A California appeals court has ruled that Jay-Z cannot sue a personal injury attorney for extortion or defamation over a shocking lawsuit that accused the superstar of raping a 13-year-old girl.
Tony Buzbee accused the rapper (Shawn Carter) in 2024 of raping a child alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs decades earlier — then dropped the case just months later. Jay-Z strongly denied it and fought back, claiming the lawyer had fabricated the claims to extort him.
But in a ruling Wednesday (Sept. 9), California’s Second Appellate District ruled the rap icon could not sue Buzbee for either extortion or defamation over the salacious accusations, even if they were quickly dismissed.
“The record contains no evidence Buzbee accused Carter of raping Jane Doe while knowing those statements to be false or with reckless disregard as to whether they were true,” the appeals court wrote in a decision obtained by Billboard. “To the contrary, Buzbee submitted declarations showing his firm’s … investigations led him to subjectively believe in the truth of the accusations.”
In a statement to Billboard on Thursday (Sept. 10), Buzbee said: “I said when the case was filed it was total bulls–t. The trial court dumped it and the appellate court affirmed. I’m now entitled to my fees and costs and I intend to get every red penny that I spent dealing with it.” A spokesman for Jay-Z did not immediately return a request for comment.
Much of Jay-Z’s lawsuit turned on a recorded interview between private investigators and the anonymous accuser, in which the woman supposedly admitted the claims were false and that Buzbee had pressured her to lie. But a lower judge ruled last year that the tape was inadmissible hearsay and refused to consider it as evidence.
In Wednesday’s decision, the appeals court affirmed that earlier ruling. Echoing skepticism expressed at a hearing last month, the three-judge panel ruled that Jane Doe could have felt pressured by the private investigators and made her statement out of fear of her name being made public.
“Coupled with the fact that one of the investigators also told Jane Doe ‘if you cooperate and kind of tell us what’s going on, everything remains a Jane Doe,’ the court reasonably concluded Jane Doe felt she needed to cooperate and help Carter if she wanted to remain anonymous and not be sued,” the appeals court wrote.
Buzbee, who filed dozens of civil abuse cases against Diddy, added Jay-Z to one of them in December 2024, claiming the two had drugged and assaulted a teen girl in 2000 during an after-party following the MTV Video Music Awards.
Jay-Z immediately called the lawsuit a “blackmail attempt” by Buzbee and vowed to fight fire with fire. “You have made a terrible error in judgement thinking that all ‘celebrities’ are the same,” he said at the time. “I’m not from your world. I’m a young man who made it out of the project of Brooklyn. We don’t play these types of games.”
Weeks before those claims were filed, a then-anonymous Jay-Z had filed his own lawsuit against Buzbee, claiming the attorney was extorting him by threatening to unleash “wildly false horrific allegations” linked to Diddy if he didn’t pay up. It was this case that led to Wednesday’s decision.
Buzbee’s original rape lawsuit was quickly dropped in February 2025, less than three months after it named the superstar. But Jay-Z said at the time that the “frivolous, fictitious and appalling allegations” could not be fully undone: “The trauma that my wife, my children, my loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed.”
Jay-Z continued to pursue his extortion and defamation case against Buzbee. But last summer, Judge Mark H. Epstein dismissed the case after refusing to consider the tape recording.
On the defamation claims, Judge Epstein ruled that Jay-Z couldn’t show that Buzbee acted with so-called actual malice — meaning he knew or should have known his statements were false. And on extortion, the judge said Buzbee was within his rights as a lawyer to demand a settlement payment from the rapper before suing him: “Selling silence for money in the civil context is not extortion; it is a settlement with a non-disclosure element.”
In Wednesday’s ruling, the appeals court affirmed that ruling, saying the threat letters sent ahead of lawsuits are a normal part of the legal process and should not be deemed a form of extortion.
“The evidence shows the Demand Letters related to litigation contemplated in good faith, Buzbee sent the Demand Letters to resolve his clients’ claims against Carter, and the communications bore a logical relation to the litigation threatened against Carter,” the appeals court wrote.
Even after Wednesday’s ruling, Jay-Z isn’t finished with Buzbee. He’s still pursuing a separate lawsuit for so-called malicious prosecution in New York federal court, where Buzbee is scheduled to soon file a key motion to dismiss.
