Photo Credit: Jay-Z for HBO Max
The unnamed woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her when she was 13 has withdrawn her claims, saying that she has never met the rapper.
A woman who alleged Jay-Z raped her when she was just 13 years old has formally withdrawn her claims and now says she has never met the rapper. The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, originally alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2024 that Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter had drugged and raped her alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs. The incident had allegedly taken place at an MTV awards afterparty in 2000.
Jay-Z quickly denied the allegations, calling them little more than a blackmail attempt, while his lawyer insisted that the events relied on an “impossible timeline.” Combs also denied the claims. The accuser dropped her lawsuit last year, and Jay-Z filed a countersuit.
Now, the woman says her claims were false: “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,” she said in her official declaration, adding that there was “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.”
As a result, the woman has been dropped from Jay-Z’s lawsuit, but his litigation against her former lawyers, including Tony Buzbee, continues. He asserts that they should have known from the beginning that the allegations were “contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation.”
“If, for some reason, now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that’s new information,” Buzbee told Rolling Stone.
“Our client maintains that she was a victim of sexual assault, but she was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr. Carter,” said her current attorney, James Blair Newman Jr.
The woman’s statement claimed that seeing an advertisement calling for victims of Combs to come forward had triggered memories of sexual assault. At the time, Combs was being investigated for numerous claims of sexual assault and was eventually found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was sentenced in October 2025. However, these were unrelated to the unnamed woman’s case.
Further, the woman said that she was unaware of the lawsuit being filed on her behalf, and the lawsuit was dropped after she expressed doubts about her claims.
“The trauma that my wife, my children, loved ones, and I have endured can never be dismissed,” Jay-Z previously told GQ. “I haven’t been that angry in a long time; uncontrollable anger. You don’t put that on someone—that’s a thing that you better be super sure (about).”