Diddy‘s upcoming sex trial has been delayed to give both sides extra time to figure out jury selection, motions and disclosure of evidence.
Deadline was in the court room on Friday (March 14), when the embattled mogul appeared for a pre-trial conference. The decision was made to postpone the trial by one week for the aforementioned issues to be ironed out, moving the date from May 5 to now May 12.
Additionally, Diddy was arraigned on the charges in a superseding indictment that was filed earlier this month, which accuses him of forcing employees to work long hours with little sleep under the threat of physical and reputational harm. He pleaded not guilty.
Elsewhere in the hearing, Feds confirmed they have the original security footage from the incident where Diddy was caught on tape assaulting Cassie.
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The Bad Boy boss’ defense team had filed a motion days earlier claiming that the tape was “altered” and the original tape destroyed, revealing plans to file a motion to exclude the video from the trial.
The altering, his team says, includes “covering the time stamp and then changing the video sequence. It also includes speeding up the video to make it falsely appear that the actions in the video are taking place faster than they are.”
There was speculation that his motion may be granted, as courts rarely allow edited video evidence, but with Feds confirming they have the raw footage, this voids his argument.
It’s to be noted that this specific incident is not part of the charges Diddy is facing, but prosecutors plan to use the footage to show how violent the mogul can allegedly get.
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Upon his filing, Cassie’s legal team hit back and told TMZ it’s not surprising that Diddy “would make a disingenuous argument to exclude the disturbing video from being shown to the jury in the upcoming trial.
Her attorney continued: “I am confident that the video fairly and accurately represents what happened, will be admitted into evidence [and Diddy] will be held accountable for his depravity.”
The next pretrial conference is set for April 25.
