Sean “Jay-Z” Carter issued a statement after being named as an additional defendant in a sexual assault lawsuit originally filed against Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Jay-Z is speaking out after a woman accused him in a civil lawsuit of raping her with she was 13 along with Sean “Diddy” Combs.
On Dec. 8, the accuser—identified anonymously as “Jane Doe”—refiled a sexual assault civil lawsuit she had originally filed against Combs in October, adding his longtime friend as an additional defendant. Per NBC News, she alleges in the new documents that in 2000, when she was 13, the two raped her at a house party following the MTV Video Music Awards in New York.
Jay-Z—real name Shawn Carter—issued a statement to E! News hours after the suit was refiled, addressing the lawyer who filed it, Tony Buzbee.
“These allegations are so heinous in nature that I implore you to file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!!” he said in a statement to NBC News. “Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree? These alleged victims would deserve real justice if that were the case.”
Carter noted the “idiotic claims you have levied against me” and alleged that before refiling the suit, Buzbee had contacted the rapper’s own attorney to try to reach a settlement.
“What he had calculated,” he alleged in the statement, “was the nature of these allegations and the public scrutiny would make me want to settle.”
E! News has reached out to Buzbee for comment and has not head back.
Carter, who shares daughter Blue Ivy, 12, and twins Rumi and Sir, 6, with wife Beyoncé, added that his “only heartbreak” is for his family.
“My wife and I will have to sit our children down, one of whom is at the age where her friends will surely see the press and ask questions about the nature of these claims, and explain the cruelty and greed of people,” he said. “I mourn yet another loss of innocence. Children should not have to endure such at their young age.”
Carter then reflected on his own childhood. “I’m a young man who made it out of the project of Brooklyn. We don’t play these types of games. We have very strict codes and honor,” he said, adding that “we protect children.”
The lawsuit marks one of several sexual abuse civil suits filed against Combs in recent months and the first to include him and an additional celebrity as a defendant. Combs is currently in jail, awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges, for which he has pleaded not guilty. He has denied any wrongdoing in all the cases.
Combs’s attorneys had previously called the “barrage of filings” attempts to “garner publicity.”
“Mr. Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses, and the integrity of the judicial process,” his lawyers told E! News in October. “In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone—adult or minor, man or woman.”
Buzbee, who has also filed other civil suits against Combs on behalf of alleged victims, had told NBC News in October, “We will let the allegations in the filed complaints speak for themselves, and will work to see that justice is done.”
(E! and NBC News are part of the NBCUniversal family.)
