After the woman who accused him of rape fully recanted her allegations in a sworn statement last Thursday, Jay-Z is hoping her reversal can revive his California-based extortion and defamation claims against lawyer Tony Buzbee and his law firm.
In a new petition for rehearing first obtained and reported by Rolling Stone, the 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 dismissed last year. He says the woman’s new retraction, first reported by Rolling Stone, amounts to “explosive new evidence” that should allow his “meritorious claims to proceed” in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where he first filed them two years ago.
“Jane Doe’s declaration proves that discovery would yield evidence supporting Carter’s claims. Fairness and due process require this court to grant rehearing,” his new appellate filing argues.
In the woman’s sworn declaration, signed Thursday in her home state of Alabama, she said her sexual assault allegations were false, that she had never met Carter, and that she had disclosed certain “mental health conditions” to one of her lawyers before Buzbee’s law firm publicly named the Grammy-winning rapper in her lawsuit in December 2024.
“Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I have never met or spoken to Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me whatsoever,” the woman wrote in the 11-page declaration filed in Manhattan federal court as part of a separate malicious prosecution case brought by the rapper.
“There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter,” she continued under penalty of perjury. “I understand my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.”
In his petition for rehearing, Carter says the California appeals court relied heavily on the idea that Jane Doe dropped her rape lawsuit against him on Feb. 14, 2025, to “protect herself from harassment and invasion of privacy.” He argues that her new declaration tells a different story.
The woman now says she agreed to dismiss the rape case after telling her lawyers she had “doubts about [her] claims,” 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 never received any threat from Mr. Carter or anyone acting on his behalf,” the woman said in her new declaration. “No one at the Buzbee Law Firm or any other law firm ever told me about a possible settlement of the New York Lawsuit. I did not authorize a settlement.”
Carter’s petition argues that Buzbee sought to dismiss the lawsuit against Carter not to shield the woman from harassment, but “to protect himself” from a pending sanctions motion. “Carter asks only that he have the opportunity to prove his case through limited discovery on remand,” the petition states. “If the discovery shows what he expects, then the case should proceed to trial where a jury can decide who is right.”
In the appeals court ruling, the panel upheld the lower court’s dismissal of Carter’s claims by finding that Buzbee’s demand letter was sent in anticipation of litigation. It said the trial court correctly concluded Carter failed to show Buzbee made statements about the woman’s claims with actual malice.
“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. To the contrary, Buzbee submitted declarations showing his firm’s and [a referral firm’s] investigations led him to subjectively believe in the truth of the accusations,” Associate Justice Anne Richardson wrote in the unanimous ruling from California’s Second Appellate District.
Carter first sued Buzbee in late 2024, alleging the prominent Houston lawyer knowingly advanced false claims when he sent a demand letter in early November seeking money to resolve allegations that Carter had raped Jane Doe. By then, Buzbee’s firm had already sued Sean Combs on the woman’s behalf, alleging that a second, unidentified male “celebrity” also sexually assaulted her that night. Weeks later, after Carter declined to engage with the demand, 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 claims, the billionaire entrepreneur is pressing ahead with the New York-based malicious prosecution claims against Buzbee and his firm. He dismissed the Jane Doe from the action last week, but he still argues her lawyers should have known her allegations “were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any 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 multiple lawyers (at least four) who dealt with Ms. Doe long before she met me. She gave the exact same story to each. If for some reason now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that’s new information,” he wrote. He previously told Rolling Stone that “sending a basic demand letter prior to filing suit is not and will never be ‘extortion.’”
One of Buzbee’s lawyers argued in a Friday filing in New York that Doe’s retraction was a “bought-and-paid-for declaration,” though she offered no evidence to support that assertion. The lawyer said Carter and his attorneys knew the new recantation contradicted Doe’s prior sworn testimony and noted that Carter’s legal team had previously described her as “an unreliable witness” with “several mental health disorders,” raising serious “concerns about her credibility.”
“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. Carter and his attorneys lack the same excuse,” Buzbee’s lawyer, Jessica N. Meyers of Sheppard Mullin, wrote in a letter to the court.
In a Sept. 1 motion to dismiss Carter’s malicious-prosecution claims, Buzbee’s camp called the lawsuit “improper” and “abusive.” They argued that filing a civil complaint on behalf of a Jane Doe alleging sexual assault did not amount to misconduct. They added that any inconsistencies in the woman’s recollection were not necessarily suspicious, particularly given her claim that she had been drugged and raped more than two decades earlier, when she was 13.
