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Jay-Z filed a new motion on Wednesday seeking to dismiss the lawsuit brought by a woman who alleges that he and Sean “Diddy” Combs sexually assaulted her in 2000 when she was 13 years old.
In the court filing, filed on Wednesday, the rapper and his lawyers reference what they claim are inconsistencies in the woman’s account of the events from that night. They also requested that the judge impose a monetary sanction on the woman’s lawyer, Anthony Buzbee, claiming that he failed to adequately investigate the woman’s allegations before filing the suit.
The allegations against Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, were made in an amended lawsuit filed last year. The woman alleges that in 2000, when she was 13 years old, she was drugged and raped by both Carter and Combs at an afterparty hosted by Combs after the MTV Music Awards, which took place in New York.
Carter has repeatedly denied the allegations against him, and criticized the lawsuit, calling it a “blackmail attempt” by the plaintiff’s lawyer.
Combs has denied all of the allegations against him, including this one. He is currently in jail on federal sex trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
In the new filing, Carter’s lawyers cited an interview the woman gave with NBC News in December, in which she stood by her allegations but admitted that she had “made some mistakes” in parts of her account around corroborating witnesses.
“Honestly, what is the clearest is what happened to me and [the] route that I took to what happened to me,” she said. “Not all of the faces there are as clear, so I have made some mistakes. I may have made a mistake in identifying.”
Among the passages from the NBC News story referenced was that the woman claimed that her father picked her up after the alleged sexual assault, but her father said that he did not recall picking her up; the woman also mentioned speaking to a musician at the afterparty, but a representative for that musician said that the musician was not in New York at the time.
Elsewhere in the filing, Carter’s attorneys pointed to alleged impossibilities in the woman’s story such as her description of Combs’s home, and argued that “by any objective measure, the fact that nearly every step in Plaintiff’s narrative – from her arrival at the VMAs to her interactions with the limousine driver and celebrities to the ride with her father – turns out to be false or highly unlikely casts considerable doubt on Plaintiff’s allegation that Mr. Carter raped her, which he did not.”
In addition to attempting to have the case dismissed, Carter’s lawyers also requested that the judge impose a monetary sanction on the woman’s lawyer, Buzbee, who they allege did not subject the woman’s allegations to “even the most rudimentary diligence”.
“To sign a pleading accusing someone of such a horrific crime without adequately vetting the allegation – particularly when the defendant’s prominence means that the allegation will be repeated in headlines across the world – is deeply wrong and unethical,” Carter’s lawyer states in the filing.
“If lawyers do not face consequences for such a cavalier effort to destroy another person’s reputation and inflict emotional harm on his loved ones, that tactic will proliferate.”
The monetary sanction, Carters lawyers say, would “ensure some measure of deterrence of this sort of conduct in the future”.
Buzbee said in a statement to Rolling Stone on Wednesday that he would not be “bullied or intimidated” by Carter or his team.
Carter’s attorney and his firm “are paid by the hour, so, they file a lot of junk with the Court”, Buzbee told Rolling Stone. “With each frantic filing, his team reeks of desperation. He and his team think the laws and rules don’t apply to them. They are flat wrong. They also think they can bully or intimidate counsel for victims by filing meritless and frivolous pleadings full of lies and half-truths. Again, they are dead wrong … We will address the utter lack of merit with his filing with the Court, rather than with the press.”
Buzbee told NBC News in December that the woman’s case was “referred to our firm by another, who vetted it prior to sending it to us”, adding that his client “remains fiercely adamant that what she has stated is true, to the best of her memory”.
“We will continue to vet her claims and collect corroborating data to the extent it exists,” he told the network. “Because we have interrogated her intensely, she has even agreed to submit to a polygraph. I’ve never had a client suggest that before.”
He added: “We always do our best to vet each claim made, just as we did in this case.”
The new filing comes after the judge overseeing the case denied an earlier effort made by Carter and his team to dismiss the case.
Judge Analisa Torres wrote in the court order in December: “Carter’s lawyer’s relentless filing of combative motions containing inflammatory language and ad hominem attacks is inappropriate, a waste of judicial resources, and a tactic unlikely to benefit his client.”
Torres also said the court “will not fast-track the judicial process merely because counsel demands it”.
Separately, Carter is suing Buzbee in California for extortion and defamation. Buzbee has launched his own lawsuit against Carter’s company, Roc Nation, claiming that the company and its lawyers are using “shadowy operatives” to unlawfully entice former clients of Buzbee to file “frivolous” claims against him.
