Jay-Z Sexual Assault Accuser Fully Recants Her Accusation: ‘These Allegations Were False’

A woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her as a 13-year-old girl has fully recanted her allegations, telling a federal judge that her claims were “false,” that she had mental health issues and that her ex-attorneys filed the bombshell case with little due diligence. In new court documents filed Thursday (Sept. 24) in a lawsuit Jay-Z brought against the accuser and her former lawyer Tony Buzbee, the unnamed Jane Doe disavows the claims made in her shocking 2024 lawsuit, saying explicitly that he “never raped me” and that she has “never met or spoken to Mr. Carter.” Related “Mr. Carter never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me whatsoever,” the woman writes in the document, signed under penalty of perjury. “I understand my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.” In the same filing, Doe says she had only one phone call with her attorneys before they filed the initial case. She believes Buzbee and her other ex-lawyers filed it “without conducting any independent investigation, background inquiry, or due diligence, and without obtaining any corroboration of the allegations.” Doe also claims that she disclosed that she had “mental health conditions” to her attorneys before they filed the claims against Jay-Z, but that they “never asked any questions about whether this affected my memory and recollection of the allegation.” And she says they later gave her $1,000 cash before a high-profile NBC News interview on her accusations. Buzbee did not immediately return a request for comment from Billboard. In a statement to Billboard, Doe’s new attorney J. Blair Newman said: “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.” He later added: “She sincerely and unconditionally apologizes to Mr. Carter and his family.” The new court filing says Doe has “not received or been promised any monetary compensation” in return for making her recantation and that she was making it “voluntarily and on my own free will.” But it came alongside a motion voluntarily dropping her as a target of the Jay-Z lawsuit. Buzbee, who filed dozens of abuse cases against Sean “Diddy” Combs during the mogul’s fall from grace, added Jay-Z to one of them in December 2024. The stunning claims alleged that the two stars had drugged and assaulted a teen girl during an after-party following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. Jay-Z strongly denied the accusations and fought back aggressively, claiming Buzbee and his unnamed client had fabricated the claims in an effort to extort him. He called the case a “blackmail attempt” and vowed to hold Buzbee accountable for bringing it. The case against Jay-Z was quickly dropped in February 2025, less than three months after it named the superstar. But the rapper has since pursued his own litigation against Buzbee. He filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles court accusing the lawyer of extortion and defamation and another in federal court alleging malicious prosecution and civil conspiracy. The California case was dismissed earlier this month by a state appeals court, which said there was no evidence that Buzbee filed the case knowing the accusations were false. But the federal case is still pending — and that’s where Doe filed her recantation on Thursday. In it, she does not outright say that Buzbee or her other former attorneys (David Fortney and Antigone Curis) knew her claims against Jay-Z were false before they filed them. But it does claim that they didn’t make much of an effort to find out if they were true. After responding to a Facebook ad from a law firm called AVA Law Group seeking alleged Diddy victims, Doe says she submitted a form and then had a brief phone call with someone from the firm. She recounted the alleged attack, she says, but told the firm that she attended a different awards event in 2000, not the MTV VMAs. “Other than my one call … I do not recall anyone interviewing me or discussing my claims with me before the October Complaint got filed,” she writes in Thursday’s declaration. “In fact, I did not know that the October Complaint had even been filed until weeks later.” Ahead of the December 2025 complaint that first publicly named Jay-Z as a defendant, Doe says she signed a legal declaration confirming that “my allegations against Mr. Carter and Mr. Combs were true.” At the time, she says she “provided the names of my father and the friend who drove me to New York City,” but that “no one asked me for proof of my allegations, or other corroborating witnesses.” Before the NBC News interview, she says Fortney “coached me on how to act and what to say.” And she says she never even met Buzbee until a brief encounter at a Houston coffee shop shortly before the interview. “Mr. Buzbee gave me $1,000 in cash for myself and my family,” Doe says in her filing. “The meeting lasted about 10 minutes. There was nothing of substance discussed, mostly just pleasantries, although I do recall that Mr. Buzbee only spoke about Mr. Carter, not Mr. Combs.” By January 2025, Doe says she “began to doubt my claims against Mr. Carter” and “also began doubting that I ever went to a party with celebrities.” After voicing these doubts to her attorneys, she says Fortney visited her and told her they would drop the case. “He said it was possible that Mr. Carter or people connected to him could find out my name and address,” she writes. “He said it was dangerous to speak about the case at all.” The filing also recounts a February 2025 meeting between Doe and two investigators hired by Jay-Z. A recording of that meeting, in which she supposedly admitted the claims were false and that Buzbee had pressured her to lie, was a key piece of disputed evidence in the earlier California lawsuit, but a judge ruled last year that the tape was inadmissible hearsay and refused to consider it. In her filing on Thursday, Doe says she has reviewed a transcript of the recording and that it is “to the best of my recollection, a true, accurate, and complete portrayal of that conversation. My statements to those investigators that Mr. Carter did not rape me were accurate and truthful.”