Judge says he'll dismiss Jay-Z's extortion claim against Tony Buzbee, unless...
Three statements from the plaintiff's lawyer who sued Jay-Z for rape will survive under the defamation claim, but three others will be dismissed.
The future of Jay-Z’s lawsuit against plaintiff’s attorney Tony Buzbee hinges mostly on a like.
A judge in California said this week he’ll probably dismiss an extortion claim against Buzbee over the now-dismissed lawsuit that accused Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs of raping a 13-year-old girl in 2000. He also expects to dismiss three statements under the defamation claim, but another will move forward, and two others will survive because of Buzbee’s decision to like a post on the social media website X.
“It’s hard to say that when somebody says, ‘Doe is Carter,’ and your client likes it, it’s not reasonable to infer that your client has just affirmed they’re right. And once you get there, we’re off to the races,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mark H. Epstein said, referring to Jay-Z’s legal name, Shawn Carter.
Judge Epstein had not finalized his order as of Thursday afternoon, and he said he may change his mind and keep the extortion claim if Carter’s lawyers present evidence showing Buzbee sought money from Carter with no plan to sue and without the consent of his clients.
“That is extortion, perhaps. But I want to see that silver bullet before I allow it to be fired,” the judge said during a two-hour hearing on Tuesday in Santa Monica. “Because otherwise, the Legislature was pretty clear that they don’t have a problem with settlement letters, and that if there’s stuff in the settlement letter that turns out to be false, your remedy is a malicious prosecution suit at the end of the day.”
Epstein’s comments are his first substantive remarks about the merits of Carter’s claims against Buzbee, who recently dismissed his rape lawsuit against Carter in the federal Southern District of New York. The lawsuit was on behalf of an Alabama woman who said Carter and Combs raped her at an afterparty for the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 7, 2000.
The extortion claim concerns two demand letters Buzbee sent Carter’s lawyers before he sued, one on behalf of the woman and another on behalf of a man whom Buzbee accused Carter of raping him in 2005 when he was 16. Carter called the accusations “false and ridiculous in every aspect” in a recent court declaration.
Buzbee has not sued Carter on behalf of the man, and he recently dismissed his lawsuit on behalf of the woman with prejudice, which means the claims can’t be pursued again.
Judge Epstein cautioned on Tuesday that a dismissal with prejudice isn’t definitive proof that the allegations against Carter were false, but it “checks the first box” for a malicious prosecution claim against Buzbee.
Buzbee’s lawyer Samuel Moniz of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP said he doesn’t believe “there’s any evidence” that Buzbee acted without his clients’ knowledge, nor is there evidence he acted maliciously.
“Counsel can quibble the adequacy of that investigation, but there was an investigation, and there’s no evidence that Mr. Buzbee closed his eyes to any contrary evidence tending to disprove his claim,” said Moniz, who was joined in court by co-counsel Camille Vasquez and Randy Boyer.
Epstein offered to delay the hearing after Carter’s lawyer Robert Schwartz, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, in Los Angeles, said an investigator spoke with someone who said Buzbee sent two demand letters to Carter without the knowledge of two clients identified as Jane Doe and John Doe.
Schwartz, however, said he doesn’t believe the investigator can publicly name his source, so Epstein proceeded with oral argument. Afterward, the judge said the findings in his 34-page tentative order may or may not change in his final order, and he urged Schwartz and his co-counsel to submit new evidence “sooner than later” if they’re going to do so. He also said they can say the evidence they believe they would find if allowed to seek discovery from Buzbee.
Epstein’s comments leave a narrow path forward for Carter’s extortion claims, but the defamation claim is safe regarding three of six statements identified in the lawsuit after the judge said they “link Carter to the sexual abuse and rape allegations made by Jane Doe.”
“An average listener would believe that Buzbee’s statements truthfully implicated Carter as a rapist,” according to the tentative order, which was distributed in the courtroom on Tuesday.
