Jay-Z Accuser Recants and Leaves Her Lawyers Exposed

A woman who sued Jay-Z for rape in 2024 now swears in federal court that she has never met him. In a 12-page declaration filed September 24, 2026, in Manhattan, Jane Doe wrote that Shawn Carter never raped her and that there is “no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter.”

Carter dropped her as a defendant in his malicious-prosecution case that same night. Houston trial lawyer Tony Buzbee and The Buzbee Law Firm stayed in the caption.

She Now Swears She Never Met Him

The paper was filed under penalty of perjury in Carter v. Buzbee, case 1:26-cv-02775, before Judge Dale E. Ho of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. An unredacted copy went in under seal. A redacted version was attached to the dismissal notice.

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. There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter. I understand my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.

Jane Doe, 12-page declaration, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York

She also wrote that her claims that Carter and Sean “Diddy” Combs raped her while a third celebrity watched are false. She said she was not promised, and did not receive, any payment from Carter or anyone acting for him.

Her new lawyer, James Blair Newman Jr., did not walk back an assault. He walked back the identification. “Our client maintains that she was a victim of sexual assault, but she was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr. Carter, and those allegations were false,” Newman said. “Mr. Carter did not rape her, sexually assault her, engage in any inappropriate conduct towards her, and she has never met him. She sincerely and unconditionally apologizes to Mr. Carter and his family.”

That split is the part the recantation does not tidy up. She now says Carter was never in the room. She still says, through counsel, that an assault happened to her.

The Ad That Put Lawyers on the Phone

The live fight is less about a celebrity meet-cute that never happened, and more about how a social-media lead became a federal rape complaint with Jay-Z’s name on it.

In the new declaration, Doe said she saw a Facebook ad in September or October 2024 seeking people with sexual assault claims against Combs. “The ad triggered memories of being raped when I was 13 years old,” she wrote. She clicked it, filled out a form, and took a call. On that call, she said, she described herself as a model who went to an after-party after the Teen Choice Awards in 2000 in New York. The lawsuit later named the MTV Video Music Awards.

On September 30, 2024, The Buzbee Law Firm and AVA Law Group, the San Diego firm led by Andrew Van Arsdale, announced a Houston press conference on claims against Combs and “other alleged perpetrators,” billed around well over 100 alleged victims. Van Arsdale was to publish a sexual assault hotline, 1-800-200-7474, and explain what happened when people called. Buzbee said the firms would “leave no stone unturned to find all potentially liable parties.”

Alabama court papers in Carter’s later suit against the lawyers describe the intake route she used. Doe signed up with AVA Law Group, which referred her to Buzbee. Those papers say Buzbee’s firm had a contract with AVA, that AVA made its own choices about how to seek clients, and that online solicitations ran through AVA or its contractors, including Facebook and Instagram client ads.

THE PATH FROM AD TO COURT

• The prompt: A Facebook ad in September or October 2024 asked for people with sexual assault claims against Combs.
• The first firm: She filled out a form, took a call, and retained AVA Law Group around mid-October 2024.
• The handoff: AVA referred the file to Buzbee’s Houston firm, which was already collecting Combs cases in public.
• The first complaint: Lawyers filed against Combs and an unnamed celebrity in Manhattan federal court on October 20, 2024.
• The naming: After a November demand letter went unanswered, an amended complaint in December 2024 put Carter in the caption.

Doe now says she was not given a draft of the October complaint and did not authorize it before it was filed. She says Buzbee and other lawyers filed it “without conducting any independent investigation, background inquiry, or due diligence, and without obtaining any corroboration of the allegations.”

Four Lawyers Heard the Same Account

Buzbee, reached the night the declaration hit the docket, said he had not seen it. He did not adopt her new story about how the file was built.

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.

Tony Buzbee, email, September 24, 2026

He also said he believed she received “some petty cash” for meals and travel when she went to Houston. She wrote that lawyers gave her $1,200 in cash for that December 2024 trip, which included a television interview. After discrepancies in her account, she said, they asked her to take a polygraph. She wrote that she never got the results.

In January 2025, she wrote, she began to doubt her claims against Carter and “began doubting that I ever went to a party with celebrities.” After she told the lawyers, she said, they told her they were dismissing the suit. She dropped the complaint against Carter and Combs in February 2025.

That was not her last word. In a March 2025 declaration in California, she said she stood by the New York claims and pointed to fear of intimidation as a reason she had walked away. In the new filing she wrote, “I never received any threat from Mr. Carter or anyone acting on his behalf.”

TWO ACCOUNTS OF THE SAME FILE

Those four rows are now the guts of the New York case. If a jury ever sits, it will be asked to pick between a client who says the complaint outran her, and a lawyer who says she told the same story to a room of attorneys.

How Jay-Z’s Name Landed in the Complaint

The original October filing treated Carter as an unnamed “male celebrity.” Buzbee’s firm sent a mediation demand dated November 5, 2024. Carter, through counsel, treated that letter as a shakedown. He sued Buzbee in California that November under a John Doe caption, then came out of alias when the New York complaint named him.

