished Mr. Geragos for describing the prosecution team as a “six-pack of white women” in the podcast.
