Jay-Z faced a lawsuit that started with allegations from a woman who claimed he and Sean “Diddy” Combs sexually assaulted her after the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards when she was just 13 years old.
The case was eventually dismissed, but the legal battle didn’t end there. Now Jay-Z has filed a new federal court motion against Tony Buzbee and the most important detail in it isn’t about legal strategy.
It’s about a lie someone told a woman to make her think her life was in danger.
According to the new filing, attorney David Fortney sat down with Jane Doe and told her that Jay-Z had threatened to kill her and that continuing the lawsuit was simply too dangerous to go forward.
Jay-Z’s legal team says that was a complete fabrication, and once you understand why it was invented, the whole Buzbee operation starts to look like something that was falling apart from the inside long before that dismissal happened.
Here’s what the filing lays out: Buzbee had been operating in the Southern District of New York by filing court documents using co-counsel Antigone Curis’s ECF login credentials, meaning he was essentially practicing law in a federal court he was never authorized to practice in.
When Judge Analisa Torres ordered him to prove his bar admission to the SDNY, he rushed to apply the very next day, and that application was denied. The Committee on Grievances confirmed he’d been filing in that court without authorization across more than 20 separate cases, so he was fully exposed.
Buzbee eventually dropped out of more than a dozen Combs-related cases after a federal judge in New York publicly admonished him over the same unauthorized practice issue.
So with sanctions coming and his admission denied, Fortney allegedly went to Doe and told her Jay-Z had threatened her life.
Doe voluntarily dismissed the case the same day Buzbee couldn’t file proof of his court admission.
Jay-Z’s filing is direct about what it believes happened: the death threat was invented not to protect Doe, but to protect Buzbee and Fortney from the consequences of running an unauthorized legal operation in a federal court where they had no business being. .
The cover-up was covering up the cover-up.
The second major development in this filing is the Section 487 claim, and it’s worth paying attention to because it’s different from everything Jay-Z has filed before.
Under New York law, when an attorney is found guilty of deceiving a court or a party with intent to cause harm, the damages don’t just get paid. They get tripled.
Jay-Z had already scored a procedural win when a judge refused to dismiss the case and moved it to New York, and now he’s sitting in the exact court that already told Buzbee he couldn’t practice there, armed with a claim that could multiply whatever damages he proves by three.
His team also keeps pointing to one piece of the timeline that tells the whole story on its own: Buzbee’s demand letter hit Jay-Z’s lawyers on November 5, 2024, a full five weeks before Buzbee even formally sat down with Doe for the first time on December 9th.
He was already demanding money from Jay-Z before he’d ever met his own client.
In his amended complaint, Jay-Z claims he lost $190 million in income and other damages from the false allegations.
As Jay-Z told ABC News about the experience, the accusations left him feeling “heartbroken” and filled with “uncontrollable anger,” and he’s been clear that 2026 is “all offense” for him now.
When the case was dismissed, Jay-Z released a statement calling the allegations “frivolous, fictitious, and appalling,” adding that “this civil suit was never going anywhere” and “this civil suit was without merit.”
Buzbee has pushed back on all of it, calling Jay-Z’s lawsuits an attempt to “intimidate and bully” his former client and insisting the whole case has no legal merit.
Discovery in the case runs through December 31, 2026, with initial disclosures due June 3rd.