The billionaire rap legend/Viacom mogul JAY-Z has filed an amended defamation and malicious prosecution lawsuit against the woman who was formerly accused of rape and her legal team, accusing them of ruining his reputation and costing him a whopping $170 million in business.
The revised lawsuit, filed in Alabama, is a belated follow-up to the accuser's suit, filed in 2018, in which the accuser, identified only as Jane Doe, dropped her lawsuit in February. According to JAY-Z, whose name is Shawn Carter, the harm did not stop there but only got worse, he says.
His legal team cites a TikTok video posted by Doe in April 2025 in which she challenges a user to pay her a million dollars by lip-synching to an audio clip that says, "You could not pay me a million dollars to get an apology video out of me, I stand on what I said, f### you." The lawsuit alleges that this wasn't simply a tasteless online stunt but another calculated move in what Carter's legal team calls a "malicious" and "reckless" effort to trash his reputation.
"Doe lacked at all material times any objectively reasonable factual basis to believe the truth of her statements," the complaint says. "In other words, she lied."
The altered suit doesn't end with Doe. It names her lead lawyer, Tony Buzbee, and another lawyer, Antigone Curis, as central figures in what JAY-Z claims was a calculated plan to defame and extort him. Even more weirdly, Buzbee directed employees to make over 100 edits to Wikipedia pages about his law firm to make him look good, but Carter and Roc Nation look bad.
The suit alleges that the original suit was not unfounded but fraudulent. JAY-Z's legal team claimed that Curis "allowed herself to be used" and failed to properly check claims made before filing the lawsuit. The result, they claim, was a public relations disaster that cost Roc Nation a $55 million personal credit line and a $115 million loan for JAY-Z's empire.
The case opens up a tableau of high-stakes legal warfare, with reputations and empires on the line. Buzbee, for his part, has shrugged off allegations about Wikipedia manipulation as "laughable and super weak." But JAY-Z's lawyers aren't finding this funny and say that Doe and her lawyers are attempting to extort a payout from him based on a false, defamatory threat to go public with their claims.
While the rape lawsuit was dropped, the fallout rumbles on and on in Carter's universe. As he tries to restore his name and improve on what's been taken from him, JAY-Z is finished playing defense.
Court battles continue, and what comes next is the question on everyone's mind in one of the most high-profile defamation brawls Hip-Hop and Hollywood have seen in recent memory.
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