Jay-Z Accuser Recants, but Her Lawyer Remains Sued

The woman who named Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter as a rapist in 2024 told a Manhattan federal judge on Sept. 24 that she has never met him. In a sworn 11-page declaration filed in his remaining lawsuit, she wrote that he never raped her, never spoke to her, and never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward her.

Carter then dropped her as a defendant. He is still suing Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee and Buzbee’s firm, which put his name into a Sean “Diddy” Combs case after a Facebook ad, a referral, and a demand letter Carter called a shakedown.

Jane Doe Tells a Federal Judge She Never Met Jay-Z

The filing went in Thursday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Jane Doe, the pseudonym she has used since 2024, signed it under penalty of perjury. She said she was promised nothing for it and received no money from Carter or anyone acting for him.

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, sworn declaration, Southern District of New York, Sept. 24, 2026

A separate statement provided with the papers added an unconditional apology to Carter, his family, and his reputation. Jordan W. Siev, counsel for Carter, filed a notice the same day dismissing her from the action without prejudice and without costs. The unredacted declaration was submitted under seal; a redacted copy went on the public docket as an exhibit.

Representatives for Carter had no comment on the recantation. Buzbee, reached by email Thursday night, said he had not seen the new declaration.

The Jane Doe who accused Jay-Z of rape has fully recanted, saying that there's "no truth" to her claims and she never even met the Roc Nation mogul.https://t.co/WGNQCq96sb

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 25, 2026

The Facebook Ad That Became a Named-Celebrity Suit

The declaration’s account of how the case started is blunter than the 2024 pleadings. Jane Doe wrote that she answered a Facebook ad in late September or early October 2024 seeking people with sexual assault claims against Combs. The ad, she said, “triggered memories of being raped when I was 13 years old.” She filled out a form and got a call.

On that call she recalled saying she was a model who went to an afterparty after the Teen Choice Awards in 2000 in New York. The lawsuit that followed said the show was the MTV Video Music Awards and put the assault at a New York afterparty in September 2000, when she was 13. The 2000 Teen Choice Awards were held on Aug. 6 at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, a different show, in a different state, on a different date.

She was connected to AVA Law Group, signed with that firm, and was referred to Buzbee’s office. She wrote that she does not remember exactly what she told the first firm. She also wrote that she told the lawyers about mental health conditions and was never asked whether those conditions affected her memory of the events she was describing.

HOW THE FIRST COMPLAINT GOT FILED

• The ad: She clicked a Facebook notice looking for Combs accusers, then completed an online form and took one intake call.
• The draft: She said she was never shown the complaint before it was filed and never gave a draft her approval.
• The lawyers: She said the October 2024 suit went in without an independent investigation, a background check, or corroborating witnesses, and that she did not know who Buzbee was when that first complaint landed.
• The amendment: Carter was added on Dec. 8, 2024, as the previously unnamed “male celebrity,” after he refused to sit down on a November demand letter.

Buzbee’s reply is that the file did not begin with him. “Her case was referred to our firm by another law firm along with the intake information they gathered,” he wrote. “She gave the same detailed story to four lawyers before she met with me. We hired a former major crimes police detective to vet her facts.” He also wrote that at least four lawyers dealt with her before she met him, and that she told each of them the same story. “If for some reason now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that’s new information.”

Buzbee Is Still the Defendant in New York

Carter’s federal malicious-prosecution case still pending is captioned Carter v. Buzbee, No. 1:26-cv-02775, before Judge Dale E. Ho. The Thursday papers take Jane Doe out of that case. They leave Buzbee, David Fortney, and the Texas firm in it.

Carter has said Buzbee sent an “extortionate demand letter” in November 2024, then named him in the Combs suit after he refused to pay. In an earlier sworn statement he described that letter as 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.

Buzbee has called the letter a standard pre-suit demand and has said no dollar figure and no threat were in it. On Sept. 1 his lawyers moved to toss the New York claims as “improper” and “abusive.” They argued that filing a Jane Doe sexual assault complaint is not misconduct, and that gaps in a drugged-and-raped account from more than 20 years later are not proof of a plot. “This case is itself a malicious prosecution,” they wrote, pointing back at Carter.

THREE DOCKETS AFTER THE RECANTATION

The original Jane Doe complaint is dead as a claim against Carter. The live question is whether Buzbee and his colleagues should have known, before they named a global star, that the story “was contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation,” which is how Carter’s New York papers put it.

The California Ruling That Protected the Demand Letter

Fourteen days before the recantation, California’s Second Appellate District shut the other door. In a unanimous 24-page opinion, Associate Justice Anne Richardson wrote that the record had no evidence Buzbee accused Carter of rape while knowing the charge was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth.

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, California Second Appellate District, Sept. 10, 2026

The panel also held that the demand letter sat inside the litigation privilege because Buzbee and Jane Doe had declared that a suit was genuinely contemplated, and because she did sue Carter after he declined to mediate. Buzbee’s line after that win was unchanged: “Sending a basic demand letter prior to filing suit is not and will never be ‘extortion.’” He said he expected to recover his fees and costs.

Los Angeles County Judge Mark Epstein had already dismissed the California case in a 65-page ruling he was “not wholly satisfied” with, ending on two words, “stay tuned.” The new Manhattan declaration is the exhibit that ruling never had. It is also the exhibit Buzbee now has to answer in New York, where the privilege fight is not over the letter alone but over whether the lawyers had probable cause to file.

Investigators Caught a Different Story on Her Porch

The coercion theory that still travels with this case comes from a February 2025 doorstep interview in Alabama, after Carter’s investigators found her. In a snippet later put before Judge Epstein, one investigator asked whether she was saying Carter was at the afterparty but “didn’t have anything to do with any sexual acts towards you.”

