The music world was thrown into an uproar on Sunday when news broke that Jay-Z had been accused of raping a minor.
A lawsuit was filed in October against Diddy, accusing him and an unnamed male celebrity of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl during a party following the 2000 Video Music Awards.
On Sunday, the anonymous accuser’s attorney, Tony Buzbee, filed a new version of the suit where he claimed the previously unnamed celeb was Jay (Shawn Carter).
Jay in turn responded publicly with an open letter strongly denying the charges, calling them “a blackmail attempt.” In his telling, Buzbee demanded either he pay up, or false charges about him would be made public.
To understand what happened, we need to look closely at the events of the past few months. Here's a timeline of the legal back-and-forth between Jay-Z and lawyer Tony Buzbee over this period.
October 1: The press conference announcing the Diddy lawsuits
Buzbee gave a press conference back on October 1 where he announced that he was getting ready to file 120 civil suits against Diddy for a variety of alleged offenses. Over two dozen of the plaintiffs, Buzbee said, were minors at the time of the alleged incident.
During that press conference, Buzbee made clear that Diddy wasn’t the only celebrity in his crosshairs.
“The names that we’re gonna name…are names that will shock you,” he said. “We will find the silent accomplices. We will expose the enablers.”
He said that “90 percent” of the cases he was filing followed a similar pattern: victims are lured somewhere, given a drink spiked with a drug, sexually assaulted, and “passed around” as others “enjoy the show.” This is exactly the pattern that would come up in the lawsuit that mentions Jay.
Diddy’s attorney Erica Wolff said at the time that “Mr. Combs emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors.”
October 14: First Buzbee Suits Filed
On Monday, October 14, Buzbee filed his first batch of half a dozen lawsuits against Diddy. You can read our breakdown of the big takeaways here.
October 20: Jane Doe Lawsuit Filed
The lawsuit that eventually mentions Jay was first filed in late October. It alleges that Diddy and a male referred to as “Celebrity A” raped the plaintiff, while a female celebrity, identified only as “Celebrity B,” watched.
November 18: The Extortion Suit
On November 18, a lawsuit was filed against Buzbee by an anonymous person—someone we now know was Jay-Z. The law firm representing the then-anonymous client was Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, known colloquially as “Quinn Emanuel.”
This lawsuit accuses Buzbee of extortion. It says that the plaintiff “is the victim of a scheme.”
Buzbee is “shamelessly attempting to extort exorbitant sums from him or else publicly file wildly false horrific allegations against him,” the complaint continues. “Defendants have threatened to unleash entirely fabricated and malicious allegations of sexual assault—including multiple instances of rape of a minor, both male and female—against Plaintiff if he refuses to comply with their demands. These baseless accusations are nothing more than a weapon in a calculated plot to destroy Plaintiff’s high-profile reputation for profit, despite the complete absence of any factual basis for such claims.”
The lawsuit lays out an argument: that because Diddy was at that point already arrested on criminal charges, and a chance to get money out of him was “unlikely to be forthcoming anytime soon,” Buzbee moved on to finding targets “with any ties to Combs”—particularly “high-profile individuals who would suffer immeasurable loss from being publicly accused of committing sex crimes.”
So, it continues, the lawyer came up with a “shakedown”—approach rich celebs; tell them they’re about to be accused of unthinkable crimes, including against minors; hint that more cases were likely to be on the way if nothing was done; and wait for the settlement money to roll in.
This is how it went with Jay, he claims. In Hov’s telling, Buzbee said that if the Roc Nation head didn’t agree to “confidential mediation” to “resolve this delicate and important matter,” that things would have to “take a different course.”
A good chunk of the lawsuit is concerned with Buzbee personally. It mentions that one of Buzbee’s former clients, who accused the football player Deshaun Watson of sexual assault, was herself investigated by the FBI for possible extortion.
It also talks about a recent lawsuit against Chris Brown and Yella Beezy following a fight at a concert. In that case, this suit says, Buzbee “brought suit against rappers Yella Beezy and Chris Brown after four men snuck backstage to provoke them into an altercation.”
It also points out that Watson was not the only NFL player Buzbee went after. He also represented an alleged sexual assault victim of former Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Brandon McManus. McManus called the allegations “an extortion attempt.”
