After years of public claims and legal filings, a long-running paternity case involving hip-hop icon Jay-Z has officially been dismissed.
The case centered around Rymir Satterthwaite, a 30-year-old New Jersey man who has claimed for more than a decade that Jay-Z—born Shawn Carter—is his biological father. Satterthwaite alleged that his late mother, Wanda Satterthwaite, had a relationship with the rapper in the early 1990s, years before Jay-Z’s rise to global fame.
Satterthwaite filed multiple petitions over the years seeking a court-ordered DNA test, but none of his claims gained legal traction. Courts previously dismissed his filings on procedural grounds, including lack of jurisdiction and insufficient evidence.
In May 2025, Satterthwaite filed a new lawsuit in federal court against Jay-Z, once again requesting paternity confirmation and additional damages. Jay-Z’s legal team swiftly responded, describing the allegations as “fabricated and harassing,” and accused Satterthwaite of continuing a “decades-long pattern of meritless litigation.”
Case dismissed:
By July 2025, the case was withdrawn and dismissed, ending the latest legal chapter in the saga. According to court records, the case was voluntarily dropped by Satterthwaite, effectively closing the matter. It’s unclear whether the dismissal was “with prejudice” (preventing refiling) or “without prejudice,” which would allow Satterthwaite to refile at a later time.
At the heart of the controversy remains a single unanswered question: whether Jay-Z ever took a DNA test to confirm or deny paternity. Satterthwaite has long insisted he wants “only the truth,” while Jay-Z has never publicly addressed the claim in detail. No court has compelled the rapper to take such a test, and no verified DNA results have ever been made public.
Jay-Z’s attorneys have maintained that their client has no connection to Satterthwaite or his late mother, asserting that the repeated lawsuits are an attempt to exploit the rapper’s fame. “The allegations are baseless,” a representative stated earlier this year, “and have already been dismissed multiple times by the courts.”
Satterthwaite, meanwhile, has said that he hopes to bring closure to his family’s decades-long pursuit of answers. “I never wanted money,” he previously told The Daily Mail. “All I ever wanted was the truth.”
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