The surviving statements are:
“It may not be big names at first, but—but we have a long list of names.” Buzbee said this during an interview with Piers Morgan that aired on Oct. 8.
Buzbee called his client in the rape lawsuit against Carter a “sexual assault survivor,” which Carter’s defamation claim alleges “reasonably understood to refer to Mr. Carter as the perpetrator of the alleged assault.”
Buzbee was paraphrased by TMZ on Dec. 10 as saying” he’s not ruling out filing rape charges against [Mr. Carter] with New York authorities,” and “What happens next is up to my client. It’s her case and what she decides to do you will find out in due course.” TMZ also reported, “Jay-Z’s rape accuser might take the music mogul’s advice and file a criminal complaint against him after slapping him with a civil suit alleging sexual assault, according to her attorney Tony Buzbee.”
The statements Epstein plans to dismiss are:
Buzbee said on Stephen A. Smith’s show on Oct. 2, “I want to make sure I capture a wide net and capture everybody involved, and that’s what I’m—that’s what I’m trying to do. And part of the—part of the purpose of the press conference was to encourage people that witnessed some of these events to come forward, and that’s happening now. I want to make sure that anyone that facilitated this, egged it on, participated, benefited from, profited from, they’re involved too because that’s really— that’s really what needs to happen here. It happens—it happens in other cases like that. You want to make sure that you include everyone, especially those that enabled and were complicit.” He also said: “You know, obviously, a lot of this is hard to corroborate.”
Buzbee said on Chris Hansen’s show on Oct. 3 that “facilitators” committed misconduct and claimed they “should be prosecuted and put underneath [sic] the jail.” He also said: “I expect the [Combs] indictment and the charges in the indictment will grow. I expect other people will be implicated, so I think that, like I say, I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg here.”
Buzbee said on Shaun Attwood’s podcast on Oct. 7, “there are going to be some people named in these cases that are going to raise some eyebrows … if you were a bank and you were somehow facilitating this by allowing, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash to be withdrawn to be used for various things, or you were some sort of pharmacy that ordered large volumes of particular drugs were being purchased or maybe you were a hotel or a club or this type of activity was taking place, you’re going to be named.”
In his tentative order, Judge Epstein said the inferences in the dismissed statements “are far more tenuous” than the inferences in the statements he won’t dismiss. Unlike Buzbee’s statement to Morgan, in the dismissed statements, “there are no hints about the specific celebrities in Diddy’s orbit that would implicate or even refer to Carter.”
“Buzbee indicates generally that famous people may be implicated, but there are no further specifics that would lead any person to believe Buzbee was particularly discussing Carter,” according to the tentative order. “His comments implicate celebrities and non-celebrities equally.”
Buzbee’s comments to TMZ are different because they specifically identify Carter. And Epstein said Buzbee’s ‘liking’ of a post that identified Carter as the John Doe suing him for extortion is enough for people to realize his comments to Morgan were about Carter.
“Buzbee's statements in a public interview to a well-known personality concerned potential high-profile assailants that had a history with Diddy and were involved in this highly publicized sex abuse scandal. The ‘like’ corroborated this circumstantial evidence,” the judge wrote.
Jay-Z describes ‘mental anguish’
A five-page declaration from Carter said he viewed Buzbee’s demand letters “as an existential threat to my reputation, my career, my family, and everything else I have spent my life achieving.” He said his company, Roc Nation, lost contracts in sports and entertainment “that would have generated revenues of approximately $20 million per year.”
“I felt enormous pressure to protect my family from what Mr. Buzbee threatened and to preserve my professional reputation. I felt mental anguish knowing someone (Mr. Buzbee) was attempting to maliciously destroy me, my livelihood, and my family. I felt that Mr. Buzbee was placing a gun to my head that I either bow to his demands or endure personal and financial ruin. His actions caused me mental anguish about the ticking time bomb and what it would do to me, my family and my hard-earned reputation,” the 55-year-old and 24-time Grammy winner wrote.
Carter said he understands lawyers send demand letters, “but these demand letters were different.”
