The declaration runs eleven pages. It was filed in New York on Thursday evening, obtained by Rolling Stone, and in it the woman known in court papers as Jane Doe takes back all of it. “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.”
There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter. I understand that my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone. I sincerely and unconditionally apologize to Mr. Carter for the devastating harm I have caused to him, his family, and his reputation.
What she had alleged, in a lawsuit filed by attorney Tony Buzbee in December 2024, was this: that in 2000, when she was 13, she went to an afterparty following the MTV Video Music Awards; that she drank something and felt woozy and wandered into a bedroom; that Carter raped her there, and then Sean “Diddy” Combs did, while an unnamed celebrity watched. She sued Combs first — he denied it, as Carter always did — and later amended her complaint to name Carter at the same party. Carter called the allegations “heinous in nature.”
The case had already been unraveling. In February 2025 she voluntarily dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning it could not be filed again. Carter sued anyway. His lawyers accused her of “willful defamation per se and her malicious prosecution of knowingly false allegations,” and he filed a separate malicious prosecution case against Buzbee, which is still pending in federal court in New York.
The new declaration is not only a recantation. It is, in its quiet way, an account of how a lawsuit gets built. Jane Doe said she answered a Facebook ad “looking for people who might have sexual assault claims against Sean Combs,” and that the ad “triggered memories of being raped when I was 13 years old.” She was connected to a firm called AVA Law Group, signed a representation agreement, and was referred on to Buzbee’s firm. She does not remember, she said, “exactly what information I provided” to the first firm. CNN said it reached out to AVA Law Group for comment.
What did not happen next, she said, was vetting. No background check. No request for proof. No corroborating witnesses sought before the suit was filed against Combs and Carter in her name. She was never shown a draft of her own lawsuit. She told the attorneys “about my mental health conditions,” she said, and was “never asked any questions about whether this affected my memory and recollection of the allegations.”
The doubts came early, she said — about a month after she went public. She “began to doubt my claims against Mr. Carter,” began doubting “that I ever went to a party with celebrities,” doubting that Combs or Carter were ever involved “in any attack on me.”
By then the machinery was already moving. After Carter’s denial, she said, Buzbee’s firm arranged a television interview: flights, meals, a hotel, a shopping trip “to get camera ready,” an outfit bought for the camera. The lawyers “coached” her, she said, on “how to act and what to say.” She texted her mother about the money being spent on her: “I’m going to try to make sure I come back with some cash.” She felt, she wrote, like “miss congenitally” — the spelling is hers, preserved in the filing.
She met Tony Buzbee himself for the first time shortly before that interview, she said, in a brief meeting. “Mr. Buzbee gave me $1000 in cash for myself and my family.”
Buzbee did not respond to CNN’s request for comment; Pitchfork said it reached out to his lawyers as well. In an email to the New York Times, he wrote: “Her case was referred to our firm by another law firm along with the intake information they gathered. She gave the same detailed story to four lawyers before she met with me. We hired a former major crimes police detective to vet her facts.”
Her current attorney, J. Blair Newman, threaded what remains: “Our client maintains that she was a victim of sexual assault, but she was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr. Carter, and those allegations were false. Mr. Carter did not rape her, sexually assault her, engage in any inappropriate conduct towards her, and she has never met him.” She said she was never threatened by Carter or his team, received no money from them, and was not paid to make the new declaration. According to Pitchfork, she told two private investigators in 2025 that Buzbee had pushed her to make false claims against Jay-Z to improve her original case against Combs.
Carter’s attorneys have now filed notice dismissing all of his claims against her. The suit against Buzbee stands. That is where the legal record rests: an apology, a pending case, a woman who says she was assaulted by someone, somewhere, and was entirely mistaken about the man she named.
She was 13, in the story she first told, at a party with celebrities she now doubts she ever attended. What stays in the record is a text message to her mother, and a misspelling: “miss congenitally.”