Inside Diddy’s ‘Hell on Earth’ NYC prison plagued by suicides and murders where fellow disgraced rapper R. Kelly, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Billy McFarland did time
Rapper Sean ‘Diddy‘ Combs will have to serve time in a New York City prison once described as ‘Hell on Earth’ after being plagued by suicides and murders after a judge denied his bail on Tuesday.
Combs, 54, was remanded into federal custody as he awaits trial on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, and will now be serving pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The jail has become the Big Apple’s primary federal detention center since 2021, when the Bureau of Prisons shuttered its sister facility in Manhattan – where child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein died – over its appalling conditions.
Combs’ lawyers even acknowledged the deplorable conditions in a motion for bail on Tuesday, noting that ‘several courts in this District have recognized that the conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are not fit for pre-trial detention.’
‘At least four inmates have died by suicide there in the past three years.’
The attorneys were referencing the June 7 death of Uriel Whyte, who had been awaiting trial on gun charges for more than two years when he was stabbed to death.
The prison was put into a lockdown in the aftermath, ‘where essentially, we come out of our cell every three days for a 15-minute shower,’ one inmate told NY 1 at the time.
‘You’re literally in solitary confinement when you shouldn’t be,’ he said.
But just over one month later, another inmate, Edwin Cordero, died after being injured in a prison fight.
His attorney called his death ‘senseless and completely preventable’ and said Cordero was ‘another victim of MDC Brooklyn, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is Hell on Earth,’ according to the New York Times.
Inmates and their lawyers have also claimed they found cockroaches on their food and mold in the showers, and in a number of recent legal cases, conditions at the prison were describes as ‘dreadful,’ ‘longstanding,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘inhuman’ and an ‘ongoing tragedy,’ Combs’ attorneys argued.
The issues apparently began in February 2019, a fire cut off power and heat to parts of the jail and inmates had to suffer in near freezing temperatures and in darkness after the sun went down.
Inmates inside the jail at the time included Nxivm sex-cult leader Keith Raniere and accused jewelry thief mastermind Damir Pejcinovic, as well as MS-13 gang members and mafiosos.
At the time, Deirdre von Dornum, who oversees the Federal Defenders’ Brooklyn team said that inmates had wrapped themselves ‘head to toe in towels and blankets’.
The crisis came to a head with protesters rallying outside the facility, where inmates banged on the walls of the jail and flashed nightlights in a plea for help.
A class action lawsuit over the outage was settled last year for roughly $10million, the Daily Beast reports.