“I was deeply concerned that if I did not pay his clients ‘something of substance,’ that Mr. Buzbee intended to create a ‘public spectacle’ and take his clients to criminal authorities to convince them to prosecute me. I didn’t think there was any other way to read those letters,” Carter wrote.
Carter also said “it was incredibly painful” for him and his wife, megastar singer Beyoncé, “to sit down with our children, one of whom is at an age where her friends would surely see the press and ask questions about these claims, and explain this.”
“I mourn this loss of innocence for my children, including one who is around the age that the female minor claims to have been when she falsely claims that these heinous acts happened,” Carter wrote.
Carter also said he believes Buzbee filed the amended complaint naming him as a defendant on the eve of his daughter’s Mufasa: The Lion King movie premiere “to put me in the position of having to choose between supporting my daughter or hiding to avoid the negative press.”
Buzbee’s lawyers objected to all but the opening paragraph of Carter’s declaration, but Epstein overruled and said Carter wasn’t attesting to Buzbee’s and his clients’ motivations or intentions “but to his innocence.”
“He is allowed to do that,” wrote Epstein, who has been a judge since 2017 and is the son of late California Court of Appeal Justice Norman Epstein.
Epstein took time to address the tone of the filings from both sides by noting “that there is a fairly high degree of rhetoric here.”
“The court understands why that would be. The allegations—on both sides—are salacious, and the court wonders whether the court is the real audience for some of the language used. The court advises counsel that the court’s oath is to decide the case according to law. Content, and not volume, will carry the day. The harsh accusations—on both sides—is more distracting than anything else. Worse, in the court’s experience, strong evidence and strong law speak for themselves. The need to yell suggests that the speaker is trying to make up in tone what it lacks in logical force,” the judge wrote.
SDNY won’t admit Buzbee
Epstein’s pending order comes as Buzbee faces increased scrutiny in the federal court district where he sued Carter.
Buzbee is based in Houston, Texas, and has been licensed to practice in the Lone Star State since 1997. He’s been licensed to practice in New York state courts since 2019, but that doesn’t cover the federal courts in New York.
Buzbee is admitted in the Brooklyn-based Eastern District of New York, but he didn’t seek admission to the SDNY until after he filed about 25 lawsuits against Combs, including the amended complaint that named Carter as a co-defendant in the lawsuit about the VMA award show after party.
The SDNY’s Committee on Grievances denied him admission because of this. The Feb. 13 order from the committee chair, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Fanilla, ordered him to include a copy of the order if he seeks admission again or moves for admission pro hac vice, which is a one-time admission sponsored by an attorney who’s already admitted.
Without being admitted, Buzbee can’t officially appear as a lawyer in the lawsuits and would have to rely on the New York attorney who filed them for him, Antigone Curis. Carter’s lawyer Alex Spiro noted Buzbee’s lack of admission in his motion for sanctions in the rape lawsuit.
“Whether that reflects an improper effort to avoid the jurisdiction of this Court or just a failure to act with anything approaching reasonable diligence, see N.Y. R. Prof’l Conduct 1.3(a), it reinforces the propriety of imposing sanctions here,” Sprio wrote.
Buzbee enlisted several attorneys to fight the sanctions request, including Marc E. Kasowitz of Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP in New York, who filed opposition to the sanctions motion on Jan. 22.
“Mr. Buzbee is aware of no requirement that he apply for interim pro hac vice admission while his application for reciprocal admission is pending. Of course, if the Court would prefer, Mr. Buzbee will apply for interim pro hac vice admission in short order,” Kasowitz wrote.
Spiro replied on Jan. 29, but then withdrew the sanctions motion on Feb. 4.
Three days later, Buzbee dismissed Bad Boy Records LLC as a defendant. Then on Feb. 18, he dismissed the case against all other defendants, including Carter, with prejudice.
He’s currently seeking pro hac vice admission in several other cases.
A PDF of Judge Epstein’s 34-page tentative order is available below for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions make my work possible.