The Houston Superlawyer Who’s Not Afraid to Take On Diddy, Deshaun Watson, and Shannon Sharpe

“When somebody says there’s a shark in the water, everybody runs.” Leaning back in his chair with his brown leather boots propped up on the desk, Tony Buzbee gazes out the window of his office on the seventy-fifth floor of the tallest building in Texas, basking in his own personal shark tank.

The feisty, flamboyant personal-injury attorney is more than a little obsessed with the ocean’s scariest hunters. His cavernous workspace here in downtown Houston is decorated with gold sharks, silver sharks, a marble shark sculpture, and shark-shaped doorknobs. And he’s quick to pull up his shirtsleeve to show me the shark tattoo on his right forearm. His private jet even has a shark decoration on the tail.

If we’re being honest, there are a few too many sharks. But for Buzbee, the excess is intentional. He didn’t get to be one of the wealthiest, most famous, and most feared lawyers in the country through subtlety. Over the past quarter century, Buzbee, fifty-seven, has financially feasted to the tune of roughly $15 billion in settlements and verdicts against big corporations, oil giants, and, more recently, celebrities and athletes accused of sexual assault. He has sued NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson and music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and was recently sued himself by Jay-Z, though the case was later dismissed. The willingness to take on any adversary is part of his formula.

“It’s hard to be critical of a shark, because he doesn’t care,” he says, laughing through his nasally East Texas accent, “and he might kill you if he chooses to.”

This is Buzbee in a snap—boisterous and showy, charming and disarming, but also capable of disemboweling you in court and publicly embarrassing you to reporters.

When I stopped by on a recent Wednesday morning, Buzbee was sporting a Texas beach-chic look, with a faded bronze tan, a foam-green suit, longish hair slicked back and tucked behind his ears, and a dress shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He was also riding high after winning a $640 million verdict against one of the country’s biggest crane companies in a wrongful-death case—among the largest such jury awards in the history of Texas. Basically, just another day in the life of the legal world’s deadliest shark.

Whenever disaster has struck in the past twenty-five years, Buzbee has expected to get a call. But the Marine-turned-litigator’s profile ascended to new heights when he successfully represented more than ten thousand clients against BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, resulting in his firm collecting more than $500 million from the oil behemoth. “I made more than a hundred millionaires in the BP case—like, legit millionaires,” he says, adding that he collects about 40 percent of the settlement totals in all cases.

Diddy (left) and Jay-Z in 2020. Buzbee is representing more than a hundred women suing Diddy for alleged sexual abuse. Jay-Z sued Buzbee claiming extortion after Buzbee filed a lawsuit (later dropped) accusing Jay-Z of sexually assaulting a minor; a judge dimissed Jay-Z’s case against Buzbee on July 1.

His work against BP landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Another Times story dubbed him “a big, mean, ambitious, tenacious, fire-breathing Texas trial lawyer.” Since then, he’s lived up to the bombastic moniker by winning one high-profile case after another. Buzbee defended Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and energy secretary in Donald Trump’s first term, against his abuse-of-power indictment in criminal court and got the charges dismissed. He successfully defended Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial. He sued rapper Travis Scott on behalf of families of victims of the deadly Astroworld Festival crowd crush and represents the estate of one of the victims of the fatal Titan submersible implosion.

All the while, he’s utilized his superpower of self-promotion to help keep himself in the public eye—whether it’s buying and parking a fully operational $600,000 World War II–era Sherman tank on the streets of Houston’s bougie River Oaks neighborhood and fighting his homeowners’ association over it, throwing a $1 million Christmas-party fundraiser for Hurricane Harvey relief that was headlined by Snoop Dogg, or rolling out a wheelbarrow of horse manure as a prop at a news conference during his 2019 mayoral campaign to show what he thought about how the incumbent mayor was running the city of Houston.

Buzbee also hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his house in Houston in 2016—which he says came back to bite him in his bid to be mayor. “One of the reasons I didn’t do as well as I would have is because they just kept putting out that picture of me and Trump together. That was their whole campaign.”

But his appetite for the spotlight typically works in his favor. “Tony Buzbee is one of the absolute finest advocates for a wronged individual that you will find in this country,” says Perry. “Whether you’re the governor of the state of Texas, the president of the United States, or a very successful personal-injury trial lawyer, we’re all in show business in some form or fashion. Tony Buzbee loves the spotlight. Tony loves show business, and he is really good at it.”

Now the lawyer at the center of some of the most high-profile sexual-assault lawsuits in the country has become almost as big a character as the celebrities and athletes he’s litigating against. That means the scrutiny of the spotlight is, increasingly, focused on him. Fans of the people Buzbee is suing see him as a thirsty attention seeker, and he’s facing growing criticism from observers and legal colleagues who question his methods.

Buzbee appears unfazed by the TMZ of it all. But will his high-octane, confrontational style of litigating continue to prevail against music and NFL legends?

