The Jay-Z accuser who alleged that he sexually assaulted her when she was 13 has now said under oath that she never met or spoke to him. The anonymous woman, who dropped her civil case in early 2025, has declared that her claims against the rapper were false.
The allegation concerned an awards-show afterparty in New York in 2000. She had accused Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, and Sean “Diddy” Combs of assaulting her. Her latest statement represents more than a clarification. It is a complete withdrawal of everything she previously alleged about Carter.
“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 wrote in a 12-page declaration filed in Manhattan federal court.
“There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr Carter,” she continued. “I understand my false accusations have caused Mr Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.”
She also stated that nobody had promised or paid her money in exchange for making the declaration.
Why has the woman withdrawn her allegations?
The woman’s new lawyer, James Blair Newman Jr, said she still maintains that she was sexually assaulted but accepts that she was “entirely mistaken” in identifying Carter as an attacker.
Newman said the allegations against the 56-year-old rapper were false and that his client “sincerely and unconditionally apologizes to Mr Carter and his family”.
Her original lawsuit was filed in October 2024. It accused Combs of raping her when she was 13 and referred to a second alleged attacker only as an unnamed male celebrity. Two months later, the complaint was amended to identify Carter, who denied the accusation from the start.
Problems with her account emerged soon after his name became public. In an interview with NBC News, she acknowledged that she had “made some mistakes”, while pointing to the more than two decades that had passed since the alleged events.
She voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit against both Carter and Combs in early 2025. The latest declaration goes much further by stating plainly that she had never met Carter, let alone been assaulted by him.
How did the original lawsuit begin?
In her new account, the woman said she first made contact with lawyers after responding to a Facebook advertisement seeking people with sexual assault allegations against Combs.
She said the advert brought back memories of being raped at 13 and that she later spoke to someone about what she remembered. However, she alleged that the initial lawsuit against Combs was filed without her knowledge and that her lawyers had not conducted an independent investigation beforehand.
By January 2025, she said, she had started questioning both the allegations against Carter and whether she had attended the celebrity party at the centre of her account. That is a substantial uncertainty for a case built around identifying who was present at a specific event.
Attorney Tony Buzbee has disputed parts of her latest version. He told Rolling Stone that several lawyers had heard the woman provide the same account before she met him. According to Buzbee, if she now says she lied to her lawyers and the court, that would be “new information”.
Buzbee and his co-counsel have argued that inconsistencies in her recollections do not prove that her legal team acted improperly, particularly because she claimed she had been drugged and raped more than 20 years earlier.
What happens to Jay-Z’s case against the lawyers?
Carter is pursuing legal action against Buzbee and his Texas law firm over their handling of the accusation. The woman had also been named as a defendant in his malicious-prosecution lawsuit, but he has voluntarily dismissed his claims against her following the declaration.
His case against the lawyers remains active. Carter alleges they should have recognised that the claims against him were inconsistent and unsupported before proceeding. He has also accused Buzbee and the firm of trying to pressure him into a confidential financial settlement, an allegation Buzbee denies.
Buzbee and his co-counsel have asked for Carter’s lawsuit to be dismissed, calling it “improper” and “abusive”. Their position is that gaps or contradictions in a client’s memory, especially in an allegation involving drugs and an event from decades earlier, do not automatically amount to misconduct by the lawyers involved.
The legal dispute now centres less on whether the allegation against Carter is being maintained, because it plainly is not, and more on whether the attorneys had sufficient grounds to file it in the first place. The courts will have to deal with that considerably less tidy question.
What has Jay-Z said about the accusation?
Carter has spoken publicly about the impact the allegation had on him, Beyoncé and their children. In an interview with GQ earlier in 2026, he said the experience left him heartbroken and furious.
“It was hard. Really hard. I was heartbroken,” he said. “We’re in a space now where it’s almost like consequence is not thought about enough because everything is so instant.”
He said the accusation “took a lot out” of him and caused “uncontrollable anger”.
“You don’t put that on someone. That’s a thing that you better be super sure,” he said. “I took that really hard. I knew that we were going to walk through that because, first of all, it’s not true.”
When the allegation first emerged, Carter described the alleged crime as “heinous” and urged the woman to pursue a criminal case rather than a civil claim. He said his main concern was explaining the reports to his children, including one old enough to encounter questions from friends.
“My only heartbreak is for my family,” he said at the time. “I mourn yet another loss of innocence.”
What happened to the allegation against Sean Combs?
Combs was also named in the dismissed civil lawsuit and separately denied the woman’s allegation. Her new declaration specifically withdraws the claims concerning Carter and says she was mistaken in identifying him.
Combs later stood trial in a separate federal criminal case involving unrelated allegations. He was convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution but acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges.
Those proceedings were not connected to the woman’s dismissed lawsuit. Her latest filing instead adds a decisive new chapter to Carter’s legal battle over how his name entered the case and why the accusation was pursued despite the inconsistencies that later became public.
