Rapper Jay-Z (C) looks on before a game between the Washington Commanders and the Dallas Cowboys at Northwest Stadium on November 24, 2024 in Landover, Maryland.
Originally appeared on E! Online
Content warning: This story discusses allegations of rape.
Jay-Z is standing his ground.
After an Alabama woman who recently filed a rape lawsuit against him and Sean "Diddy" Combs addressed inconsistencies in her story, the "99 Problems" rapper — born Shawn Carter — put her attorney on blast for submitting a "false complaint against me in the pursuit of money and fame."
"This incident didn’t happen," Carter said in a Dec. 13 statement to E! News. "True Justice is coming. We fight FROM victory, not FOR victory. This was over before it began."
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His attorney Alex Spiro added, "It is stunning that a lawyer would not only file such a serious complaint without proper vetting, but would make things worse by further peddling this false story in the press."
The woman's attorney Tony Buzbee told NBC News that her case was previously vetted by another law firm and that his firm does their “best” to vet each claim they make.
In the lawsuit, the woman alleged that Carter and Combs sexually assaulted her in 2000 at a New York after-party for the MTV Video Music Awards. She said in her filing that she ran to a nearby gas station after the alleged attack and called her dad for a ride home.
However, in an NBC News investigative report published Dec. 13, her father said he does not recall picking her up following the alleged incident. Furthermore, a celebrity the woman alleged to have spoken to at the party told NBC News that he was not in New York at that time.
While the inconsistencies do not necessarily mean the allegations are false, the woman said in a Dec. 13 interview that she "may have made a mistake in identifying."
"Honestly, what is the clearest is what happened to me and [the] route that I took to what happened to me," she told NBC News, after the inconsistencies were laid out. "Not all of the faces there are as clear."
Still, the woman stands by her overall allegations, with her attorney Buzbee saying that it's possible her father misremembered the night in question.
"His daughter explains that he was in no state to remember during that point in time due to personal issues he was having then," Buzbee told NBC News. "We are talking about a time frame more than twenty years ago."
Meanwhile, an attorney for Combs — who's been accused of sexual assault in over 100 civil lawsuits — has said that the rap mogul maintains his innocence.
“He cannot address every meritless allegation in what has become a reckless media circus," Erica Wolff shared in an Oct. 1 statement to E! News. "That said, Mr. Combs emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors."
(E! and NBC News are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
