On the 75th floor of the tallest building in the city, the Houston attorney Tony Buzbee spoke for nearly 40 minutes at a press conference near his office. It was October, and nearly a year had passed since Sean “Diddy” Combs quickly settled a lawsuit filed by his ex-girlfriend Casandra Ventura that accused the hip-hop mogul of extensive violence and sexual abuse.
Buzbee’s hair was slicked back, his firm’s hotline hovered in large type in the background, and the podium bore his Instagram handle. He was now working on his most important case to date, he told reporters, by representing 120 accusers in forthcoming sexual misconduct suits against Combs, including 25 minors.
By that point, Combs had been sued more than 10 times over similar allegations and indicted on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges. (He has denied wrongdoing in connection to the lawsuits and pleaded not guilty in his criminal case; he is in a Brooklyn prison awaiting his May trial date and recently dropped an effort to be released on bail.) With his extensive celebrity ties as hip-hop’s long-reigning, preeminent connector, it has become the default parlor game around Combs’s case to speculate about who else might be implicated. Jamie Foxx and Will Smith have each recently distanced themselves from him. Buzbee’s remarks stoked the anticipation.
“Many powerful people will be exposed,” he said.
On a Sunday night this month, an anonymous woman represented by Buzbee updated a lawsuit she had filed against Combs in October. The new complaint replaced a reference to “Celebrity A” with Jay-Z’s birth name, Shawn Carter. According to the suit, in 2000, when the woman was 13 years old and Combs and Carter were each at the peak of their powers, they took turns raping her at an awards show afterparty. She claimed that she had been drugged and that an unnamed female celebrity looked on during the assault. Afterward, the complaint said, she ran from the home where the party was held and found a gas station where her father picked her up.
Within hours of the new complaint’s filing, Carter’s entertainment company Roc Nation posted a first-person statement in which he went beyond a standard-issue denial. He called Buzbee “a deplorable human being” and an “ambulance chaser in a cheap suit” who had tried to shake him down prior to his being named in the suit. (Carter had sued Buzbee for extortion, which Buzbee denies.)
“I’m not from your world,” Carter wrote. “I’m a young man who made it out of the project of Brooklyn.”
The suit put Buzbee toe-to-toe with Alex Spiro, Carter’s longtime attorney who currently has a strong claim to American law’s most high-profile client list. He has recently represented Elon Musk, Alec Baldwin, and New York mayor Eric Adams. In November, Spiro and Tom Brady sat courtside together at a Dallas Mavericks game. By Buzbee standards, Spiro is relatively low-key, with a balanced if forceful manner, but on Monday, he held a press conference of his own at Roc Nation’s Manhattan headquarters.
“Why is this story even created?” Spiro asked reporters. “This lawyer took advantage of this. That’s what’s going on here.”
“This issue of a lawyer taking advantage of the situation is going to be dealt with, I can assure you,” he said. “Stay tuned.”
A former Marine, Buzbee grew up on a farm in Texas and rose to national attention with his 2010 litigation against BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In more recent years, he has filed claims on behalf of clients against NFL quarterback Deshuan Watson for alleged sexual misconduct and against rapper Travis Scott for damages related to the 2021 Astroworld crowd crush. (Watson denied the allegations and settled with the majority of his accusers in 2022, though another sexual assault allegation was filed this fall; Scott settled hundreds of lawsuits this year, but hundreds remain.) Buzbee’s Instagram account features a heavy sprinkling of cigars, thick jewelry, and cowboy hats. “Slumming it across Italy with my beautiful bride,” he wrote in a caption from Capri this year. (Buzbee did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
As his profile has risen, his own life has occasionally featured in the tabloid press. Just before Christmas in 2017, a 29-year-old court reporter from Dallas was kicked out of Buzbee’s $14 million home. According to authorities, Lindy Lou Layman had been out on a date with Buzbee, and afterward, sloshing red wine around the premises, allegedly destroyed an estimated $300,000 worth of his art, including two Warhols. (Buzbee later said she was there for a party, and that a Renoir and Monet she pulled off the wall were not damaged. Layman denied the accusations and criminal mischief charges against her were dismissed in 2020.)
The episode ultimately amounted to a footnote in Buzbee’s biography. He has launched a failed Houston mayoral bid with $10 million of his own money, clashed with neighbors by parking an operational Sherman M4A4 tank in front of his home, and been arrested on DWI charges. (The case was dismissed within a year, though not without controversy.)
With his appetite for theater, Buzbee has fitted in naturally to the media-law ecosystem that has sprung from the allegations against Combs. In the aftermath of Combs’s unraveling, and amid an online frenzy that often verges into conspiracy, “Diddy parties” have come to connote the sinister side of celebrity in much the same way the notion of an “Epstein list” has. In addition to the extortion suit brought by Carter, Buzbee was sued last month by an anonymous woman claiming that he assaulted her with a champagne flute while representing her during her divorce.
“That’s crazy fiction,” Buzbee told TMZ. “Like really crazy. Like ridiculously crazy. I would ask if the lawyer bringing this silly case is friends with a lawyer from the firm that brought the other [extortion] case. All this will be exposed soon.”
The day after Carter was named in Buzbee’s suit against Combs, Spiro filed a response in Manhattan federal court asking for the allegations to be dismissed or for the plaintiff to be identified. He included screenshots of Buzbee’s social media posts regarding Carter and wrote that Buzbee’s “tactics send a clear message: any individual who resists extortionate demands will face public retaliation through highly publicized lawsuits.”
Buzbee responded the same day in a post on X, claiming that Carter’s extortion claims were “bogus and laughable.”
“What you are seeing played out now,” he wrote, “is a coordinated and desperate effort to focus the public’s attention on me personally to avoid attention on the allegations being made by my clients.”
For a few days, the matter quieted down. Carter attended the Los Angeles premiere of Mufasa: The Lion King with Beyoncé and their 12-year-old daughter Blue Ivy, who play mother-daughter voice acting roles in the movie. Then, this past Friday, NBC News published an interview with his accuser.
“I have made some mistakes,” the woman said, although she stood by her allegations overall. There were several inconsistencies raised in the report, among them that her father did not recall picking her up as she had claimed. The woman had said she spoke to Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden the night that she was assaulted, but he has said he was not in New York at the time.
In an email to the outlet, Buzbee appeared to backtrack a bit, saying that his firm was continuing to vet the woman’s claims. “Jane Doe’s case was referred to our firm by another,” he wrote, “who vetted it prior to sending it to us.”
The legal back-and-forth sprung back to life. Spiro quickly accused Buzbee, in a letter to a judge, of violating a federal rule that requires lawyers to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” before signing on to the case. Buzbee denied the allegation, telling The New York Times, “Our conduct has been beyond reproach and will continue to be.” On Wednesday, he announced that he was suing Roc Nation for what he claimed was a conspiracy to turn his clients against him. (A company rep told TMZ that the “baloney lawsuit” was a “pathetic attempt to distract and deflect attention.”)
In the moments after the blockbuster interview with his client, though, Buzbee didn’t seem bothered. On Instagram, he posted a video of a mariachi band playing “New York, New York,” and began singing along toward the end of the clip.
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