After the woman who accused him of rape fully recanted her allegations in a sworn statement last Thursday, Jay-Z hopes his reversal can revive his California-based extortion and defamation lawsuit against attorney Tony Buzbee and his law firm.
In a new petition for a new hearing obtained and reported for the first time by rolling stoneThe rapper and entrepreneur, whose legal name is Shawn Carter, is asking a California appeals court to reconsider its recent refusal to reinstate his extortion and defamation lawsuit that a lower court threw out last year. He says the woman’s new recantation, first reported by rolling stoneamounts to “explosive new evidence” that should allow his “substantiated claims to proceed” in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where he first filed them two years ago.
“Jane Doe’s statement proves that discovery would provide evidence supporting Carter’s assertions. Fairness and due process require that this court grant a rehearing,” her new appeal brief argues.
In the woman’s affidavit, signed Thursday in her home state of Alabama, she said her allegations of sexual assault were false, that she had never met Carter and that she had disclosed certain “mental health issues” to one of his attorneys before Buzbee’s law firm publicly named the Grammy-winning rapper in its December 2024 lawsuit.
“Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I never met or spoke to Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me,” the woman wrote in the 11-page declaration filed in Manhattan federal court as part of a separate malicious lawsuit filed by the rapper.
“There is no truth in my allegations against Mr. Carter,” she continued under penalty of perjury. “I understand that my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering and damage that can never be fully repaired.”
In his request for rehearing, Carter claims that the California appeals court relied heavily on the idea that Jane Doe dropped her rape case against him on February 14, 2025, to “protect herself from harassment and invasion of privacy.” He argues that his new statement tells a different story.
The woman now says she agreed to dismiss the rape case after telling her lawyers she had “doubts about (her) allegations” and after one of the lawyers allegedly traveled to Alabama to have her sign the dismissal papers. The sexual assault case was ultimately dismissed with prejudice under an agreement in which Carter promised that neither he nor his agents would contact or interact with her.
“I have never received a threat from Mr. Carter or anyone acting on his behalf,” the woman said in her new statement. “No one at Buzbee Law Firm or any other law firm ever spoke to me about a possible settlement of the New York lawsuit. I did not authorize a settlement.”
Carter’s motion contends that Buzbee sought to dismiss the case against Carter not to protect the woman from harassment, but “to protect himself” from a pending sanctions motion. “Carter requests only that he be given the opportunity to prove his case through limited pretrial discovery,” the petition states. “If the discovery shows what he expects, then the case should go to trial where a jury can decide who is right.”
In the appeals court’s decision, the panel upheld the lower court’s dismissal of Carter’s allegations by finding that Buzbee’s demand letter was sent in anticipation of litigation. He said the trial court correctly concluded that Carter failed to demonstrate that Buzbee made statements about the woman’s claims with actual malice.
“The record contains no evidence that Buzbee accused Carter of raping Jane Doe while knowing those statements were false or recklessly ignoring whether they were true. Rather, Buzbee submitted statements showing that investigations by his firm and (a referral firm) led him to subjectively believe the truth of the accusations,” Associate Judge Anne Richardson wrote in the unanimous decision from California’s Second Appellate District.
Carter first sued Buzbee in late 2024, alleging that the prominent Houston attorney knowingly made false allegations when he sent a demand letter in early November seeking money to resolve allegations that Carter had raped Jane Doe. By then, Buzbee’s company had already sued Sean Combs on the woman’s behalf, alleging that a second unidentified male “celebrity” had also sexually assaulted her that night. A few weeks later, after Carter refused to respond to the request, Buzbee amended the complaint to explicitly name Carter as that celebrity, making him a co-defendant with Combs.
Regardless of what happens with Carter’s attempts to revive the extortion and defamation allegations, the billionaire entrepreneur is continuing his malicious New York-based lawsuit against Buzbee and his company. He dismissed Jane Doe’s suit last week, but he continues to argue that his lawyers should have known that her allegations “were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and not supported by a credible story or investigation.”
Attempts to reach Buzbee on Monday were not immediately successful. Reached by email last Thursday, the lawyer defended himself. “We have several attorneys (at least four) who dealt with Ms. Doe long before she met me. She told the exact same story to each one. If for some reason she now claims she lied to us and to the court, that is new information,” he wrote. He had already said rolling stone that “sending a basic demand letter before filing a lawsuit is not and never will be “extortion.” »
One of Buzbee’s lawyers argued in a filing Friday in New York that Doe’s retraction was a “bought and paid for statement,” although she provided no evidence to support that claim. The attorney said Carter and her attorneys knew the new recantation contradicted Doe’s previous sworn testimony and noted that Carter’s legal team had previously described her as “an unreliable witness” suffering from “multiple mental health conditions,” raising serious “concerns about her credibility.”
“In summary, there is no evidence that when the Buzbee parties relied on Jane Doe’s multiple statements they knew she was a perjurer. Carter and his attorneys do not have the same excuse,” Buzbee’s attorney, Jessica N. Meyers of Sheppard Mullin, wrote in a letter to the court.
In a Sept. 1 motion to dismiss Carter’s claims of improper prosecution, Buzbee’s camp called the lawsuit “inappropriate” and “abusive.” They argued that filing a civil complaint on behalf of Jane Doe alleging sexual assault did not constitute misconduct. They added that any inconsistencies in the woman’s memories were not necessarily suspicious, particularly given her claim that she had been drugged and raped more than two decades earlier, when she was 13.
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