“Something ain’t right about this.” That is how a YouTube commentator who goes by Ms. Lowdown summed up Jane Doe’s sworn reversal Thursday night, and after reading the court file I am not going to tell her she’s wrong. I read the 12-page declaration. I read the dismissal notice it came stapled to. I read Buzbee’s furious letter to the judge the next morning. The paper is all in order. That is part of what bothers me. As they say, desperate people do desperate things.
Let me walk through the theories, because the internet has been doing the work the press hasn’t, and some of it holds up better than the coverage suggests. First, here’s the declaration Jane Doe’s attorney filed yesterday.
Exhibit 1: Proof of Racketeering? Tampering? Or…
“Somebody Got Paid”
This is the majority view in every comment thread I have read, and the declaration anticipates it. Paragraph 2 says she received “no monetary consideration, payment, or other financial compensation of any kind from Mr. Carter, or anyone acting on his behalf.” Sworn, under penalty of perjury.
Read it again. Monetary. Financial. Those words were chosen by lawyers, and lawyers do not choose words by accident. What she got the same day she signed is written into the very next document on the docket: Carter dropped his lawsuit against her, “without costs to either Carter or Doe as against the other.” She had been a defendant in a billionaire’s malicious prosecution case for 19 months. She is, by every description, a woman of modest means in Alabama. Getting out of that case is worth more to her than any check, and it is not money, so the paragraph stays true.
And there is one line the declaration does not contain. It never says who is paying her new lawyer. J. Blair Newman Jr. practices at McDowell Knight Roedder & Sledge, a Mobile law firm that likely does not take these cases for free. Someone is covering that bill. The declaration is silent on it. I would like to know why.
“Was She a Plant?”
This is the video’s big theory, and if true it would be the story of the decade.
She answered a Facebook ad for Combs accusers in late September 2024. The complaint filed October 20 named Combs and an unnamed “Celebrity A.” Buzbee did not send Carter the demand letter until November 5. For her to have been sent at Buzbee to embarrass him, Carter would have had to know, before Buzbee did, that Buzbee was going to come after him.
But drop the word “plant” and something ain’t right anyway. She did not have to be sent. She only had to be found, and she was found fast.
Carter’s investigators knocked on her door in Alabama on February 21, 2025, one week after her suit was dismissed. She was a pseudonymous plaintiff. Her name and address were supposed to be secret. The California appeals court, in the ruling this site covered Sept. 10, noted that if Carter’s lawyers directed that visit it “would have been a violation of rule 4.2,” the rule against contacting a represented party. The court also found she “felt she had to cooperate,” and “felt intimidated.”
So no, not a plant. Something closer to the opposite: a claimant nobody protected, located by the man she accused, and worked for 19 months. Ms. Lowdown says Carter’s team “slid on up on her over and over again till they got her to do what they wanted.” The record does not contradict that. It documents the first visit and then goes dark until Thursday. The possibility she’s been threatened is very real, and Carter’s own third amended complaint lists those alleged threats.
The Timing Is Suspect: “Bait-and-Switch”
Here is the part that nobody on YouTube has noticed and that made Buzbee’s lawyers angrier than anything else. On Tuesday night, Carter’s lawyer emailed all the defendants asking them to consent to a longer opposition brief, to be filed against all three pending motions to dismiss, including Jane Doe’s. Everyone said yes. Wednesday morning the letter went to the judge saying the parties had “met and conferred” and consented. Wednesday evening, Carter dropped Jane Doe.
Buzbee’s firm says the declaration, which she swears she reviewed “together” with her lawyer before signing, could not have been produced in the hours between. They say the dismissal “was in the works well before” the consent was requested, and that Carter’s counsel “deceived” both the defendants and the court. I do not know if Judge Ho will agree. I know that a sworn 12-page narrative with exhibits does not get drafted in an afternoon, and that Carter’s lawyers asked for a favor while sitting on it.
The Warning: “They Told Me Jay-Z Was Threatening to Kill Me”
Somebody told Jane Doe that Jay-Z was going to kill her. That is not a YouTube theory. It is in Carter’s own complaint.
