Jay-Z is speaking out about a 2024 lawsuit that alleged he sexually assaulted a teenage girl decades earlier, saying the complaint left him “heartbroken” and determined not to settle.
The hip-hop mogul sat down for a sprawling interview with GQ ahead of his comeback concerts at Yankee Stadium and the Roots Picnic this summer.
The “99 Problems” rapper addressed a range of topics in the rare interview, including his early career, being a father, a Black businessman, and why he refused to settle with the accuser.
He called the lawsuit “horrible” and said he’s still dealing with the emotional fallout.
“It was hard. Really hard. I was heartbroken,” Jay-Z said about the allegations.
Texas attorney Tony Buzbee filed the federal lawsuit in October 2024, on behalf of an anonymous “Jane Doe” accuser in the Southern District of New York.
The initial complaint listed Sean “Diddy” Combs as a defendant and alleged the Bad Boy Records founder “took turns” raping the then-13-year-old girl with an unnamed male celebrity at an MTV Video Music Awards afterparty in 2000, while an unnamed female celebrity watched.
Then on Dec. 8, Buzbee filed an amended complaint, which named Jay-Z as the male celebrity. The accuser alleged she was drugged and forced to sign an NDA after being taken to the party by a limo driver outside the awards.
Both Diddy and Jay-Z, born Shawn Carter, vehemently denied the allegations.
“That s–t took a lot out of me. I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time, uncontrollable anger,” Jay-Z told GQ.
“You don’t put that on someone—that’s a thing that you better be super sure. It used to be like that. You had to be super sure before you put those kind of things on a person. Especially a person like me,” he continued. “Even when we were doing the worst things, we had those kind of rules. There was a line: no women, no kids. You hear those sayings, but those are the things that I took from the street. We lived and died by that.”
Jay-Z countersued the woman and her attorney in a March 2025 lawsuit.
“I took that really hard. I knew that we were going to walk through that because, first of all, it’s not true. And the truth, at the end of the day, still reigns supreme,” the rapper said.
He noted that Buzbee filed the amended lawsuit on a date that coincided with the release of the Disney film Mufasa: The Lion King, which featured his eldest daughter Blue Ivy Carter.
Jay-Z shocked fans when he attended the premiere with Blue Ivy, wife Beyoncé Knowles, and mother-in-law Tina Knowles.
He called his family a “tight unit,” and said Blue Ivy showed him support throughout the legal ordeal.
“Blue has this jersey with ‘Jay-Z’ on the back. She put it on one day. She went to school with the ‘Jay.’ I was just in the corner, like tears coming down. Seriously. To have that, it’s priceless,” he said.
Jay-Z told GQ it would have been “cheaper” to settle the lawsuit, but he was determined to fight the allegations.
“I can’t take a settlement—it ain’t in my DNA. First of all, first I had to tell my wife. Let’s back up. I know the weight that this is going to bring on our family. I can’t do it. I would die,” he said.
“I also got to see how people felt about me, especially people that were close to me… So when those types of things happen, people run, they don’t care what happened. It’s like, save yourself,” he added.
His accuser admitted that she made “mistakes” in her recollection of the alleged assault during an interview with NBC News in December 2024, when a reporter noted inconsistencies in her account of what happened.
Buzbee later dropped the lawsuit and Jay-Z proclaimed victory in a statement at the time.
The accuser stood by her allegations in subsequent legal filings, but said she had grown tired of fighting Jay-Z after he allegedly hired goons to intimidate her.
She said she was approached outside her home by two people who told her they were investigators working for the mogul’s legal team. While she filed the lawsuit anonymously, she said the investigators managed to track her down.
Buzbee alleged Jay-Z tried to destroy his reputation and career.
“Carter’s team filed a meritless motion for sanctions against me, challenged my admission to federal court in New York, and filed a state bar grievance against me,” the attorney said.
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