Video shows YouTuber, not Sean 'Diddy' Combs, biking in prison

"Can't hold him down," says text over a video posted to Instagram December 28, 2024. "Diddy riding a bike in jail."

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Screenshot from Instagram taken January 7, 2025

The footage shows a Black man in an orange jumpsuit riding the dirt bike. Similar posts naming Combs ricocheted across Instagram and other platforms, including Threads, TikTok and X.

The music mogul was indicted and taken into custody in September 2024 on three criminal counts alleging that he sexually abused women and coerced them into drug-fueled sex parties using threats and violence. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and has been repeatedly denied bail ahead of his trial, which is slated to begin on May 5, 2025, remaining incarcerated at the MDC Brooklyn, a federal detention center in the borough of Brooklyn, New York.

He is not the man depicted in the video circulating online.

"No incarcerated individual has the means or ability to ride a 'dirt bike' or motorcycle in any Federal Bureau of Prisons facility," Donald Murphy, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told AFP in a January 8 email.

David Richardson, executive assistant for MDC Brooklyn, told AFP the rapper is "currently incarcerated" at the facility and that "motorcycles or dirt bikes are not allowed."

Reverse image searches surfaced the same clip on the Instagram and YouTube pages of "Mr.Gotdamnit," a digital creator who first posted the footage on February 24, 2024, more than six months before Combs's arrest (archived here and here).

"Can you do this in your Prison," the original Instagram post says.

Other posts on Mr.Gotdamnit's Instagram profiles show him posing in the jail in an orange jumpsuit, riding the bike in a different outfit and blaring music inside the prison alongside a group of other people on similar bikes (archived here, here, here and here). 

A nearly 30-minute video posted on his YouTube page February 25, 2024 shows him visiting the prison, riding the bike and performing other stunts, at times while wearing the same orange jumpsuit seen in the posts falsely claiming to show Combs (archived here). The upload is titled: "Mr.gotdamnit goes to prison."

Following Combs's indictment, Mr.Gotdamnit reposted the dirt bike clip several times -- apparently in jest -- with captions falsely describing it as footage of the rapper.

The prison in his posts appears to be the abandoned Glades Correctional Institution in Belle Glade, Florida, which shut down in 2011, according to local media reports. Photos of the facility's interior, exterior and cells appear to match those shown throughout Mr.gotdamnit's YouTube video (archived here, here and here).

AFP reached out to Mr.gotdamnit for comment, but no response was forthcoming.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about Combs here and here.