Jay-Z Turns a Recantation on Tony Buzbee in Court

Jay-Z asked a California appeals court on September 24 to rehear his extortion case against Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee. His legal name is Shawn Carter. The filing landed the same day Jane Doe, the anonymous woman who had accused him of rape, swore she had never met him.

He dismissed her from his New York suit that day. He kept Buzbee in it. Buzbee’s lawyers then asked a Manhattan judge to pull her new statement off the docket, calling it bought. The recantation that closed the rape claim is now the exhibit both sides want to control.

Jay-Z Asks Only for Limited Discovery

Horvitz & Levy filed a petition for rehearing filed September 24 in Carter v. The Buzbee Law Firm, Court of Appeal case B347898, out of Los Angeles Superior Court case 24SMCV05637. The clerks stamped it received at 9:57 p.m. Counsel also asked the court to take judicial notice of Doe’s declaration, or to take it as new evidence on appeal, and to seal her name and medical history.

The petition does not ask Division Two to declare Buzbee an extortionist on the papers. It asks the panel to vacate the trial order and send the case back so Carter can take limited discovery. If that record matches what he expects, he wants a jury.

Jeremy B. Rosen’s brief calls Doe’s oath “a new and extraordinary sworn declaration” that “proves Carter’s claims are meritorious and that Buzbee’s anti-SLAPP motion was built on lies.” It says she now swears Carter never raped her, that she lied when she said otherwise, that Buzbee did not fully investigate, and that she has waived attorney-client privilege with the lawyers who handled her New York case, except her current counsel.

WHAT THE SEPTEMBER 24 PETITION ASKS

• Rehearing: The court should take another look at its own ruling after Doe’s new oath.
• The declaration: Notice that the filing exists, or receive it as new evidence, without treating every sentence as proven fact.
• Remand: Vacate the strike order and allow the depositions the trial court refused.
• The seal: Keep Doe’s name and sensitive history out of the public file, with most of the declaration still readable.

The brief also says the September 9 opinion misread why the New York rape suit ended. The panel treated the dismissal as Doe protecting her privacy. Carter says Buzbee ended it to dodge sanctions, and that this error leaked into the privilege analysis.

The Appeals Court Affirmed Buzbee’s Anti-SLAPP Dismissal

On September 9, 2026, Division Two of the Second Appellate District issued an unpublished September 9 appellate opinion by Associate Justice Anne Richardson. It affirmed Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark H. Epstein, who in June 2025 granted Buzbee’s special motion to strike Carter’s claims for civil extortion, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Buzbee had sent “Mediation Demand” letters on November 5, 2024, on behalf of two anonymous clients, Jane Doe and John Doe. The letters said Carter sexually assaulted both when they were underage and that they would sue if he refused to meet. John Doe never sued. Carter sued in California two weeks after the letters, then added defamation about a month later.

Richardson held that, at the first step of anti-SLAPP, Buzbee only had to make a prima facie showing that the letters were petitioning activity protected by the litigation privilege in Civil Code section 47. Whether the letters were lawful was not the question at that step. She wrote that they related to litigation contemplated in good faith and bore a logical relation to the claims threatened against Carter.

The record contains no evidence Buzbee accused Carter of raping Jane Doe while knowing those statements to be false or with reckless disregard as to whether they were true. To the contrary, Buzbee submitted declarations showing his firm’s investigations led him to subjectively believe in the truth of the accusations.

Associate Justice Anne Richardson, California Court of Appeal, Second District, Division Two

Sheppard Mullin, which represents Buzbee and the firm, called the result a complete appellate win. Partner Camille Vasquez said the letters were “precisely what California law protects,” zealous pre-litigation advocacy on behalf of clients. She said the trial court and the Court of Appeal agreed, “unanimously and unequivocally.”

The panel also left standing Epstein’s refusal to lift the discovery stay. Carter wanted to use a secretly recorded February 2025 talk that investigators had with Doe at her Alabama home, and to depose her and Buzbee. Richardson said the request was not timely, that discovery is not a tool “merely to ‘test’ the opponent’s declarations,” and that privilege would have blocked questions about lawyer-client talks anyway.

Why the Recantation May Not Move Anti-SLAPP

California’s special motion to strike under section 425.16 is built to end some speech and petitioning cases before discovery. A defendant first shows the claims arise from protected activity. The plaintiff then has to show a probability of winning, with admissible evidence, while a stay keeps most discovery locked.

