American rapper, Jay-Z, is fighting back against a lawsuit accusing him and Sean “Diddy” Combs of r@ping a 13-year-old girl during a Video Music Awards after-party in 2000.
In a legal filing Wednesday, the music entrepreneur asks a federal judge in Manhattan to dismiss the lawsuit and order monetary sanctions against Tony Buzbee, the Texas attorney who sued over the alleged incident in October.
The rape claim suffers from “substantial inaccuracies” which should have led Buzbee to drop the lawsuit, Carter’s filing says. Those include woman’s father telling NBC News he had no memory of picking his distraught young daughter up from the after-party and driving her home as described in the lawsuit.
“It strains credulity,” Carter’s filing says, “that a father — impelled to jump into his car in the middle of the night to undertake a minimum 10-hour round trip to pick up his 13-year-old daughter at a random gas station—would forget the entire episode.”
Buzbee has also been unable to explain why the Alabama woman who filed the suit, now in her late-30s, told NBC News in December that she had a conversation at the after-party with rapper Benji Madden, whose distinctive “The Last Supper” tattoo she described to the network.
Madden later told NBC that he was touring the Midwest during the VMAs that year.
Combs and Carter have both denied the s£xual ass@ult.
“A single, initial media interview turned up glaring problems that counsel had either ignored or never investigated,” Wednesday’s Carter filing, drafted by Manhattan attorney Alex Spiro, complains.
In court filings, Buzbee has dismissed both inconsistencies as unsurprising memory lapses.
“Calling this a ‘memory lapse’ cannot obscure counsel’s lapses in investigating whether multi-decade-old recollections aligned with reality,” Carter’s filing says.
“These factual discrepancies are neither isolated nor surprising. They result from Mr. Buzbee’s rush to launch allegations unhindered by mandatory diligence,” the filing says, asking the judge assigned to the lawsuit to impose unspecified cash damages and drop the lawsuit.
The original lawsuit was brought against Combs, his companies, and unnamed accomplices, including “Celebrity A.” Carter was identified as Celebrity A when the suit was amended in December.
Since then, Buzbee and Carter have traded words in public statements and court documents, including a previous filing by the rapper seeking dismissal and sanctions.
Two weeks after Carter was named “Celebrity A” in the revised lawsuit, Buzbee filed a new lawsuit accusing Carter’s Roc Nation of trying to intimidate his law firm and turn his plaintiffs against him.
“This conduct was specifically targeted at our firm so we would not pursue cases related to the Diddy litigation,” Buzbee said at the time in a statement to Business Insider. “But, we will not be bullied or intimidated.”
