The Mann Act and the man in the mirror: The rap on Diddy Combs

Now and then, a news story from the United States filters down to Cuenca that’s so strange it feels imported from another planet.

Last week’s comes wrapped in fur coats, private jets, and 1910 legislation. It involves Sean “Diddy” Combs a rapper. recording mogul, philanthropist, and, by most accounts, an unmitigated scoundrel.

He’s been sentenced to just over four years in prison for violating something called the Mann Act. Not, as you might think, a law about men behaving badly, but an antique statute forbidding the transport of women across state lines for “immoral purposes.”

Diddy Combs

In Diddy’s case, his former live-in girlfriends became, by judicial alchemy, prostitutes. Not because he paid them for a la carte sex acts, which he did not, but because the court decided that his mix of power, drugs, and intimidation made genuine consent on their part legally impossible under federal law.

You could call that progress: a society finally treating coercion seriously. Or you could call it performance art, since nobody, including the defendant, seems entirely sure what laws he broke.

The prosecutors said they were sending a message. The judge said it was to deter others. Nobody specified who those others might be, or precisely what message was being sent, but perhaps they were thinking of touring musicians exploiting groupies, or anyone crossing a state line with mischief in mind.

The Mann Act, written when women couldn’t vote and corsets were compulsory, has been dragged through courtrooms for over a century now, sometimes to stop trafficking, other times to punish moral irregularity. It’s the legal equivalent of using an old family Bible to justify stoning taxi drivers for horn-honking.

Here in Ecuador, justice is more literal. If you steal a chicken, you might go to jail for stealing. In the U.S., you might go to the penitentiary for animal cruelty for what obscene thought the jury imagines you might have had while you were plucking, gutting, spit-roasting, and plating the unfortunate fowl.

Still, I suppose there’s a kind of poetic justice at work. A billionaire music producer felled for foul deeds, not for tax evasion like gangster Al Capone, but run over by a law written for a time when automobiles were the latest tool for mobile crime and Bonnie and Clyde struck fear into the hearts of bank managers everywhere.

Perhaps that’s the moral: Fashions can change, but moral panic never goes out of style.