The suit put Buzbee toe-to-toe with Alex Spiro, Carter’s longtime attorney who currently has a strong claim to American law’s most high-profile client list. He has recently represented Elon Musk, Alec Baldwin, and New York mayor Eric Adams. In November, Spiro and Tom Brady sat courtside together at a Dallas Mavericks game. By Buzbee standards, Spiro is relatively low-key, with a balanced if forceful manner, but on Monday, he held a press conference of his own at Roc Nation’s Manhattan headquarters.
“Why is this story even created?” Spiro asked reporters. “This lawyer took advantage of this. That’s what’s going on here.”
“This issue of a lawyer taking advantage of the situation is going to be dealt with, I can assure you,” he said. “Stay tuned.”
A former Marine, Buzbee grew up on a farm in Texas and rose to national attention with his 2010 litigation against BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In more recent years, he has filed claims on behalf of clients against NFL quarterback Deshuan Watson for alleged sexual misconduct and against rapper Travis Scott for damages related to the 2021 Astroworld crowd crush. (Watson denied the allegations and settled with the majority of his accusers in 2022, though another sexual assault allegation was filed this fall; Scott settled hundreds of lawsuits this year, but hundreds remain.) Buzbee’s Instagram account features a heavy sprinkling of cigars, thick jewelry, and cowboy hats. “Slumming it across Italy with my beautiful bride,” he wrote in a caption from Capri this year. (Buzbee did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
As his profile has risen, his own life has occasionally featured in the tabloid press. Just before Christmas in 2017, a 29-year-old court reporter from Dallas was kicked out of Buzbee’s $14 million home. According to authorities, Lindy Lou Layman had been out on a date with Buzbee, and afterward, sloshing red wine around the premises, allegedly destroyed an estimated $300,000 worth of his art, including two Warhols. (Buzbee later said she was there for a party, and that a Renoir and Monet she pulled off the wall were not damaged. Layman denied the accusations and criminal mischief charges against her were dismissed in 2020.)
The episode ultimately amounted to a footnote in Buzbee’s biography. He has launched a failed Houston mayoral bid with $10 million of his own money, clashed with neighbors by parking an operational Sherman M4A4 tank in front of his home, and been arrested on DWI charges. (The case was dismissed within a year, though not without controversy.)
With his appetite for theater, Buzbee has fitted in naturally to the media-law ecosystem that has sprung from the allegations against Combs. In the aftermath of Combs’s unraveling, and amid an online frenzy that often verges into conspiracy, “Diddy parties” have come to connote the sinister side of celebrity in much the same way the notion of an “Epstein list” has. In addition to the extortion suit brought by Carter, Buzbee was sued last month by an anonymous woman claiming that he assaulted her with a champagne flute while representing her during her divorce.
“That’s crazy fiction,” Buzbee told TMZ. “Like really crazy. Like ridiculously crazy. I would ask if the lawyer bringing this silly case is friends with a lawyer from the firm that brought the other [extortion] case. All this will be exposed soon.”
The day after Carter was named in Buzbee’s suit against Combs, Spiro filed a response in Manhattan federal court asking for the allegations to be dismissed or for the plaintiff to be identified. He included screenshots of Buzbee’s social media posts regarding Carter and wrote that Buzbee’s “tactics send a clear message: any individual who resists extortionate demands will face public retaliation through highly publicized lawsuits.”
Buzbee responded the same day in a post on X, claiming that Carter’s extortion claims were “bogus and laughable.”
“What you are seeing played out now,” he wrote, “is a coordinated and desperate effort to focus the public’s attention on me personally to avoid attention on the allegations being made by my clients.”
For a few days, the matter quieted down. Carter attended the Los Angeles premiere of Mufasa: The Lion King with Beyoncé and their 12-year-old daughter Blue Ivy, who play mother-daughter voice acting roles in the movie. Then, this past Friday, NBC News published an interview with his accuser.
“I have made some mistakes,” the woman said, although she stood by her allegations overall. There were several inconsistencies raised in the report, among them that her father did not recall picking her up as she had claimed. The woman had said she spoke to Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden the night that she was assaulted, but he has said he was not in New York at the time.
In an email to the outlet, Buzbee appeared to backtrack a bit, saying that his firm was continuing to vet the woman’s claims. “Jane Doe’s case was referred to our firm by another,” he wrote, “who vetted it prior to sending it to us.”
The legal back-and-forth sprung back to life. Spiro quickly accused Buzbee, in a letter to a judge, of violating a federal rule that requires lawyers to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” before signing on to the case. Buzbee denied the allegation, telling The New York Times, “Our conduct has been beyond reproach and will continue to be.” On Wednesday, he announced that he was suing Roc Nation for what he claimed was a conspiracy to turn his clients against him. (A company rep told TMZ that the “baloney lawsuit” was a “pathetic attempt to distract and deflect attention.”)
In the moments after the blockbuster interview with his client, though, Buzbee didn’t seem bothered. On Instagram, he posted a video of a mariachi band playing “New York, New York,” and began singing along toward the end of the clip.
