Marc Agnifilo looked tense Tuesday.
Jurors had informed the court they’d reached consensus on the sex-trafficking charges against Agnifilo’s client Sean “Diddy” Combs, but were deadlocked on racketeering. The jury note came a few days after Agnifilo’s free-wheeling summation saying that thanks to the Combs case “the streets of America are safe from Astroglide.”
His wise-cracking approach paid off. After roughly an hour of further deliberations Wednesday morning, jurors acquitted Combs on both of the top charges, which carried potential life sentences. Combs pumped his fist as the verdict was read and fell to his knees in apparent prayer afterward. As Agnifilo turned around, Combs’ family members in the courtroom cheered.
The outcome is the highest-profile win to date for Agnifilo’s boutique law firm, Agnifilo Intrater LLP, launched just last year. It defied the odds of Manhattan federal court: Less than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted at trial in 2024, according to federal judiciary data.
“Nobody has the power of persuasion like Marc Agnifilo,” said someone who would know—his wife and law partner Karen Agnifilo. “He has a way of connecting to juries,” she told me in a recent phone interview.
Agnifilo is a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and New Jersey federal prosecutor. He also worked for over a decade under Benjamin Brafman, the criminal defense attorney who defended Combs at a 2001 New York gun trial that ended in an acquittal.
Brafman declined to comment Wednesday but told the New York Law Journal last year: “I took Marc Agnifilo out of the DA’s office and I put him on the map.”
Agnifilo’s past clients include Martin Shkreli, the so-called Pharma Bro, who served almost seven years in prison for securities fraud. On Wednesday, Shkreli congratulated Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, another Combs attorney at Agnifilo Intrater, on their “incredible victory.”
To be sure, it was far from a complete victory for Combs: He was convicted of two counts of transporting prostitutes, which carry a 10-year maximum each.
“The disturbing reality is that sex crimes are all too present in many aspects of our society,” Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement after the verdict. Douglas H. Wigdor, an attorney for Combs’ ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura, said Ventura “brought attention to the realities of powerful men in our orbit” through her testimony.
And Subramanian rejected Combs’ bid to be released on bond ahead of sentencing, saying Combs had admitted to domestic violence at the trial and hadn’t shown he wasn’t a danger to the community. Read More
It wasn’t clear what Combs would ultimately serve on the convictions. Agnifilo argued to the court that sentencing guidelines on the charges for someone with no prior convictions like Combs only call for 20 to 27 months, and Combs has already served 10.
Columbia Law professor Daniel Richman told me that given that the relatively new-to-the-bench Subramanian doesn’t have a long track record of sentencing to examine, and the “extraordinary nature of the case,” predicting the sentence is impossible.
The mixed Combs verdict comes ahead of what may be even higher-profile proceedings for Agnifilo Intrater: Karen Agnifilo is set to defend Luigi Mangione in upcoming state and federal trials on terrorism and murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson.
Amid the throng of spectators outside the courthouse Wednesday, Mangione’s supporters were already preparing, showing up in green hats like the Mario Brothers character.
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