We are in the final hours of the Diddy trial.

It comes as no shock that after Sean Combs left the courtroom on Tuesday, having been informed that the jury arrived at a partial verdict, he looked towards his mother, Janice, seated in the gallery, and silently expressed: ‘I love you.’

‘Ma Dukes’, the endearing nickname Combs uses for his mother, has steadfastly supported her son during his trial in New York where he faces charges of sex trafficking.

In a mere 13 hours of deliberation, the jury delivered a decision on four of the five charges against the 55-year-old artist. However, they remain undecided on the fifth count, which involves a racketeering conspiracy. On Tuesday evening, the judge instructed the jury to continue their discussions.

Back in October, 85-year-old Janice went as far as to liken the more than 100 sexual misconduct allegations against Diddy to a ‘public lynching’.

After the rapper and music executive was indicted in September last year, a disturbing video recorded in 2022 resurfaced, showing the mother and son duo sharing a kiss.

‘Yeah, my mom is gorgeous,’ Diddy says in the footage.

‘Everything’s good baby, I’m here with you. I love you,’ Janice says, smiling.

Diddy then says he loves her too, before planting an impromptu peck on her lips. 

‘That’s my baby,’ Janice tells onlookers. 

After the 55-year-old rapper was indicted in March last year, a disturbing video recorded in 2022 and showing the mother and son duo sharing a kiss resurfaced.

Janice Combs often accompanied her son at big events, including the 2023 MTV Movie Music Awards on Sept. 12, 2023 in Newark, New Jersey

In the months since, Janice has been front and center, often sitting behind her son in the Manhattan courthouse.  

And while Combs has faced serious allegations including kidnapping, sex trafficking for prostitution and racketeering, Janice also has been slapped with racketeering claims of her own in a civil lawsuit related to her son’s alleged business dealings. 

In that lawsuit, Deon Best, a former friend who worked with the disgraced rapper, claims Combs used his mother’s name to allegedly form a criminal enterprise in order to hide artists’ publishing rights.

Best alleges that his company, Finish Line Entertainment, signed artists to Diddy – but that the business dealings had been arranged not only to take publishing rights away from him and his artists, but to bilk them out of future earnings.

‘All of my publishing rights went to Janice Combs,’ Best told the Daily Mail last year in an exclusive interview.

In total, he alleges that Janice’s companies took millions away from him. He is suing her and her companies for aiding and abetting, fraud and deceit, civil conspiracy and racketeering.

Other artists have made similar claims against Diddy over the years.

Rapper Mase, who collaborated with Diddy on some of his biggest hits, including ‘Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down’ in 1997, often called out the music executive for allegedly rejecting his $2 million offer to buy back his rights. 

Deon Best has sued Janice Combs and claims the matriarch has control over royalties for music he helped produce

The mother and son kissed on the red carpet at the 2022 BET Awards in June 2022. Combs has boasted that he would take his ‘Ma Dukes’ to strip clubs

Janice Combs is expected to be in court with her grandchildren once Diddy’s criminal trial starts next week in Manhattan federal court. The family walked out of the building together during a hearing in Oct 2024

Addressing the claims, Combs blasted his critics during a radio interview back in October 2022.

‘If you think that I’m a scumbag that will ever steal anything, my name is Sean Combs,’ he barked. ‘I never took nothing from nobody a day in my life. All I’ve ever given is opportunity and more money than a person was making. I’d open up the doors.’  

In our exclusive interview, Best told the Daily Mail that Diddy had been able to get away with taking advantage of his producers and artists for so long by using his mother. 

‘Janice knew all along what was going on. This is a partnership. She heard the allegations and rumors many times before and she’s yet to step away,’ Best claimed. 

‘A street villain would say, “Enough is enough. You have to walk away.” In her case, she stayed. Based on his comments of him partying and taking his momma out to strip clubs, that strange relationship speaks for itself.’

Diddy’s close relationship with his mother has raised eyebrows over the years.

Janice was a regular figure around her son’s infamous ‘white parties’, where some of the sexual abuses he’s accused of are said to have taken place.

Diddy’s childhood friend, Tim Patterson, told the Daily Mail earlier this month of the rapper’s unstable upbringing.

When Diddy was just three-years-old, his father Melvin was shot dead in a drug deal gone wrong – and Janice made the decision to move him and his sister from Harlem to the suburban town of Mount Vernon in New York. 

Lamenting Diddy’s lack of a father figure, Patterson said: ‘In my home, there were boots and there were high-heeled shoes in the closet. In Sean’s home, there were high-heeled shoes. There were no boots. So that makes sense. There was something missing from his maturing.’ 

He has also said: ‘Because Sean had no dad, all he had was his mom. Sean’s house, our house, there was always things going on. On the weekend, and we did that a lot. He was around all type of alcohol, he was around reefer smoke. He was around drug addicts, around lesbians, around homosexuals, he was around pimps and pushers. That was just who was in our house.’

Neighbors in Mount Vernon also told the Daily Mail that they had witnessed ‘wild’ parties thrown by Janice for her young son.

The suggestion: could they have been the inspiration for his later life of debauchery?

Diddy has pleaded not guilty to the charges he is facing in his federal trial. When he does learn his fate in the coming hours, he may well have more to say to his ever-defensive mother.