The anonymous woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her in 2000, when she was 13, filed a 12-page sworn declaration in Manhattan federal court on Thursday saying none of it happened. She wrote that she has never met or spoken to Shawn Carter, Jay-Z's legal name, and that "there is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter." Texas lawyer Tony Buzbee added Jay-Z to her suit in December 2024, and she dropped it two months later after an NBC News interview exposed holes in her story. Carter then sued Buzbee, his co-counsel, his firm, and the woman for malicious prosecution. On Thursday he dropped her from that case, so it now runs against her former lawyers: Buzbee, his firm, and his co-counsel. Buzbee's motion to throw the case out is pending, and he says he hasn't seen her declaration.

1. Carter's Lawyers: The Case Was Fake From the Start, and Now She's Said So Under Oath

Attorney Alex Spiro has said Jay-Z never settled or paid. The suit against Buzbee goes on.

They've waited nearly two years for this. Carter's lawyer, Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel, said this in February 2025, the day she dropped the suit: "By standing up in the face of heinous and false allegations, Jay has done what few can — he pushed back, he never settled, he never paid 1 red penny, he triumphed and cleared his name."

They say the warning signs were there before Buzbee ever filed. Carter's malicious-prosecution complaint says Buzbee's team should have known her claims "were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation." In December 2024, NBC found that her father didn't remember the five-hour drive she described, and that the musician she said she chatted with was on tour in the Midwest, not at the awards show. Spiro said it was "stunning" that a lawyer would file such a serious complaint "without proper vetting."

They say the false claim still cost him money and business. In a sworn declaration last year, Carter said Buzbee's demand letter felt like "placing a gun to my head." He said the case cost him roughly $20 million in lost income, and that Buzbee's actions damaged Roc Nation's business relationships. He's already lost twice in California trying to sue Buzbee for extortion and defamation, so the New York malicious-prosecution case is his remaining case against Buzbee.

2. Buzbee: She Told the Same Story to at Least Four Lawyers Before Me

He hasn't read the declaration. He says filing a Jane Doe suit isn't misconduct, and two California courts have already sided with him.

He says the story didn't start with him. Buzbee told Rolling Stone he hasn't seen the declaration. "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." He says any money she got was "petty cash" for meals and travel.

He says a shaky memory isn't proof of a lie. In a motion to dismiss filed September 1, Buzbee and his co-counsel argued that filing a civil complaint for a Jane Doe alleging sexual assault isn't misconduct. They said a woman who says she was drugged and raped at 13, more than two decades ago, would naturally have gaps in her memory, and that isn't suspicious on its own. The motion calls Carter's suit "improper" and "abusive" and says, "This case is itself a malicious prosecution."

The courts have backed him so far. Earlier this month a California appeals court affirmed the dismissal of Carter's extortion and defamation suit, finding "no evidence Buzbee accused Carter of raping Jane Doe while knowing those statements to be false or with reckless disregard as to whether they were true." The court said Buzbee had submitted declarations showing his firm's investigations "led him to subjectively believe in the truth of the accusations." Afterward, Buzbee said: "Sending a basic demand letter prior to filing suit is not and will never be 'extortion.'"

He's said before that Carter's investigators pressured her. Last year Carter's lawyers put a recording his investigators secretly made into the court record. On it she seemed to say Jay-Z had nothing to do with the assault. Buzbee called it "a pieced-together fabrication" and said the investigators "tormented and harassed and tricked that poor woman." At the time, she filed her own declaration saying she stood by her claims and feared "intimidation and retaliation from Jay-Z and/or his associates or fans."

3. Jane Doe and Her New Lawyer: She Was Assaulted, but Not by Carter, and Her Lawyers Filed Without Checking

Her new lawyer, James Blair Newman Jr., says his client is a victim who was "entirely mistaken" about Carter. She says the lawyers filed without her knowledge and never investigated.

She still says she was assaulted. Her new attorney, James Blair Newman Jr., says she "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." In her declaration she apologizes "sincerely and unconditionally" to Carter for "the devastating harm I have caused to him, his family, and his reputation."

She says the lawyers filed before she knew about it. In the fall of 2024 she answered a Facebook ad looking for people with sexual-assault claims against music mogul Sean Combs. She wrote that the ad "triggered memories of being raped when I was 13 years old." She says her lawyers filed the October 2024 complaint against Combs without telling her, and put her allegations in court "without conducting any independent investigation."

She says she told them things that should have made them check. She'd disclosed "certain mental health conditions" to her legal team before they named Carter publicly. The party she described to them followed one awards show, but the complaint named a different one. After the NBC interview, her lawyers asked her to take a polygraph, and she says she never learned the results.

She says she began doubting in January 2025. "In January 2025, I began to doubt my claims against Mr. Carter," she wrote. She also questioned whether she'd been at any celebrity party at all. She says nobody paid or promised her anything for this declaration.

Where This Lands

Carter's team says a fabricated case has finally collapsed under oath, and the lawyer who filed it should answer for it. Buzbee says she gave at least four lawyers the same account, that her inconsistencies fit a drugged 13-year-old's memory, and that courts in California have already found he believed her. The woman herself says she was assaulted by someone, that it wasn't Carter, and that her old lawyers filed before checking. The malicious-prosecution case now runs against her former lawyers, with Buzbee's motion to dismiss waiting on a judge in Manhattan.

Sources