American rap star and businessman Jay-Z had tried to have a rape case against him dismissed, but American justice rejected his request this Thursday, December 26, 2024. The rapper, in his real name Shawn Corey Carter, is accused, with P. Diddy (Sean Combs), of having raped a 13-year-old child in 2000, on the sidelines of a party following the MTV Video Music Awards.
The woman, now 38, who first filed a complaint in October 2024, incriminating a rap celebrity and Sean Combs (indicted the month before for sex trafficking and extortion), amended her complaint on December 9 to clarify that the first individual was Shawn Carter. She said she was drugged at a party before being raped by the two men.
The judge in the case, Analisa Torres, just rejected Jay-Z/Carter’s request to dismiss the rape charge: “Carter’s attorney’s continued filing of aggressive motions containing inflammatory language and ad hominem attacks is inappropriate, a waste of judicial resources, and a tactic unlikely to benefit his client.”she wrote in a court order.
Torres also granted the complainant the opportunity to pursue her complaint anonymously: it will therefore be registered under the pseudonym Jane Doe, as is customary, and despite pressure from defense lawyers to publicly reveal their identity.
Legal battle
Carter, who has pleaded not guilty, worked to highlight inconsistencies in the complainant’s story. The latter admitted, in an interview with NBC News, to having “made some mistakes” in his testimony, twenty-four years after the alleged facts, but maintains his accusations.
These inconsistencies were used by the defense to insistently request an accelerated dismissal of the complaint, which was not to the taste of American justice. In her order, Judge Torres reports that
“Since Carter’s attorney first appeared in this case seventeen days ago, he has submitted a litany of letters and motions attempting to impeach the character of the plaintiff’s attorney, many of them relying on the so-called “urgency” of this matter”.
Combs, who has also pleaded not guilty and faces more than 150 sexual battery charges, will face a criminal trial in May 2025. He is incarcerated in New York awaiting sentencing.
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