Lawyers who filed a shocking rape lawsuit against Jay-Z have responded after their ex-client fully recanted her allegations, claiming her U-turn testimony was “bought-and-paid-for.”
The rebuttal from attorney Tony Buzbee came hours after his unnamed former client admitted in a sworn statement Friday (Sept. 25) that her stunning 2024 claim — accusing Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) of raping her as a 13-year-old girl in 2000 — was “false” and that she’d “never met or spoken” to the star.
In their response, filed in court later on Friday and obtained by Billboard, lawyers for Buzbee say that the Jane Doe accuser’s sudden reversal is not only “irrelevant and inflammatory” but also “bought-and-paid-for” — a claim they did not offer any evidence to support.
“Carter and his attorneys are now advancing testimony that they either know is probably false and perjurious, or, at best, know is offered by a witness (Jane Doe) that they have spent two years calling inherently unreliable, and who has repeatedly offered sworn testimony that is directly contrary to the testimony they secured by dismissing her,” Buzbee’s attorneys at the law firm Sheppard write in the response, which asks the judge to strike the declaration from the case.
Reps for Jay-Z and an attorney for Jane Doe did not immediately return requests for comment.
Buzbee, who filed dozens of abuse cases against Sean “Diddy” Combs during the mogul’s fall from grace, added Jay-Z to one of them in December 2024. The stunning claims alleged that the two stars had drugged and assaulted a teen girl during an after-party following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards.
Jay-Z strongly denied the accusations and fought back aggressively, claiming Buzbee and his unnamed client had fabricated the claims in an effort to extort him. The case was quickly dropped in February 2025, and the rapper has since pursued his own litigation against Buzbee and the accuser.
On Friday, Doe went a step further and fully recanted her accusations, telling a judge that Jay-Z “never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me whatsoever.” She also admitted she had had mental health issues, and claimed her ex-attorneys had done little due diligence on her case. She said she had not been paid for reversing course, but the sworn statement came alongside a motion from Jay-Z voluntarily dropping her from the suit.
In their response, Buzbee’s attorneys say filing the recantation was entirely unnecessary to dismiss Jane Doe from the case, and “seems to serve no purpose other than to harass and impugn the Buzbee parties.”
They point out that it “directly contradicts” her own earlier sworn statements in the case — and that Jay-Z’s own lawyers had repeatedly pointed out that she is “an unreliable witness.”
“In sum, there is no evidence that when the Buzbee parties relied on Jane Doe’s multiple declarations they knew her to be a perjurer,” Buzbee’s attorneys write. “Carter and his attorneys lack the same excuse.”
The new filings come in an ongoing lawsuit Jay-Z filed in federal court accusing Doe, Buzbee and her other lawyers of malicious prosecution and civil conspiracy. He also separately sued the attorney in Los Angeles for extortion and defamation, but that case was dismissed earlier this month by a state appeals court that said there was no evidence that Buzbee filed the case knowing the accusations were false.
