Twenty-one months after a lawsuit put Jay-Z's name next to the worst accusation there is, the woman who made it has told a federal court it wasn't him. She says she never met him and never spoke to him.
## What got filed Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) broke it early Friday, Sept. 25. On Thursday, a 12-page declaration was filed in Manhattan federal court, signed under penalty of perjury by the Jane Doe who sued Shawn Carter in December 2024. The key lines, per Rolling Stone: "Shawn 'Jay-Z' Carter never raped me," and "There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter."
TMZ had the filing within the hour, and TheGrio followed that morning. All three outlets report the same facts from the same document.
Filed with it was a notice from Hov's side. He's voluntarily dismissing her as a defendant in his malicious-prosecution suit. That case now runs against only one side: Houston attorney Tony Buzbee and his firm.
![Jay-Z](https://imagez.tmz.com/image/d6/4by3/2026/07/24/d602db01c0364e48ae7cb8bd00178e6e_md.jpg "Getty Images via TMZ|https://www.tmz.com/2026/09/25/jay-z-sexual-assault-accuser-says-not-truth-to-her-allegations/"")
## What the declaration actually says Read this part carefully. Her new attorney, James Blair Newman Jr., says she still maintains she was sexually assaulted as a child. What she's taking back is that it was Carter. "She was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr. Carter, and those allegations were false," he said in a statement to Rolling Stone and TMZ. She "sincerely and unconditionally apologizes to Mr. Carter and his family."
According to Rolling Stone's reporting on the document, she also says:
- In late September or early October 2024, she answered a Facebook ad looking for people with sexual assault claims against Sean Combs.
- Her October 2024 complaint against Combs was filed without her knowledge and without her lawyers doing any independent investigation.
- She told her legal team about "mental health conditions" before Carter was publicly named that December.
- On the intake call she described an afterparty after the 2000 Teen Choice Awards. The lawsuit later said it was the MTV VMAs.
- Her lawyers asked her to take a polygraph after discrepancies came up. She says she never got the results.
- By January 2025, she was doubting her claims against Carter and whether she had ever been at a party with celebrities.
- She says she received $1,200 in cash when she traveled to Houston for an NBC News interview in December 2024. She says she got nothing, and was promised nothing, for this new declaration.
## Buzbee's response Buzbee told Rolling Stone he hadn't seen the declaration. "We have multiple lawyers (at least four) who dealt with Ms. Doe long before she met me. She gave the exact same story to each," he wrote. "If for some reason now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that's new information." He called the money "some petty cash" for meals and travel. He also said every court filing, including the original demand letter, was explained to her in detail.
He still represents other plaintiffs suing Combs. Combs' lawyers have always denied this woman's allegations.
![Jay-Z at the 2026 Met Gala](https://thegrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2275012575-scaled-e1789086923996-1600x900.jpg "Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue via TheGrio|https://thegrio.com/2026/09/25/jay-z-accuser-recants-declaration-buzbee-lawsuit/"")
## How we got here - Oct. 2024: The Jane Doe sues Combs, alleging he raped her at 13. A second, unnamed "male celebrity" is also accused. - Nov. 2024: Carter says Buzbee sent him an "extortionate demand letter." He sues Buzbee for extortion in California under a John Doe pseudonym. - Dec. 2024: The complaint is amended to name Carter. He denies it immediately and calls the letter an "existential threat." - Early 2025: She voluntarily drops the whole lawsuit against Carter and Combs, after admitting inconsistencies in her story. - Early Sept. 2026: A California appeals court upholds the dismissal of Carter's extortion case. It finds Buzbee subjectively believed the accusations. Buzbee's team moves on Sept. 1 to dismiss the New York malicious-prosecution suit, calling it "abusive." - Sept. 24, 2026: The recantation is filed, and she's out of the case.
## Why it matters The New York malicious-prosecution suit is the last case Carter has going against Buzbee. His theory is that Buzbee's firm should have known the claims "were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported." Now the plaintiff herself has sworn to a detailed account of how the claim was put together: an ad, a form, a phone call, no background check, and a polygraph she never saw results for. That's a different case from the one Buzbee's team was trying to dismiss three weeks ago.
For Hov, this lands in the middle of a big month: the *In 8* rollout on HBO and Roc Nation's Super Bowl LXI halftime situation. He took the hit publicly in 2024 and denied it from day one. The correction is in the court record now.
One more thing. A woman is still saying she was hurt as a kid, and that part of her declaration didn't change. A false identification doesn't mean nothing happened to her. Both of those can be true, and the coverage should reflect that.
## Sources - Rolling Stone (Nancy Dillon), Sept. 25, 2026: Jane Doe Who Accused Jay-Z of Sexual Assault Fully Recants · Canada edition - TMZ, Sept. 25, 2026: Jay-Z Sexual Assault Accuser Recants, Says 'No Truth To Any of My Claims' - TheGrio (Bolarinwa Oladeji), Sept. 25, 2026: Jay-Z accuser withdraws allegations, says she never met rapper named in lawsuit