That design is why a later recantation is an awkward fit. Richardson’s actual-malice holding was about what Buzbee believed when he sent the letters and spoke about the claims, not about whether Doe’s accusation was true in 2026. A client can recant and a lawyer can still have believed her in 2024. That is the wall Carter is trying to climb with judicial notice instead of a new lawsuit.

His brief tries to reframe the malice argument as well. He says Buzbee made “a deliberate decision not to acquire knowledge of the truth,” which the U.S. Supreme Court has treated as evidence of actual malice, rather than a mere failure to investigate. He also says the so-called pre-suit letters went out after Doe’s New York case was already on file, with Carter as an unnamed second celebrity, so they were not a clean prelude to a suit still being weighed.

People reading the September 9 ruling next to the September 24 oath often mash the two together. The opinion discussed why the New York case was dropped in 2025, including privacy and harassment. It did not discuss a recantation that did not yet exist. Treating the new declaration as something the appeals court already weighed is a category error, and it is the error Buzbee can use if the panel refuses to reopen the record.

She Recanted, and He Dropped Her That Day

Doe signed the declaration in Alabama on September 24. Carter’s lawyers filed it in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Shawn Corey Carter v. Anthony Buzbee et al., No. 1:26-cv-02775-DEH, before Judge Dale Ho, with a notice dismissing her from that case. She said she was promised no money and received none, and that Carter never threatened her.

Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I have never met or spoken to Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me whatsoever. There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter.

Jane Doe, sworn declaration, Southern District of New York

She also wrote that her claims that Carter and Sean Combs raped her, while a third celebrity watched, were false. James Blair Newman Jr., her new lawyer, said she “maintains that she was a victim of sexual assault, but she was entirely mistaken in her allegations identifying Mr. Carter, and those allegations were false.” He said Carter did not rape her, did not assault her, and that she has never met him, and that she “sincerely and unconditionally apologizes” to Carter and his family.

Her account of how the 2024 case started is the part Carter wants in a California discovery order. She said she answered a Facebook ad in late September or early October 2024 seeking people with sexual assault claims against Combs. She said the October complaint was filed without her knowledge, without a draft shown to her, and “without conducting any independent investigation, background inquiry, or due diligence, and without obtaining any corroboration of the allegations.”

She said she told lawyers about “mental health conditions” and was never asked whether those conditions affected her memory. She said she did not see the November 2024 demand letter until 2026, never meant to press criminal charges against Carter, and did not authorize a settlement of the New York case. In January 2025, she wrote, she began to doubt the claims against Carter and even that she had gone to a celebrity party. The New York suit was dismissed in February 2025.

THE PATH TO THE REHEARING PETITION

1. September 2000: Doe later alleged a rape at a Manhattan after-party tied to the MTV Video Music Awards, when she was 13. She now says that account, as to Carter, is false.
2. October 2024: Lawyers file a New York complaint against Combs on her behalf. She says she did not authorize it.
3. November 5, 2024: Buzbee sends mediation demand letters naming Carter. Carter sues in California two weeks later.
4. December 2024: The New York complaint is amended to name Carter.
5. January 2025: Doe writes that she began to doubt the Carter claims.
6. February 2025: The New York suit is dismissed. Investigators record Doe in Alabama; California courts later keep that recording out.
7. June 2025: Judge Epstein grants Buzbee’s anti-SLAPP motion.
8. September 9, 2026: Division Two affirms.
9. September 24, 2026: Doe recants, Carter drops her in New York, and the California rehearing petition is filed.

The petition says her new oath also confirms that what she told those investigators was true, which is Carter’s answer to the hearsay problem that helped sink him in June 2025.

Buzbee’s Team Calls the Statement Bought

Buzbee has said, for months, that a demand letter is not extortion. After the recantation, he did not retreat from the investigation story he used to win anti-SLAPP. He said the matter came in from another firm with that firm’s intake file, that several lawyers heard the same account before he did, and that his office hired a former major-crimes detective to vet it.

Her case was referred to our firm by another law firm along with the intake information they gathered. She gave the same detailed story to four lawyers before she met with me. We hired a former major crimes police detective to vet her facts.