In a sworn declaration of his own, Carter said the letter felt like an “existential threat.” “I felt that Mr. Buzbee was placing a gun to my head that I either bow to his demands or endure personal and financial ruin,” he wrote. Publicly he called the accusation a blackmail attempt and said he would not pay.

On December 8, 2024, the New York complaint was amended to name him. It alleged that in 2000, when Doe was 13, she was drugged and raped by Carter and Combs at an after-party tied to the MTV Video Music Awards, with a third celebrity in the room. Combs denied her claims. His lawyers called the civil wave a hunt for headlines. In July 2025 a criminal jury convicted Combs on prostitution-related charges involving two ex-girlfriends. He is serving a four-year sentence. That verdict does not decide this civil file.

HOW CARTER GOT NAMED

1. September 30, 2024: Buzbee and AVA Law Group announce a Houston press conference and a public hotline for Combs-related claims.
2. October 20, 2024: Lawyers file Jane Doe v. Combs in Manhattan, naming an unidentified celebrity as well as Combs.
3. November 5, 2024: Buzbee’s firm sends Carter a mediation demand on Doe’s behalf.
4. November 2024: Carter sues Buzbee in California, first as John Doe, calling the letter extortion.
5. December 8, 2024: The New York complaint is amended to name Shawn Carter.
6. February 2025: Doe dismisses the New York complaint against Carter and Combs.

Carter’s original Alabama complaint later argued that a basic public-records search would have raised doubts before anyone put his name in a rape pleading. It cited, among other things, mental-health court records close in time to the demand letter. Doe’s new declaration says she had already disclosed “mental health conditions” to her legal team before they named him in December 2024.

A Dismissal That Leaves Buzbee in the Case

The docket on the night of September 24 is a clean map of who Carter still wants to fight. At 10:51 p.m., his lawyer Jordan W. Siev filed a notice under Rule 41 that dismissed Jane Doe without prejudice and without costs. At 11:06 p.m. came a request to seal her unredacted declaration. At 11:14 p.m. the sealed declaration was logged. At 11:22 p.m. Siev sent Judge Ho a letter about the dismissal.

Without prejudice means Carter is not forever barred from suing her again. It also means he is, for now, done with her as a defendant. The remaining defendants include Buzbee, David Fortney, and Anthony G. Buzbee LP, doing business as The Buzbee Law Firm. Newman appears on the docket for Doe.

Carter’s New York theory is that the lawyers should have known, before filing, that her claims “were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation.” He has said they tried to squeeze a secret settlement “under the threat of devastating harm to his reputation.”

On September 1, 2026, Buzbee and co-counsel moved to throw that case out. They called it “improper” and “abusive.” They argued that filing a Jane Doe sexual-assault complaint is not misconduct, and that gaps in a story about a drugged 13-year-old, more than two decades later, are not proof of a lawyer’s bad faith. “This case is itself a malicious prosecution,” they wrote, pointing back at Carter.

California’s Appeals Court Backed the Demand Letter

Carter has already lost one theater. A California judge dismissed his extortion case. Earlier in September 2026, the Second Appellate District affirmed that dismissal in a unanimous ruling by Associate Justice Anne Richardson.

“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,” Richardson wrote. “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.” The court also held that the November demand letter sat inside the litigation privilege because a lawsuit was genuinely contemplated. Doe did sue after Carter declined to mediate.

Buzbee, after that ruling, said sending a basic demand letter before a suit “is not and will never be ‘extortion.’” He said he expected the California case to die and wanted his fees back.

That holding is the main shield he will carry into Manhattan. Subjective belief, plus privilege on the letter, is a high wall on a malicious-prosecution claim. The new declaration is the first real crack he has to answer, because his former client is now on paper saying the Carter facts were false and that the October complaint went out without her sign-off.

Judge Dale Ho Still Has the Buzbee File

The New York action arrived on April 3, 2026, after a transfer from the Southern District of Alabama, where it had been 1:25-cv-00086. A case-management order in the file set fact discovery to close by December 31, 2026. Interrogatories were due October 30, 2026. Those dates are still on the calendar unless Ho resets them around the dismissal and the new exhibit.

Buzbee still represents other people with civil claims against Combs. Nothing in Doe’s paper binds those clients. It does give Carter a sworn statement from the one plaintiff who put him in a child-rape complaint, plus a waiver of the usual courtesy that a former client stays quiet about how the lawyers built the file.

When Doe dismissed the 2024 case in February 2025, Carter said the trauma to his wife, Beyoncé, their children, and his loved ones “can never be dismissed.” The new declaration uses the same idea in her own voice: the damage, she wrote, “can never be fully undone.”

Judge Ho now has a plaintiff who has let the accuser out, a sealed 12-page recant, and a Houston firm that says the recant is news to them. The next fight is not whether Jay-Z and Jane Doe ever shared a room. On her sworn telling, they did not. The fight is what four lawyers did with a Facebook lead before they typed his name.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on court filings and public statements. It is informational only and is not legal advice, a finding of liability, or a ruling on any remaining claim. It does not tell readers how to bring or defend a defamation, malicious-prosecution, or sexual-assault case, and it should not be used as a substitute for advice from a licensed attorney about any specific matter. Figures, quotes, and case statuses come from the papers and statements described here and may change as the New York case moves.