The civil lawsuit that accused Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter of sexually assaulting a then-13-year-old girl should be dismissed and the lawyer who filed it should be sanctioned, Jay-Z’s attorney argued Wednesday in a new court filing that cites “glaring red flags” in the plaintiff’s account.
“While the allegations stated in the complaint in this case are gravely serious (and injurious to Mr. Carter’s hard-won reputation), many of them, on their face, strain the outer bounds of credulity, and none of them appears to have been subjected to even the most rudimentary diligence by the filing attorney who initially signed his name to them and has since declined to withdraw them,” Carter’s attorney, Alex Spiro, wrote.
The anonymous plaintiff accused Carter of raping her at a party following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. At the same party, the complaint alleged Sean Combs also raped her while an unnamed celebrity watched. Combs has also denied the allegations.
Carter has questioned the plaintiff’s account, including specific details of location, transportation and setting.
“By any objective measure, the fact that nearly every step in Plaintiff’s narrative—from her arrival at the VMAs to her interactions with the limousine driver and celebrities to the ride with her father—turns out to be false or highly unlikely casts considerable doubt on Plaintiff’s allegation that Mr. Carter raped her, which he did not,” the defense motion said.
Spiro accused the plaintiff’s attorney, Texas-based personal injury lawyer Tony Buzbee, of ethical lapses and “utter lack of diligence” prior to filing the lawsuit.
“Especially when a complaint alleges violent, felonious conduct that is defamatory per se, attorneys should not be permitted to destroy a person’s reputation by alleging facts without a sufficient investigation or by failing to withdraw those allegations once it is clear that they are false or exceedingly unlikely to be true,” Spiro wrote.
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