Tony Buzbee, the lawyer representing a woman who has sued Jay-Z over allegations of rape, has submitted a typically bullish court filing lambasting the rapper’s attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed and Buzbee sanctioned for having filed it in the first place.
Jay-Z, real name Shawn Carter, filed a motion for dismissal earlier this month, having been added last month as a co-defendant on a lawsuit that also accuses Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs of rape. That motion, says Buzbee in his response, “amounts to an outrageous and unprecedented attempt to silence” his client, who claims she was raped by Carter and Combs when she was just thirteen years old.
“Carter’s celebrity status does not entitle him to special treatment by the courts and certainly not on the mere say-so of his lawyers”, Buzzbee adds. And as for the request that Buzbee himself be sanctioned for his role in filing his client’s lawsuit, he insists that such sanctions are only possible in “extraordinary circumstances”, and in this dispute there are “no circumstances at all, let alone extraordinary circumstances, justifying sanctions against” the lawyer.
Buzbee is involved in numerous lawsuits accusing Combs of sexual assault. He added Carter as a defendant on one of those lawsuits last month. His unnamed client says both musicians raped her at an MTV Video Music Awards after party in 2000. Carter strongly denies the rape allegation and has been publicly scathing of Buzbee ever since he was formally pulled into the litigation.
In his motion for dismissal, and to have Buzbee sanctioned, Carter said that his accuser’s claims “strain the outer bounds of credulity” and were clearly not subject to “even the most rudimentary diligence by the filing attorney”. Buzbee is obliged under court rules to undertake such diligence, he added, and should therefore be sanctioned for failing to do so.
Carter’s criticism of the allegations against him were in no small part based on an interview his accuser gave to NBC News. That interview, Carter insisted, highlighted various errors and inaccuracies in his accuser’s claims regarding what happened back in 2000.
In his response, Buzbee says that, even if - for the sake of argument - his client has misremembered some details about the night 24 years ago when she says she was raped, that is not grounds to dismiss her core allegation of sexual assault at this stage.
“Carter’s lawyers’ purported certainty about what happened” to his accuser “is utterly unjustified”, he writes. “The NBC report, on which they principally rely, itself acknowledged that its purported findings ‘do not necessarily mean the allegations are false’”. That acknowledgment alone, he argues “removes any possible justification” for sanctioning the attorney.
And the factual errors raised by Carter, even if valid, do not impact on the core rape allegation, he adds, and arise “solely from the memory of a victim - here, a child victim - of sexual abuse, which, it is well established, typically causes memory lapses”.
With all that in mind, Buzbee argues that he undertook all the necessary due diligence before adding Carter as a defendant on this lawsuit, and the rapper’s motion for dismissal and sanctions should be rejected.