Jay-Z is breaking his silence on the February 2025 dismissal of a lawsuit against himself and Sean “Diddy” Combs by an anonymous woman claiming that she’d been sexually assaulted by the moguls in 2000, when she was 13 years old.
The 56-year-old Brooklyn-born multi-billionaire, real name Shawn Carter, told GQ that he was “really heartbroken” in 2025, and “needed the people around me more than ever.”
“That whole [lawsuit thing], that s–t took a lot out of me,” said the Roc Nation founder “I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time, uncontrollable anger.”
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Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs are pictured in this 2003 file photo. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage for Bad Boy Entertainment via Getty Images)
In October 2024, weeks after Harlem-born Combs, also 56, was arrested on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges, Jane Doe filed a lawsuit accusing him and a man identified as “Celebrity A” of having sexually assaulted her at a party following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. The suit was refiled in December 2024 to include Jay-Z, who promptly denounced the suit as a “blackmail attempt.”
The rapper filed a defamation lawsuit against Doe’s attorney Tony Buzbee that a judge later dismissed.
In denying the “heinous” and “idiotic” allegations, Jay added that he “made it out of the project of Brooklyn,” where there are “very strict codes and honor.”
As he explained to GQ, “There was a line: no women, no kids. … Those are the things that I took from the street. We lived and died by that. So it’s strict for me, like it meant a lot to me.”
Days after Jane Doe refiled, she acknowledged to NBC News that there were inconsistencies in her recollection. Her lawyers voluntarily dismissed the filing with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled as is.
“It used to be … you had to be super sure before you put those kind of things on a person. Especially a person like me. … I took that really hard,” Jay-Z told GQ.
He said he also “got to see how people felt about me, especially people that were close to me. … When those types of things happen, people run, they don’t care what happened. It’s like, save yourself.”
Though a settlement “would’ve been cheaper,” Jay-Z said he “would die” before settling.
Ultimately though, he knew he’d come out on the other side, “because, first of all, it’s not true. And the truth at the end of the day, still reigns supreme.”
Combs — the subject of over 50 civil lawsuits since ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura accused him of rape and sexual abuse in a November 2023 filing — was convicted last July for for transportation for prostitution. He’s expected to be released from New Jersey’s FCI Fort Dix in April 2028.