Jay-Z Breaks Silence on 2024 Sexual Assault Lawsuit: ‘Took a Lot Out of Me’
In 2024, Jay-Z was accused of sexually assaulting a then-13-year-old girl in 2000, alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs. The case was eventually dropped. Now, the former is speaking out about the emotional toll the allegations took on him.
The allegations came up in a new cover story for GQ, in which Jay-Z gave a rare, in-depth interview. He brought up the lawsuit himself when asked how he would rate his 2025, which is when most of the fallout from the December 2024 lawsuit played out in the public.
Details of the Lawsuit
In December 2024, lawyers for an anonymous accuser amended a previous complaint she originally made against Diddy. Identified only as Jane Doe, she claimed Diddy and an unnamed celebrity drugged and raped her at an after-party for the MTV Video Music Awards. In the amended complaint, she named Jay-Z as the other party involved.
Following a strong denial of the claims by Jay-Z and inaccuracies in her lawsuit, she voluntarily filed to drop the case with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be refiled. He later sued her and her attorney, claiming she admitted she was lying while calling the lawsuit an extortion attempt.
In July 2025, a judge dismissed Jay-Z’s lawsuit as well.
What Jay-Z Is Saying Now
Speaking about his tumultuous year, he told GQW it “was hard. Really hard.”
“I was heartbroken. I’m glad we got right to that so we could just get that out the way. Like I was really heartbroken by everything that occurred,” he continued. “We’re in a space now where it’s almost like consequence is not thought about enough. Because everything is so instant, you know what I’m saying?”
“That whole [lawsuit thing], that s--t took a lot out of me. I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time, uncontrollable anger,” he told the publication. “You don’t put that on someone—that’s a thing that you better be super sure. It used to be like that. You had to be super sure before you put those kind of things on a person. Especially a person like me.”
He added he lives by a sort of “street” code, where “even when we were doing the worst things, we had those kind of rules. There was a line: no women, no kids.”
“We lived and died by that. So it’s strict for me, like it meant a lot to me,” he continued, saying that he took the allegations against him “really hard.” That being said, he added, “I knew that we were going to walk through that because, first of all, it’s not true. And the truth, at the end of the day, still reigns supreme.”
As for how he bounced back from that time in his life, he told GQ, “I don’t know. This is the first thing I’m doing, actually. It was just like, alright man, we played enough defense. 2026 is all offense.
Jay-Z's Initial Denial
While this is the first public interview in which Jay-Z has spoken about the assault allegations, he did issue a lengthy statement denying them back in 2024.
Calling the lawsuit a “blackmail attempt,” he insisted he wouldn't be settling the suit and called out the attorney for only filing a civil complaint and not a criminal one.
“My only heartbreak is for my family. My wife [Beyoncé] 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 added at the time. “I mourn yet another loss of innocence. Children should not have to endure such at their young age. It is unfair to have to try to understand inexplicable degrees of malice meant to destroy families and human spirit.”