Saturday, February 1, 2025 - American rapper, Jay-Z, is fighting back against a lawsuit accusing him and Sean "Diddy" Combs of r@ping a 13-year-old girl during a Video Music Awards after-party in 2000.
In a legal filing Wednesday, the music entrepreneur asks a
federal judge in Manhattan to dismiss the lawsuit and order monetary sanctions
against Tony Buzbee, the Texas attorney who sued over the alleged incident in
October.
The rape claim suffers from "substantial
inaccuracies" which should have led Buzbee to drop the lawsuit, Carter's
filing says. Those include woman's father telling NBC News he had no memory of
picking his distraught young daughter up from the after-party and driving her
home as described in the lawsuit.
"It strains credulity," Carter's filing says,
"that a father — impelled to jump into his car in the middle of the night
to undertake a minimum 10-hour round trip to pick up his 13-year-old daughter
at a random gas station—would forget the entire episode."
Buzbee has also been unable to explain why the Alabama woman
who filed the suit, now in her late-30s, told NBC News in December that she had
a conversation at the after-party with rapper Benji Madden, whose distinctive
"The Last Supper" tattoo she described to the network.
Madden later told NBC that he was touring the Midwest during
the VMAs that year.
Combs and Carter have both denied the s£xual ass@ult.
"A single, initial media interview turned up glaring
problems that counsel had either ignored or never investigated,"
Wednesday's Carter filing, drafted by Manhattan attorney Alex Spiro,
complains.
In court filings, Buzbee has dismissed both inconsistencies
as unsurprising memory lapses.
"Calling this a 'memory lapse' cannot obscure counsel's
lapses in investigating whether multi-decade-old recollections aligned with
reality," Carter's filing says.
"These factual discrepancies are neither isolated nor
surprising. They result from Mr. Buzbee's rush to launch allegations unhindered
by mandatory diligence," the filing says, asking the judge assigned to the
lawsuit to impose unspecified cash damages and drop the lawsuit.
The original lawsuit was brought against Combs, his
companies, and unnamed accomplices, including "Celebrity A." Carter
was identified as Celebrity A when the suit was amended in December.
Since then, Buzbee and Carter have traded words in public
statements and court documents, including a previous filing by the
rapper seeking dismissal and sanctions.
Two weeks after Carter was named "Celebrity A" in
the revised lawsuit, Buzbee filed a new lawsuit accusing Carter's Roc
Nation of trying to intimidate his law firm and turn his plaintiffs
against him.
"This conduct was specifically targeted at our firm so
we would not pursue cases related to the Diddy litigation," Buzbee said at
the time in a statement to Business Insider. "But, we will not be bullied
or intimidated."
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