The Diddy verdict proves #MeToo is dead and people still don’t understand consent

It’s been seven years since the movement started to call out abusive men, yet in 2025, whether it is working-class girls in Rotherham or women on the red carpet, the struggle to be believed is still real, writes Anna Hart

How did you feel when you heard that a jury of eight men and four women found Sean “Diddy” Combs not guilty of the most serious sexual crimes he was charged with by federal prosecutors? The reactions of most women I know ranged from “sad” to “angry”, but the overwhelming beat from my pinging WhatsApps was “sad, but not surprised” and “how are we still here in 2025?”

Although Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs bail on Thursday, citing clear evidence of violence and lawlessness, the jury acquitted Diddy of racketeering and sexual trafficking. The latter acquittal – sex trafficking – means the jury was not convinced that the female witnesses were not consenting sexual partners.

For most women (and many men) who watched video evidence of violent assault and read the testimony of witnesses – describing years of violence, threats, rape and humiliation – this verdict felt like a heartbreaking letdown, and a grim and inevitable one too.

A “jury of peers” is a fundamental aspect of the justice system. But consider this. There were 77 million Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump as president after he was found liable for sexual abuse. Trump’s America has invited in a parade of alleged sexual predators, from Andrew and Tristan Tate (currently being tried for rape and sex trafficking in Romania) to Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor, found guilty of rape in a civil case in November 2024, who was seen partying at the White House on St Patrick’s Day in March 2025.

The “manosphere” has morphed from being a pathetic and abusive male subculture into something very mainstream.

As the British Netflix series Adolescence brilliantly and bleakly depicted, every student is literate in manosphere lore: they know their alphas from their betas, can spot a Chad or a Stacy, identify friends as incels or pick-up artists, and text abbreviated misogyny maxims like AWALT (all women are like that).

A mistrustful, conspiratorial and transactional attitude to women transcends social and educational barriers. Academic Jordan Peterson made it his business to argue that “the masculine spirit is under assault”, encouraging a victim mentality in disenfranchised young men.

But the statistics tell a different story from their “poor men” narrative. Across Europe, while overall crime rates are falling, reports of domestic violence and sexual assault are rising. But more subtle markers of modern misogyny are everywhere. Anecdotally, friends agree that we’re seeing fewer mixed male-female friendship groups hanging out and travelling together than when we grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. Online dating is increasingly viewed as a game, with gendered “rules” to follow, and “winners” and “losers”.

Cassie Ventura, pictured here in 2015, gave evidence at the musician’s trial (Invision/AP)

Unregulated online pornography available to all today is so violent, degrading and dangerously delusional that it makes pornography of the 1990s seem positively quaint. Dior still thought it appropriate to keep Johnny Depp as their front man for its Sauvage aftershave even after a courtroom heard his text messages describing how he wanted to “burn” or “drown” his partner Amber Heard.

Against this backdrop, it appears that in 2025 juries, there is still little understanding of consent. From the girls in the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal to women with A-list boyfriends, the legal system and courtroom feel like just another unsafe place for women.

When people look at someone staying in an abusive relationship with the assumption they can just walk out of it when things get dark, they are saying they have no understanding of the slow chipping away of agency that comes from sexual abuse, violence and coercive control. Yes, some people do leave, but thousands don’t, which is why we are still left with the horrifying statistic of two women killed a week by a current or former partner.

Many of his supporters flocked to the courtroom despite seeing horrific video evidence of him violently attacking his partner (AP)

We can have as many consent classes as we like in schools, but it appears that any progress having been made by the #Metoo movement, seven years on is being dialled back. And the backlash to women finding their voice has been swift and its punishment brutal, because this backlash brings with it self-righteousness, violence and intensity, and consequentially, hating women has never been such a popular and public position.

In the past, the abuse and exploitation of women was largely ignored. Now it feels like it is sometimes even celebrated with a sort of gleeful sadism posing as a man’s “fight for justice”. Many famous men in the dock aren’t seen as accused criminals; they’re seen as warriors for modern masculinity, with an almost medieval degree of public ire and scorn levelled at their female accusers. Why? Because mainstream misogyny so often does a defence’s job for abusive men.

The prosecution in the P Diddy trial called 34 witnesses to describe Sean Combs’s violent and sexually violent behaviour over seven weeks of testimony, the star witnesses being ex-girlfriends Cassie Ventura, an R&B musician, and a woman identified only as Jane Doe.

Combs pictured attacking his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in 2016 (CNN)

The defence chose not to invite witnesses to the stand to defend Diddy. Instead, they invoked the language which chimed with a misogynistic climate. The defence described Cassie Ventura as a “winner” and a “woman who likes sex”, a nasty piece of faux-feminism that deftly turns an exploited woman into a sneaky exploiter. They filled the courtroom with the ideas, language and well-worn tropes, suggestions that “she probably enjoyed it”, “she was asking for it”, “she got what she wanted out of the deal” and “she could have left at any time”. The language used to describe Sean Combs, meanwhile, was heroic verse, a man being unfairly victimised by an ultra-woke “mainstream media” and man-hating, glory-hunting prosecutors.

The so-called masculine energy rhetoric continued after the verdict: “He showed up and tried this case like a man,” announced Diddy’s defence lead Marc Agnifilo. “That’s what winning is.”

Sean Combs still faces up to 10 years in jail, and more than 30 civil sexual misconduct suits. It’s not yet clear if this was a win for him. What is clear, however, is that in this climate of modern misogyny, we are all the losers.