In a 2024 lawsuit, an anonymous woman identified as Jane Doe accused Jay-Z and Sean "Diddy" Combs of raping her in 2000, when she was 13. Soon afterward, she admitted inconsistencies in her story and dropped her lawsuit, and Jay-Z sued her, calling the accusation "a false, malicious story." Now, Jay's accuser has recanted her allegations completely, saying that she has never even met the rapper.
As Rolling Stone reports, Jay-Z's former accuser has written a new 12-page court declaration, claiming that her original claims were false and that she told her legal team about how she suffered from certain "mental health conditions" before filing the lawsuit. She writes, "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... I understand my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone."
Jane Doe writes that she doesn't believe her lawyers did due diligence before filing the lawsuit and that she only came to doubt her own story later: "In January 2025, I began to doubt my claims against Mr. Carter. I also began doubting that I ever went to a party with celebrities." The declaration came with a notice that Jay-Z had voluntarily dropped the Jane Doe from his lawsuit against her celebrity lawyer Tony Buzbee and his Texas law firm. The woman said that she received no payment for her declaration.
Jay had already claimed that Buzbee sent him an "extortionate demand letter" before naming him in an in-progress lawsuit against Sean Combs. In a statement to Rolling Stone, Buzbee says that he hadn't read Jane Doe's declaration, adding, "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." Read the Rolling Stone report here.
