Last Friday, NBC News aired an interview with the woman who accused Jay-Z and Sean Combs of raping her at an unknown home after the 2000 MTV VMAs. She told her story to NBC News, then the outlet did some fact-checking to authenticate what they could about her story, and all they found were glaring inconsistencies: she claimed she was driven 20 minutes to a home from a traffic-jammed Manhattan; her father had no memory of driving five hours from Rochester to pick up his 13-year-old daughter; the Madden brothers were not even in New York and she claimed to have met them; she claimed the VMAs were shown on the Jumbotron and they weren’t, and on and on. NBC went back to the woman and she admitted that yes, there are inconsistencies but she still insists that she was raped by Jay-Z and Sean Combs, all while an unidentified female celebrity watched. Jay-Z has insisted that the woman’s lawyer, Tony Buzbee, did nothing to vet his client’s claims, and that this is all an extortion attempt by Buzbee. As in, Buzbee thought Jay-Z would throw some money at the problem and none of this would end up going to court. Well, on Monday, Jay-Z’s lawyer Alex Shapiro did a full briefing to reporters at Roc Nation.

Lawyers for Jay-Z plan to ask a judge to toss a lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping a 13-year-old in 2000, pointing to what they described as “glaring inconsistencies” that emerged in an NBC interview of the accuser, who was not named in the suit.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Mr. Carter, wrote a letter Friday night to U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres saying that Mr. Carter intends to file a motion to strike the complaint, citing the NBC report. “The interview outs plaintiff’s allegations for what they are: a sham,” he wrote in the letter.

And on Monday, Mr. Spiro spoke to reporters at the Manhattan offices of Roc Nation, Mr. Carter’s entertainment empire. He provided a timeline of the night in question that he said undercut the plaintiff’s account and displayed a photo that he said showed Mr. Carter at a nightclub after the Video Music Awards, not a private residence. “The story doesn’t work,” he said. “It doesn’t check out.”

Tony Buzbee, the lawyer for the woman who sued, wrote in an email that his client remained “adamant” about her claim even as she acknowledged that she may have been mistaken about which celebrity she encountered at the party that night. “We are talking about events from 20 years ago,” he said in an email. He said that he did not think the photograph of Mr. Carter at a nightclub “proves or disproves anything.”

“Courts exist to resolve factual disputes,” he said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to do so in a news article.”

On Monday, Mr. Spiro — a well-known lawyer whose celebrity clients have included Elon Musk, Alec Baldwin and Mayor Eric Adams of New York — spoke to the press in an effort to discredit the plaintiff. In seeking to get the claim thrown out, Mr. Spiro, in his letter to the judge, accused Mr. Buzbee of violating a federal rule requiring a lawyer to “conduct a reasonable inquiry” into the facts of their client’s claim before signing their name onto a case.

Mr. Buzbee, in an email, defended his firm’s handling of its client’s claim, saying that while the case was referred by another law practice, at least three lawyers from his firm interviewed her before filing the amended complaint. He said a background check was run on her, an investigator was engaged to vet some of the details in her claim and she signed two affidavits related to her account. “Our conduct has been beyond reproach and will continue to be,” Mr. Buzbee said.

[From The NY Times]

I completely understand why Jay-Z and his lawyers are attacking Tony Buzbee so heavily and so consistently. Buzbee’s client’s story fell apart in one interview with a news outlet, and it seems clear that Buzbee and his firm did zero due diligence on checking out this woman’s story or trying to find anything to authenticate any part of her claims. If this case ends up going to trial, it will be bad for Buzbee and his client, not Jay-Z. Jay and his lawyers are on the warpath now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they try to get Buzbee disbarred over this.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.