Buzbee disputes recantation, says accuser repeated story to four prior lawyers
The woman who sued rapper Jay-Z in 2024 alleging he raped her when she was 13 formally recanted her allegation in a sworn court declaration filed Thursday, writing that the musician “never raped me” and that she had “never met or spoken to” him.
In the declaration, filed in the case Carter brought against her and her former lawyers, the woman said her earlier claims that she had been drugged and raped by Carter and Sean “Diddy” Combs at an after-party following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, while a third celebrity watched, were false. “There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr Carter,” she wrote. The woman, identified in court filings only by the pseudonym Jane Doe and described as being from Alabama, added: “I understand my false accusations have caused Mr Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.”
The declaration was filed in the lawsuit Carter brought against the woman and her attorneys in February 2025, after she voluntarily dropped her underlying rape lawsuit against him and Combs. Carter had denied the allegations throughout, describing them at the time as “frivolous, fictitious and appalling allegations” and a “blackmail attempt.”
The woman has now been removed from Carter’s countersuit, according to the BBC. She said in the declaration that she had not received any money from Carter or anyone acting on his behalf, and had not been paid to make the new statement. Carter’s separate lawsuit against Buzbee and the other lawyers who represented her continues.
Doe’s filing offers a detailed account of how the original lawsuit came to be filed. She said she saw a Facebook advertisement in September or October 2024 seeking people who might have sexual assault claims against Combs. “The ad triggered memories of being raped when I was 13 years old,” she wrote. She said she was contacted by a law firm but was not provided with a draft of the lawsuit containing her allegations and did not authorize its filing in October 2024. She said Buzbee and other lawyers acting on her behalf filed the complaint “without conducting any independent investigation, background inquiry, or due diligence, and without obtaining any corroboration of the allegations.”
Buzbee pushed back on the recantation in a statement to Rolling Stone, which first reported the new declaration. He said he had not seen the document. “We have multiple lawyers (at least four) who dealt with Ms Doe long before she met me,” Buzbee said. “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.”
The exchange revives a contested claim Buzbee made when Carter filed his countersuit in February 2025. At the time, Buzbee said Carter’s investigators had “repeatedly harassed, threatened and harangued this poor woman for weeks, trying to intimidate her and make her recant her story.” In her new declaration, Doe rejected that characterization. “I never received any threat from Mr Carter or anyone acting on his behalf,” she wrote.
Combs also denied Doe’s claims when she filed her original lawsuit, with his lawyer describing the suit at the time as one of several civil cases “pushed forward by an attorney more focused on media headlines than legal merit.” In July 2025, Combs was convicted by a criminal court on prostitution-related charges involving his two ex-girlfriends and is currently serving a four-year prison sentence. Buzbee represents numerous other people who have made allegations against Combs.
The BBC said it had contacted Buzbee for comment on the new declaration.
Carter, who is married to singer Beyoncé, said in February 2025 when Doe dropped her case that “the trauma that my wife, my children, loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed.”