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JAY-Z‘s lawyer has ripped into Piers Morgan over his recent episode hosting singer Jaguar Wright, who made a number of wild claims comparing the music mogul to Diddy.
As previously reported, while on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Wright claimed that Jay and Beyoncé are a “nasty couple” who do “nasty things,” such as “keeping people against their will, putting people on planes while they’re unconscious, just like Aaliyah got on that plane, unconscious.”
Following the show’s airing, Morgan issued a rare apology for Wright’s “totally false” claims — and in a new interview, the Carters’ attorney Alex Spiro explained that he’d threatened legal action.
“There’s rumors and then there’s nonsense and this is one step further,” he told TMZ. “This is a pointed and formal accusation of something and I felt it needed to be responded to. I think somebody reported it was a cease and desist — it wasn’t that. It was quite bluntly an ultimatum, which was remove that accusation that’s demonstrably false or a court’s going to order you to.”
He added: “And in doing that to get clicks, he didn’t just harm the Carters. What he did effectively was to drown out the voices of actual victims in an ongoing case, in an ongoing investigation — and that was too much for me.”
In his apology, Piers Morgan said: “Last week, I interviewed Jaguar Wright, a singer-songwriter who’s made claims about Diddy for years. Those claims [have received] a lot of attention in the media across many platforms for many years.
“And that’s the thing about platforms. The reality of the modern world is that pretty much everyone has a platform as long as they have something to say that other people want to hear.
“That’s why we invited her on to be interviewed. The people making these claims have an audience with or without shows like mine.”
He continued: “Jaguar Wright unexpectedly made several serious allegations about JAY-Z and Beyoncé during that interview. As I said in the moment, they were not present to respond or defend themselves.
“But now they have. Their lawyers contacted us to say that those claims were totally false and have no basis in fact.”
Morgan concluded his apology by saying: “And we’ve therefore complied with the legal request to cut them from the original interview. Editing interviews is not something we do lightly on a show called Uncensored.
“But, like the proverbial cries of fire in a crowded theater, there are legal limits on us, too. And we apologize to JAY-Z and Beyoncé.”
