Jay-Z on refusing to settle sexual assault lawsuit: ‘I can’t do it, I would die’

Jay-Z has spoken out about his recent sexual assault lawsuit in a new interview.The suit alleged that Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs raped a a 13-year-old girl at a party in 2000. Combs and Jay-Z denied all allegations after the lawsuit was filed in late 2024, and the case was voluntarily dismissed in February 2025.“It was hard,” Jay-Z told GQ. “Really hard. I was heartbroken. 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?”The rapper continued: “I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time, uncontrollable anger. You don’t put that on someone – that’s a thing that you better be super sure [about]. It used to be like that. You had to be super sure before you put those kind of things on a person.”In a lengthy four-hour conversation, Jay-Z explained why he chose to fight the lawsuit rather than settle with the Jane Doe accuser.“I can’t take a settlement – it ain’t in my DNA,” he said. “First of all, first I had to tell my wife. Let’s back up. I know the weight that this is going to bring on our family. I can’t do it. I would die.“If I settled … it would’ve been cheaper? Yes. Cheaper, quicker, move on with your life. I knew what was coming. I wasn’t naive. I called – again, after my family – my partners. They were like, ‘What do you need to help? Don’t even worry.’ In a phone call. Not even a: ‘I got to go to the board with this.’ It was like a testament because people know me.”The lawsuit claimed that an unnamed girl was drugged and raped by both Jay-Z and Combs at a party after the MTV music awards in 2000. Jay-Z blasted the assault allegations when they first emerged in late 2024, calling them a “blackmail attempt”. His attorney Alex Spiro lambasted the claims as “provably, demonstrably false”, adding that they relied on an “impossible timeline”.Elsewhere in the interview, Jay-Z reflected on the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Speaking of hip-hop culture, he said, “We love the excitement and I love the sparring, but in this day and age there’s so much negative stuff that comes with it that you almost wish it didn’t happen.“I don’t know if it’s helpful to our growth where the fallout lands, especially on social media,” the musician added. “It’s too far. It’s bringing people’s kids in it. I don’t like that. I sound like the old guy wagging his finger, but I think we can achieve the same thing, as far as sparring with music, with collaborations more so than breaking the whole thing apart.”Jay-Z also discussed what he called the right wing’s anti-hip hop agenda: “There is clearly an agenda to silence voices in our community, a heavy rightwing agenda. And the culture is happily playing along in the name of this insane thirst of Stan culture to have something on the other side. We are in a strange time.”The rapper sat for the GQ interview to commemorate 30 years of his debut album Reasonable Doubt. This July, he will perform two shows at New York’s Yankee Stadium dedicated to Reasonable Doubt and its follow up, 2001’s The Blueprint.