Jay-Z is starting his comeback with a clean slate as he sits down for a rare interview ahead of his 30th anniversary concerts.
In an interview with GQ published on March 24, the hip-hop icon addressed the now-dismissed rape lawsuit against him and Diddy that he spent much of his 2025 fighting. Jumping straight into it, Jay-Z admitted it’s been a “really hard” year that left him “heartbroken.”
“That whole lawsuit thing, that s*** took a lot out of me,” the Roc Nation founder admitted. “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.”
The lawsuit was filed in late 2024 by an anonymous woman who alleged Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs drugged and raped her decades earlier at an MTV Video Music Awards afterparty in 2000 when she was just 13 years old. The lawsuit was dismissed months later.
Born Shawn Carter, the rapper noted that allegations of rape and pedophilia are not something anyone should take likely. “Especially against a person like me,” he noted to GQ.
Explaining what he meant, Jay-Z said, “Even when we were doing the worst things, we had those kind of rules. There was a line: no women, no kids. You hear those sayings, but those are the things that I took from the street. We lived and died by that. So it’s strict for me, like it meant a lot to me.”
He continued, “I took that really hard. 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.”
Jay-Z is currently gearing up for his two-night comeback concert at Yankee Stadium in July to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, as well as the 25th anniversary of his sixth studio album, The Blueprint.