“Yeah,” she replied. Asked whether Buzbee was the person who suggested Jay-Z had a role, she said, “He was the one that kind of pushed me towards going forward with him, with Jay-Z.” In the same period she was also quoted as saying, “It was more Diddy, but Buzbee brought Jay-Z into it.”

Buzbee called that recording a setup at the time. He said investigators had harassed her for weeks to force a recant, and he played a call in which she denied telling them Jay-Z had not assaulted her. Judge Epstein listened to the tape, called it “not as clear as either party would like,” and noted that she later said she had felt intimidated. He dismissed Carter’s California case anyway.

Her Sept. 24 declaration now says the opposite of a forced climb-down. She wrote that she was never threatened by Carter or his team, and that she has not received any money or promise of money from them. She also wrote that by January 2025 she had begun to doubt the claims against Carter and to doubt “that I ever went to a party with celebrities,” and that Combs or Carter were involved “in any attack on me.” After she voiced those doubts, she said, her lawyers told her they were dismissing the suit.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The old suit: Jane Doe’s complaint against Combs and Carter was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice on Feb. 14, 2025, so those rape claims cannot be refiled in that form.
• The new oath: On Sept. 24 she swore she never met Carter, that the joint rape story in the old complaint was false, and that she was not paid for saying so.
• The remaining defendant: Carter dismissed her without prejudice the same day and is still suing Buzbee and the firm in Manhattan.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Buzbee’s answer: He had not read the declaration when he first replied, and he has not yet answered it in a New York brief.
• The assault she still alleges: Her new lawyer says she was sexually assaulted by someone; the declaration does not name a replacement defendant.
• Disciplinary fallout: No public bar complaint tied to this filing has been docketed in the papers reviewed for this account.

A reading that treats the recantation as the product of two years of pressure has to sit next to the calendar. The original civil case ran from October 2024 to Feb. 14, 2025, roughly four months. The long fight after that was Carter’s, against the lawyers.

Newman Says She Was a Victim but Named the Wrong Man

James Blair Newman Jr., who now represents her in the malicious-prosecution case, did not describe a person who invented an assault from nothing. He described a person who named the wrong famous man.

“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.”

The declaration itself goes further on the old complaint. She wrote that the October pleading’s claim that Carter and Combs raped her while a third celebrity watched was false. Court papers filed with the recantation also state that Combs did not rape her. That original Jane Doe claim was separate from the criminal case that produced Combs’s 2025 conviction and 50-month prison sentence on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs’s lawyers have said he has never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone, man or woman, adult or minor. Buzbee still represents other civil plaintiffs against Combs.

Newman’s formulation leaves a hole the New York case does not have to fill. Carter is out. The woman still says, through counsel, that an assault happened. She does not, in this declaration, put another public figure in the room.

Cash, Coaching, and a Show in the Wrong State

The Houston trip is the part of the declaration that will be hardest for the firm to wave off as a memory glitch. About a month after Carter was named, she wrote, Buzbee’s office asked her to sit for a television interview. The firm paid for flights, meals, and a hotel, took her shopping “to get camera ready,” and bought the outfit. She said the lawyers “coached” her on “how to act and what to say.”

She texted her mother that she was going to try to come back with some cash. She met Buzbee for the first time shortly before the taping, a brief meeting, and wrote that “Mr. Buzbee gave me $1000 in cash for myself and my family.” He has said he believed she received “some petty cash” for meals and travel, and that every court filing, including the demand letter, was explained to her in detail. After the NBC interview, she said, the lawyers asked for a polygraph because of discrepancies; she never got the results.

HOW THE CASE MOVED

1. Aug. 6, 2000: The Teen Choice Awards are held at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, the show she later recalled on the intake call.
2. September 2000: The later lawsuit places a VMAs afterparty assault in New York, with Carter and Combs named as the attackers and a third celebrity watching.
3. Late September or early October 2024: She answers the Facebook ad, takes an intake call, and is referred from AVA Law Group to Buzbee’s firm.
4. October 2024: The first complaint is filed against Combs and an unnamed male celebrity; she says she did not see it first.
5. November 2024: Buzbee sends Carter a demand letter; Carter sues in California over it.
6. Dec. 8, 2024: The New York complaint is amended to name Carter. She travels to Houston, meets Buzbee, and sits for the NBC interview.
7. January 2025: She begins to doubt the Carter claim and whether she was ever at a celebrity party.
8. Feb. 14, 2025: The Jane Doe action is dismissed with prejudice; Judge Torres so-orders it on Feb. 18.
9. February 2025: Investigators interview her in Alabama; the porch tape becomes an exhibit in California.
10. Sept. 10, 2026: The California appeal confirming Buzbee’s privilege win is issued.
11. Sept. 24, 2026: She recants under oath; Carter dismisses her and keeps the lawyers on the Manhattan docket.

Buzbee’s defense has been consistent across those dates. The client told several lawyers the same story, a detective was hired, the demand letter was ordinary practice, and a recantation now is news to him. The declaration he had not read as of Thursday night is the document that waives a large part of that shield in New York, because the former client is no longer standing behind the 2024 complaint. She is the witness against the filing.

Carter never paid the demand, never settled the rape case, and has now taken the accuser off his own caption. Buzbee still has to explain, to Judge Ho, how a Facebook ad, a Teen Choice memory, and a New York VMAs complaint became a charge against a man the plaintiff now swears she has never met.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on court filings, sworn statements, and public comments. It is informational only and is not legal advice, a finding of liability, or a determination of any sexual assault claim beyond what the cited papers state. Readers with a legal question about a pending case should consult a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction before acting on anything described here. Anyone who has been affected by sexual assault can contact RAINN at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or text HELLO to 741-741; the filings, case statuses, and quotations in this piece reflect the public record as dated above and may change as the New York action proceeds.