Tony Buzbee, email statement

He also said, before he had read the declaration, that if she was now claiming she lied to the lawyers and to the court, “that’s new information.” In a September 25 letter to Judge Ho, Jessica N. Meyers of Sheppard Mullin called the filing a “bought-and-paid-for Declaration.” She argued Carter attached it to a dismissal he did not need a recantation to enter, and she asked the judge to strike it or, if he considered it, to put Doe’s earlier sworn accusations beside it.

Meyers wrote that there is “no evidence that when the Buzbee Parties relied on Jane Doe’s multiple declarations they knew her to be a perjurer,” and that “Carter and his attorneys lack the same excuse.” The letter leans on Carter’s own earlier attacks on Doe’s credibility, including mental-health and reliability arguments his California papers had already made. The same woman Buzbee once put forward as a sexual-assault survivor is now, in his New York file, an unreliable narrator whose latest oath should not be trusted.

Doe’s declaration says the opposite on money. Newman’s statement leaves a second live fact: she still claims she was assaulted by someone. The recantation is complete as to Carter. It is not a finding that nothing happened to her, and it is not a finding that Buzbee knew the Carter identification was false when he mailed the letters.

The Privilege Waiver Buzbee No Longer Controls

The California panel said even a deposition would have slammed into attorney-client privilege. Doe’s September 24 waiver is Carter’s attempt to remove that lock. She waives privilege and related protections for communications and materials with Buzbee and the other lawyers on the underlying suit. She carves out talks with Newman.

If Division Two accepts that waiver as a reason to reopen discovery, the fight shifts from what Doe will say now to what the 2024 intake file contains: the Facebook ad, the first phone call, whether anyone ran a background check, whether anyone asked about memory, and whether anyone showed her the October complaint or the November letters before they went out. Those are document questions. They are the kind of questions anti-SLAPP is designed to postpone, which is why the petition spends so many pages on the discovery stay rather than on a full merits retry.

Carter also argues Doe was no longer Buzbee’s client when the investigators interviewed her in February 2025, so the opinion was wrong to treat that session as a still-represented interview. That is a dry procedural point. It is also the point that decides whether the Alabama recording was ever getting in, even before she recanted.

Judge Ho Still Has to Rule on the Filing

The California petition and the New York strike letter are the same piece of paper in two courthouses. In Los Angeles, Carter says the declaration proves discovery would matter. In Manhattan, Buzbee says the declaration is the price of a dismissal and should not sit in the file. Judge Ho has not ruled on the strike request. Division Two has not said whether it will rehear B347898 or take judicial notice.

TWO DOCKETS STILL OPEN

The two captions matter because a win in one place does not write the order in the other. A New York judge could leave the declaration in the federal record and the California panel could still refuse to disturb an unpublished anti-SLAPP opinion. The reverse is also possible. Either court can treat Doe’s new oath as a reason to look harder at 2024, or as a reason to doubt every sworn sentence she has given.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The recantation: Doe swore Carter never raped her and that she has never met him, and Carter dismissed her from the New York case the same day.
• The California posture: The September 9 opinion affirming the anti-SLAPP dismissal still stands while the rehearing petition is pending.
• Buzbee’s line: He says multiple lawyers heard the same story and that a detective was hired to vet it, and his counsel has asked Judge Ho to strike the new declaration.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Payment: Doe swears she was not paid; Meyers calls the declaration bought. No court has picked a version.
• What Buzbee knew in 2024: Doe now says there was no real investigation. That is her present oath, not a finding about his then-existing belief.
• The assault she still claims: Newman says she was assaulted by someone other than Carter. That claim is not on trial in B347898.

Division Two can deny rehearing and leave Epstein’s strike order in place. It can take notice of the declaration and still hold that a 2026 recantation does not prove 2024 malice. Or it can send Carter back for the depositions he has been chasing since the stay first went on. Until one of those orders issues, Jane Doe’s apology is evidence in a New York folder and an offer of proof in a California brief, and it is not yet a judgment against Tony Buzbee.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of public court filings and statements. It is informational only and is not legal advice, a prediction of how any court will rule, or a finding that any person committed a crime or a civil wrong. Readers with a legal problem of their own should consult a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction before acting on anything described here. Case statuses, motion results, and quoted claims reflect the filings and statements available as of the dates named above and may change as the California petition and the New York strike request are decided.