Jay-Z was a teenage drug dealer who shot his brother. He is now accused of rape alongside Diddy. Maureen Callahan writes about the dark past that many people are unwilling to acknowledge.

Jay-Z, also known as Shawn Carter, released a lengthy statement on Sunday night in response to a lawsuit. The lawsuit accused him and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl at a VMA afterparty in 2000.

To my mind, anyone wrongly accused of such a vile and depraved crime would surely be wise to put forth a simple, declarative, emphatic denial.

That’s not what Jay-Z gave us.

It’s important to note that making a statement does not imply guilt, as that is a matter for the court to determine. However, Jay-Z’s statement was disorganized and poorly written, suggesting he may not have consulted with his team before releasing it.

In his statement, Jay-Z dismissed the allegations as a “blackmail attempt” and criticized Tony Buzbee, the lawyer who filed the complaint. Jay-Z then went on to portray himself as a victim of the situation, going to great lengths to defend his innocence.

‘My only heartbreak is for my family,’ wrote the rapper. ‘My wife and I will have to sit our children down… and explain the cruelty and greed of people.’

Cruelty and greed are two things Jay-Z knows intimately, as we will see.

He continued: ‘I mourn yet another loss of innocence. Children should not have to endure such [sic] at their young age.’

He then bemoaned how much famous people are misunderstood. Addressing Buzbee again, he wrote: ‘You have made a terrible error in judgement thinking that all ‘celebrities’ are the same. I’m not from your world. I’m a young man who made it out of the project [sic] of Brooklyn… We have very strict codes and honor. We protect children… only your network of conspiracy theorists, fake physics’ — whatever that means — ‘will believe the idiotic claims you have levied against me.’

One may think, after struggling to read this, that Jay-Z was a true man of principles, or moral uprightness.

Not so. Not by a long shot.

Jay-Z is a high school dropout who, by his own admission, was a drug dealer at age 13. He sold crack to his own community for years.

He told none other than Oprah Winfrey, in 2009, that ‘drug dealers were my role models’ and that, when he was 12, he shot his 16-year-old brother.

In October 2001, Jay-Z pleaded guilty to stabbing rival record producer Lance ‘Un’ Rivera in the shoulder and stomach — a stabbing he initially denied — in 1999 at New York City’s Kit Kat Club.

Here’s what Jay-Z said in court, after months of proclaiming his innocence: ‘I stabbed Lance Rivera. I have accepted responsibility for my actions.’

He got three years’ probation.

Yet in 2023, Rivera suddenly claimed that on the night in question, Jay-Z definitely didn’t stab him — even though Jay referenced the incident in his 2010 book ‘Decoded’, admitting he’d been out of control.

‘I was blacking out with anger,’ he wrote. ‘That night… I was charged with assault.’

‘Jay-Z’s a nice guy,’ Rivera said last year. ‘It’s never been his history.’

Well, who could forget that CCTV footage of Solange, sister to Jay-Z’s wife Beyoncé, beating him up in an elevator, in 2014, as Beyoncé stood by and watched?

Beyoncé tried to turn that humiliation into vulgar self-valorization, gloating on her track ‘Flawless’ that ‘when it’s a billion dollars on the elevator’ — a reference to Jay’s billionaire status — ‘of course, sometimes s*** go down’.

Sure. Or could Solange’s attack, maybe, possibly, have had something to do with Jay-Z’s known infidelity, memorialized on Beyoncé’s album ‘Lemonade’?

And then there are the rumors about his ‘love children’.

The mother of Jay’s alleged 31-year-old son, Rymir Satterthwaite, said in a signed 2015 affidavit that she got together with the rapper when he was 22 and she was just 16.

No attempts by Satterthwaite or his mother to legally force a paternity test have been successful. Jay-Z has consistently denied any allegations that he’s fathered ‘love children’.

None of this, even in part, adds up to Jay-Z being ‘a good guy’. Nor does showing up on a red carpet, one day after the bombshell rape allegation broke, with his wife and 12-year-old daughter Blue Ivy.

All smiles, like nothing has happened.

It’s not just tone deaf. Frankly, it beggars belief that Jay-Z — who has been extremely close friends with both Diddy and that other disgraced rapper, Kanye West — has said nothing about Combs’s alleged ‘freak offs’ and other depravities.

And what on Earth is Beyoncé thinking? Her whole brand is ‘fiery feminist’. You can’t be for the sisterhood and protect a guy who pals around with Diddy.

That said: Beyoncé might be grappling privately with questions about her marriage. After all, there is photographic proof that she was only 16 when she first met Jay-Z, who was then 28 years old and vowed ‘she will be mine’ – though it doesn’t appear they started dating until Beyoncé was legally an adult.

What does a nearly 30-year-old man talk about with a teenager?

And where were Beyoncé’s parents?

Speaking of: Beyoncé’s mom Tina Knowles — who goes by ‘Miss Tina’ — ‘liked’ an Instagram post reporting the rape allegations against her son-in-law, then quickly claimed she was hacked.

If she says so.

‘No weapon formed against my family shall prosper,’ Tina later wrote.

That’s some family.

From the amended court filing, released Sunday evening: Plaintiff Jane Doe, 13 at the time, alleges that she found herself drugged at an afterparty hosted by Combs.

‘Plaintiff was held down by Carter as he vaginally raped her, while Combs and Celebrity B’ — an unnamed A-list female — ‘watched’.

Jennifer Lopez was dating Combs at this time, and was photographed with him on the night in question, both at the VMAs and again at an afterparty, visibly yelling at him.

Of course, there is no suggestion that she is the celebrity in question, and she has yet to comment on the allegations against Combs.

Nor has she said anything about the claims that she served as Combs’s ‘gun mule’ in a 1999 New York City nightclub shooting – and that, per a February 2024 lawsuit, J-Lo allegedly ‘carried the gun into the club for [Combs] and passed him the gun after he got into an altercation with another individual.’

Back to the Jay-Z complaint:

‘After Carter finished, he stepped back toward the wall,’ the lawsuit claims. ‘Combs then stepped forward and vaginally raped Plaintiff while Carter and Celebrity B watched. Combs then knocked Plaintiff down and attempted to force Plaintiff to perform oral sex on him.’

The complaint says she then hit him in the neck and ran away.

After attending Monday night’s premiere, a Beyoncé source told Page Six that ‘she’s sticking by Jay’, that she ‘wholeheartedly believes him’ and ‘has no intention of leaving [him]’.

We shall see.