Alyssa Goldberg
I have no love for Jay-Z. But right is right and wrong is wrong.
2006, 2008, I was working in the dollar store, and some staff member had a radio playing to give us music. It was tuned to 92Q, the only radio station I ever heard in any public place in those days. Jay-Z's "30 Something" came on, and this line:
U respect the one who got shot.
I respect the shooter.
I almost fainted. In that time and place, for me, that was just about the most destructive thing anyone could say.
When the P. Diddy scandal broke in 2024, attorney Tony Buzbee filed hundreds of lawsuits from various Jane Does alleging that Diddy had raped them.
Then came the suit against Jay-Z.
In October 2024, Buzbee filed suit against Jay-Z on behalf of a woman who claimed as follows. In the year 2000, at age 13, she met Jay-Z backstage at the Video Music Awards in New York City. (In fact, he was there with his wife, Beyonce.) She got whisked away in a limousine to an after-party at a certain mansion in New York City. In her complaint, she described the mansion in great detail. (It would turn out that no such mansion exists in New York City.) There, she said, Jay-Z raped her. Her clothes in tatters, she staggered away from the house, found a gas station, phoned her father, and asked him to come get her.
He lived five hours away.
Jay-Z's public remarks in response to this suit were exactly what I'd expect from a man wrongly accused. Exactly.
That wasn't good enough for Alyssa Goldberg.
What shocked her was that Jay-Z denied it.
Her case boils down to, "Believe the woman." To do otherwise, she says, is misogynistic and an insult to all women who have ever been abused.
Note that this is not, "Believe the victim."
It boils down to, rather, "Believe the accuser."
And that can always be a big, big, big mistake. No trial, no evidence, no "innocent until proven guilty." Just sheer prejudice.
And whether in the legal world or the moral world, that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
POSTSCRIPT: Jay-Z accuser recants, says claims were false
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