The entertainment industry is largely politely ignoring that Jay-Z was named as a defendant alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs in the case of the rape of a 13-year-old girl in the year 2000. On Sunday, he and his kids attended the Super Bowl, where his company Roc Nation helped produce the halftime show wherein Kendrick Lamar performed a song alleging another artist is a pedophile. The week before, he was in the audience for the Grammys, celebrating when his wife Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year (a year after Jay admonished the institution for never giving it to her). But despite the rapper’s strenuous denials and attempts to bully the case out of court, his legal trouble persists.
Last week, his legal team filed to withdraw the lawsuit they filed against Tony Buzbee, who represents Jay-Z’s accuser and a number of other Combs accusers. This was somewhat of a surprise given the amount of shit talking Jay and his lawyer Alex Spiro have done about Buzbee over the last few months. However, Spiro also filed another formal motion to have the case dismissed entirely.
So far the attempts to get the case dismissed have been futile, and it’s still ongoing as of Monday. But Judge Analisa Torres did drop one defendant from the case: Combs’ Bad Boy Records. “Pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the plaintiff(s) and or their counsel(s), hereby give notice that the above-captioned action is voluntarily dismissed with prejudice against Defendant(s) Bad Boy Records LLC (“BBRLLC”),” the most recent update states (via Deadline). “The same is acknowledged and agreed by BBRLLC, by and through its undersigned counsel.”
Bad Boy Records was reportedly dropped “due to replication of its status because of Combs’ corporate structure of overlapping companies and divisions,” according to Deadline. Combs and Jay-Z are still defendants in the case, as are CE OPCO LLC a.k.a. Combs Global, Bad Boy Entertainment Holdings, Inc and “several Bad Boy named entities.”
