Jay-Z filed a lawsuit Monday against big-name Houston attorney Tony Buzbee and a woman who previously accused the hip-hop artist and Sean “Diddy” Combs of raping her when she was 13 years old in 2000.
The suit, filed in Alabama, comes almost a month after the woman, identified as Jane Doe, voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit against Diddy and Jay-Z, whose legal name is Shawn Carter.
In Carter’s new lawsuit against the woman, the artist accuses Doe of conspiring with multiple attorneys, including Buzbee, to make false and defamatory statements against him.
Doe was one of hundreds of people whom Buzbee has been representing in lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual misconduct. However, hers was the only one that named Carter, alleging that he and Combs raped her in New York City after the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards while an unnamed female celebrity watched.
Combs has denied all wrongdoing in multiple lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct as well as a federal sex trafficking case against him. Carter also denied Doe’s allegations, and she dismissed her lawsuit with prejudice, meaning she cannot file it again.
In Carter’s lawsuit, obtained by HuffPost, Carter accuses Doe, Buzbee and David Fortney, another attorney at the firm, of being “soullessly motivated by greed.” Carter claims they attempted to extort him in November through “a menacing ‘private’ ‘demand letter.’” However, when the letter failed to yield any financial results, Doe amended her lawsuit against Combs to include Carter.
The artist claims that since Doe filed her lawsuit against him, he has suffered emotional distress along with a $20 million loss from his record label, Roc Nation.
The lawsuit alleges that the woman told Buzbee that Carter did not sexually assault her, but her attorney “pushed” her toward going forward with a false story for a payout. Carter alleges that Doe at one point “voluntarily admitted directly” to his representatives that he did not assault her.
Buzbee told HuffPost in a statement that the quotes attributed to Doe in Carter’s lawsuit are either “completely made up” or Carter’s representatives spoke to someone else. He said Carter’s filing holds no merit and that Doe stands by her allegations.
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“Shawn Carter’s investigators have repeatedly harassed, threatened and harangued this poor woman for weeks trying to intimidate her and make her recant her story. She hasn’t, and won’t,” Buzbee wrote, claiming Carter’s investigators have been caught on tape offering to pay people to sue him and his firm.