Jay-Z responded with a lengthy statement calling the allegations “idiotic.” The accuser is anonymous.
Jay-Z, the star rapper and businessman whose real name is Shawn Carter, was accused in a lawsuit Sunday of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000 allegedly with Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The alleged victim, who is known only as Jane Doe, claimed the attack occurred after she was taken to an MTV Video Music Awards after-party.
The federal lawsuit was filed in October in the Southern District of New York, naming Combs as a defendant. It was refiled Sunday to include Carter.
The lawyer who filed the suit, Texas-based attorney Tony Buzbee, did not speak.
Carter described the allegations as idiotic in a statement he made on Sunday evening and accused Buzbee of professionalism.
These are such serious allegations that I urge you to make a criminal complaint not a civil one!!!! He who would perpetrate such a crime on a minor should be locked away, do you not think? Carter said in a statement to USATodayWorld News. “These alleged victims would deserve real justice if that were the case.”
When shown USATodayWorld News’ report on the lawsuit, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York refused to state whether the office is pursuing the case.
Buzbee has sued Combs in the past few months — all of the lawsuits have redacted the complainants’ identities — for assault and rape.
In a statement, legal representatives for Combs described the suits as “shameless publicity stunts, where people seek to extort money from celebrities in order to prevent the truth from coming out, just as is the case with Mr. Combs.”
As his legal team has said before, Mr. Combs has full confidence in the facts and the integrity of the judicial process. In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr. Combs never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone—man or woman, adult or minor,” the statement read.
Federal prosecutors in New York indicted Combs in September with racketeering, sex trafficking and other crimes, and is currently detained in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center after being denied bail for the third time last month. His trial is set to happen on May 5.
During a hearing last month, the prosecutors stated that they are considering to file more charges against Combs in a superseding indictment.
In the letter to Carter before the lawsuit was refiled Sunday, “Plaintiff’s counsel wrote a letter to Carter requesting that he agree to mediate this matter,” Buzbee said in the suit. Buzbee stated this in the suit, which USATodayWorld News has seen, after Carter wrote his own lawsuit against the accuser’s attorneys.
“You have made a terrible error in judgement thinking that all ‘celebrities’ are the same,” Carter added in his statement Sunday. “I’m not from your world. I am a young man who escaped the project of Brooklyn. We do not engage in such games. We have very strict codes and honor. We protect children.”
The lawsuit alleges that in September 2000, when Doe was 13, Combs and Carter raped her at a house party after the MTV Video Music Awards in New York.
The lawsuit says a friend brought her to the VMAs at Radio City Music Hall. She had no ticket and went round asking different drivers of limousines to help her get into the show or any party that was following it.
One of the drivers, according to the lawsuit, informed her that he worked for Combs and that she was “what Diddy was looking for.” He took her to a show and told her to come back to his car later that night after he took Carter and Combs, according to the lawsuit.
Later, the driver picked her up, the suit says, and after 20 minutes they arrived at a white house with a U-shaped driveway, the suit says. She had to sign what she thought was a nondisclosure agreement when she arrived — and was not given a copy — to get into the party, which the suit claims was attended by celebrities and people using marijuana and cocaine.