November 19: Buzbee Sued By Alleged Former Client
Just one day after the extortion suit, Buzbee is sued again. This time, it’s by an anonymous woman who claims to have been a former client of his. She says Buzbee assaulted her. The lawsuit makes it to TMZ.
The lawsuit is seemingly unrelated to the extortion case, but Buzbee claims shortly afterward that they are in fact tied together—that both were “coordinated by persons acting on behalf of” the same anonymous celebrity. It’s clear now that the person Buzbee refers to is Jay-Z.
December 5: Buzbee Fires Back
In early December, Buzbee decided to get even. Since the person who filed the extortion suit was still anonymous, he did the next best thing: he sued Quinn Emanuel, the firm that brought the extortion suit, for “damages in excess of” $25 million. He also asked for a restraining order, to keep Quinn Emanuel people away from anyone related to his firm.
Buzbee claims in his lawsuit that Quinn Emanuel, alongside a company called Lex Intelligence, was pursuing a number of dirty tricks in order to dig up dirt on him. This included, it alleges, surveilling people related to the firm, contacting them under false pretenses in order to attempt to get information, and even harassing his daughter.
It is in this suit that Buzbee claims that the two cases against him—the extortion one and the assault one—are connected, as both were filed to benefit a celebrity. We now know that person is Jay.
Buzbee’s restraining order request against Quinn Emanuel was denied.
December 8: Jay-Z Is Named And Responds
On Sunday, an updated version of the October suit was filed in federal court. It is virtually unchanged from the original, except that Jay is now named as the original suit’s anonymous “Celebrity A.”
Almost immediately, he fires back with a long statement, posted on Roc Nation’s social media accounts. It is extremely personal and direct, referring to Buzbee mockingly as a “‘lawyer’” and a “fraud” and referring to the attempt to reach out to JAY as “blackmail.”
Buzbee then responds on X, saying that JAY is the one who filed the extortion suit (something he admits the following day).
“[M]y firm sent his lawyer a demand letter on behalf of an alleged victim and that victim never demanded a penny from him,” he writes. “Instead, she only sought a confidential mediation. Since I sent the letter on her behalf, Mr. Carter has not only sued me, but he has tried to bully and harass me and this plaintiff. His conduct has had the opposite impact. She is emboldened.”
December 9: Jay-Z Demands The Plaintiff Be Named
On Monday, Jay filed a motion demanding either that Buzbee’s so-far-still-anonymous plaintiff be named, or the case should be dismissed. This comes just one day after Buzbee filed a motion with the court asking that his client be allowed to keep her anonymity.
“It is not consistent with justice, fairness, or the rules governing federal proceedings for the Plaintiff and her counsel to smear Defendant’s good name in ways that are calculated to feed media coverage and thus inflict maximum public-relations damage while the core fact of Plaintiff’s identity, revelation of which stands to discredit her entire case, remains wholly hidden from view,” Jay's motion reads.
It is in this motion that, for the first time, Jay clearly admits that he was the one who filed the extortion lawsuit. He says that Buzbee naming him in the re-filed rape suit was simply an act of “retaliati[on] against the rare target who would not pay.”
Jay-Z brings back the Buzbee-filed Quinn Emanuel suit here. His motion points out that there were only two days between when the restraining order Buzbee requested in that suit was denied and when Jay was named in the lawsuit. It cites that as an example of Buzbee’s “retaliatory behavior.”
Shortly afterwards, Jay’s longtime attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to the judge asking for a decision “on an expedited basis.”
His reasoning for asking the judge to move quickly?
“Tony Buzbee has orchestrated a months-long press campaign aimed at inflaming public opinion and escalating the events in real time on social media platforms,” Spiro wrote. “Every day and in real-time, Buzbee continues to amplify false narratives, exploiting the legal process to generate media attention and damage Mr. Carter’s reputation. This relentless campaign underscores the need for a fast-track hearing to address these issues promptly and prevent further harm.”
The next step is for a judge to decide whether the plaintiff can proceed anonymously. If she can’t, she’ll have two options: either re-file the suit with her name attached, or drop the case. Whether the judge decides this immediately, requests further information from the litigants, or sets a hearing for them to argue it out in person remains to be seen.