Sean "Diddy" Combs is being held at Brooklyn's notorious Metropolitan Detention Center after being denied bail twice this week in his sex trafficking and racketeering case—and sources tell People that he has been placed on suicide watch. The sources say the move is for "preventative measures as Combs is in shock and his mental state is unclear." Combs was arrested in Manhattan Monday night. He is expected to remain in the federal facility for months awaiting trial, the New York Times reports.
In a letter to a federal judge on Tuesday, a lawyer for Combs described conditions at the MDC as "horrific," noting that there have been at least four suicides and one murder at the facility over the last three years, the Times reports. After inmate Edwin Cordero was fatally injured in a fight in July, his lawyer called the facility "an overcrowded, understaffed, and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth." The MDC, which currently holds around 1,200 detainees, became the Bureau of Prisons' only New York City facility after the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was closed in 2021, the AP reports.
Combs is reportedly being held in the facility's Special Housing Unit. Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for Donald Trump—and a former MDC inmate—tells CNN that Combs will only have a tiny space to move around in. "He's waking up on a steel bed with a one-and-a-half-inch mattress, no pillow, in an eight by 10-foot cell that I can assure you is disgusting," Cohen says. "When he wakes up, he's staring at cinder block painted white walls, as opposed to whatever the decor of his mansions were," Cohen says. (More Sean Combs stories.)