Paragraph 5 of the Third Amended Complaint (posted below) his lawyers filed in July says that on February 13, 2025, the day before her suit was dismissed, David Fortney flew to Alabama, met her in person, and told her she had to dismiss immediately because “they told me Jay-Z was threatening to kill me.” Those are her words, spoken to Carter’s own investigators on a recording made outside her house a week later.
Paragraph 160 adds that when the investigators asked whether Buzbee himself had told her there were threats on her life, she said yes, and that she was warned “saying anything else could get [her] in a lot of trouble” and that Carter “could come after [her].” Paragraph 161 says her father backed her up independently, describing “very, very, very serious threats” to her “life and family” and recalling that “David got on a plane and flew all the way out here to take her through the threats,” then flew home the same night.
Carter’s position is that Fortney made it all up to frighten her into dropping the case before Judge Torres could sanction Buzbee. Maybe. But sit with what that requires you to believe: that a lawyer flew across the country to tell his own client the man she sued would kill her, invented from nothing, and that her father repeated the same fabrication to strangers on his lawn.
And then consider what Carter’s investigators did with a woman who had just been told that. They showed up at her door. Footnote 16 of the same complaint says Carter “first became aware of Doe’s identity on or around February 21, 2025.” That is the day of the visit. Her name was under seal. She writes in the new declaration that she was “surprised that those investigators knew who I was and where I lived.” They asked her to sign an affidavit. She asked, according to paragraph 5, “how does this help me?” Carter’s lawyers quote that line as proof of her greed. I read it as a woman who had been told this man wanted her dead, looking at his people on her porch, and doing the math.
One Needed the Threat to Exist so Fortney Could Be The Villain
Now look at what happened to the word “kill.” The declaration Carter’s team filed Thursday describes the same February 13 meeting. In it, Fortney tells her only that “it was possible that Mr. Carter or people connected to him could find out my name and address” and that “it was dangerous to speak about the case at all.” Same meeting, same lawyer, same car. The death threat that Carter’s own pleading put in her mouth is gone, replaced by “dangerous.”
Two paragraphs later she swears she “never received any threat from Mr. Carter or anyone acting on his behalf.” Both documents were drafted with Carter’s interests in the room. One needed the threat to exist so Fortney could be the villain. The other needed it to vanish so the recantation could look voluntary. I do not know which version is true. I know they cannot both be, and I know who was holding the pen each time.
The complaint says one more thing worth knowing. Paragraph 164 alleges that on February 28, 2025, Buzbee’s New York co-counsel called Carter’s lawyer and warned that if Carter used the doorstep recording, Buzbee would put out a statement from Doe saying she had been “threatened by Carter’s ‘people’ since she dropped the lawsuit” and had only dismissed it because “she was afraid for her life.”
Two weeks later Buzbee did roughly that, releasing his own recording of her and telling Rolling Stone that Carter’s investigators had “repeatedly harassed, threatened and harangued this poor woman for weeks trying to intimidate her and make her recant her story.” His December 2024 complaint had already accused Carter of “a conspiracy of harassment, bullying and intimidation against Plaintiff’s lawyers, their families, employees and former associates,” and his former clients told a Houston court that investigators came to their homes claiming to be “with the state” and offering money to sue him. That suit died in June on jurisdiction, not on the facts.
So here is the shape of it. In February 2025 a woman is told, by someone, that the billionaire she accused will kill her. Within days his people find her sealed address and stand outside her house with a document to sign. She spends the next 19 months as his defendant. Then she signs a longer document, prepared with his lawyers, in which the death threat has become “dangerous” and nobody threatened her at all. You do not need to believe Carter personally threatened anyone to see the coercion in that sequence. Whoever said the word “kill” first, it was Carter’s camp that made sure she never had to hear it again, because by then she had no other way out.
Ms. Lowdown put it this way: they “slid on up on her over and over again till they got her to do what they wanted.”
Something ain’t right about this. The question is whether Judge Ho is going to ask what.
Carter’s third amended complaint against Buzbee, Carter vs Buzbee. 1:26-cv-02775-DEH
This is an opinion article.