A woman who accused Jay-Z of raping her when she was 13 years old has formally withdrawn her allegation, saying that she has never met the rap superstar.
The unnamed woman had originally made the allegation in a lawsuit filed in 2024, claiming that Jay-Z, real name Shawn Carter, had drugged and raped her with Sean Combs, known as P Diddy. The incident was alleged to have happened at a party after an MTV awards ceremony in 2000.
Denial and counter-suit
Jay-Z denied the allegations, describing them as a blackmail attempt, and Combs also denied them. Jay-Z’s lawyer maintained the events relied on an “impossible timeline”. The woman dropped the lawsuit in 2025, and Jay-Z filed a counter suit.
As that lawsuit progresses, the woman has now said 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 a declaration obtained by Rolling Stone.
She added 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.”
Legal proceedings continue
The woman has now been dropped from Jay-Z’s lawsuit, though the rapper is still pursuing her former lawyers, claiming they should have known the allegations were “contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation”. Earlier this month, as they made a motion to have the lawsuit dismissed, lawyer Tony Buzbee and his co-counsel described it as “a malicious prosecution”.
Regarding the woman’s new statement, Buzbee told Rolling Stone: “If for some reason now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that’s new information.”
The woman’s current lawyer, James Blair Newman Jr, said: “Our client maintains that she was a victim of sexual assault, but she was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr Carter.”
Impact and response
Continuing her statement, the woman said memories of sexual assault were triggered by seeing an advertisement calling for victims of Combs to come forward. Combs was being investigated for a number of alleged sexual assaults, and – unrelated to the unnamed woman’s case – was eventually found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, receiving a four year and two month sentence in October 2025.
The woman said that after making the allegations, she was unaware of the lawsuit being filed on her behalf and, after she expressed doubts about her claims, the lawsuit was dropped.
Jay-Z has previously spoken about the impact the allegations had on his life. When the case was dropped, he said: “The trauma that my wife, my children, loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed,” and speaking to GQ in March he said: “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].”
He said he had refused to settle the lawsuit out of court: “I can’t take a settlement – it ain’t in my DNA … I would die.”