For anyone who uses the Internet, Buzbee is probably best known today as the lawyer most likely to represent victims of alleged sexual assault or misconduct by high-profile celebrities and athletes. Years after representing two dozen female massage therapists in a sexual-harassment settlement against NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson, Buzbee will represent more than a hundred accusers in civil litigation against Diddy. (Both Combs and Watson have denied the allegations against them.)

Buzbee represented two dozen massage therapists who accused NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson, pictured here at a Cleveland Browns practice in June, of sexual assault.

In early July, a jury in a federal criminal trial found Diddy guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution but acquitted him of more serious charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. The verdict was seen as a victory for Diddy, though he faces a potential sentence of ten years for each of the two counts on which he was convicted. And now he must contend with Buzbee and his hundred-plus lawsuits.

When Buzbee and I meet, it’s about a month after Buzbee filed a $50 million sexual assault and battery lawsuit on behalf of a Nevada woman against NFL Hall of Famer and media personality Shannon Sharpe. Sharpe, who temporarily stepped away from his duties at ESPN, denied the allegations and later resolved the lawsuit. (More on that below.)

At the same time, Buzbee himself was being sued by Jay-Z for extortion and defamation. The hip-hop titan has asserted that an anonymous woman, Buzbee, and another attorney knew that rape allegations against Jay-Z were false but proceeded with a lawsuit anyway. The “Jane Doe,” an Alabama woman, had accused Jay-Z in a civil suit of raping her alongside Combs when she was thirteen at a party in New York in 2000. She later acknowledged to NBC News that there were inconsistencies in her account but said that she stood by the allegations. In December, Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, issued a rare public statement denouncing the charges and Buzbee as an attorney and as a person and detailed how the attorney had sent a demand letter seeking confidential mediation.

“I have no idea how you have come to be such a deplorable human, Mr. Buzbee,” Jay-Z said in the statement, describing Buzbee as “an ambulance chaser in a cheap suit.”

Buzbee later withdrew from the case because he has not been admitted to practice law in the Southern District of New York, and in February the accuser dropped her lawsuit altogether. The case was dismissed without settlement. In his lawsuit against Buzbee and the woman, Jay-Z claimed that he suffered $190 million in business losses. (Alex Spiro, Jay-Z’s attorney, did not respond to interview requests.)

When asked about the lawsuit and the case involving his former client, it’s the one time Buzbee is not long-winded. “I never even had any thoughts about the guy!” he says about Jay-Z, noting that his former client’s case was vetted beforehand and calling the lawsuit against him “completely meritless.”

Adds Buzbee: “You can’t be sued for extortion for sending a request to sit down to have a mediation. That’s really all I can say.”

The court apparently sympathized with Buzbee’s point of view. On July 1, a judge in California dismissed the case. Buzbee immediately went on X to declare victory. “Yet another huge win!!” he wrote. He told TMZ that he would be seeking “a lot” of money for attorneys’ fees from Jay-Z’s lawyers for the cost and inconvenience of “defending against a meritless case.”

Like Jay-Z, Sharpe has fought back aggressively, claiming that Buzbee “targets Black men” for his own gain. “This is a shakedown,” Sharpe said in an April video statement posted on social media.

Buzbee on his private jet last year with his wife, Frances Moody Buzbee, and his brother-in-law, Robert Moody. The jet has a shark painted on the tail.

This wave of backlash publicity has allowed critics to resurface some of the more controversial parts of Buzbee’s past—specifically his former relationship with Samuel B. Kent, a now-disgraced federal district judge in Galveston, and how lawyers and critics say that the relationship between judge and attorney wildly benefited the early part of Buzbee’s career. (Both men have previously denied the allegations.)

Buzbee’s edgy style has also come under fire. Critics cite his MO of stuffing as much embarrassing information as possible into demand letters with the intention of scaring the target of the allegations into a settlement to avoid having the case go public. Buzbee has admitted that the criticism has merits while pointing the finger at forces bigger than himself, telling TMZ in the fall that “the system is the system.”

“I really don’t want to be criticizing Tony one way or another, but I don’t agree with his business model, and I don’t agree with the tremendous amount of self-promotion that accompanies his lawsuits,” says Rusty Hardin, another high-profile Houston trial lawyer who has opposed Buzbee in the civil litigation for Watson and the impeachment trial for Paxton. “You make it impossible for the innocent to ever recover, and you make it extremely difficult for people to defend themselves. That’s why they pay him—and that’s not how it’s supposed to be.”

So how did a renowned trial lawyer who has long thrived on confrontation and spectacle, and who is wealthier and more famous than he’s ever been before, find himself as one of the main characters in some of the most significant civil litigation involving celebrities, athletes, and alleged sex crimes?

The simple answer: Because he believes in their cases. The other answer: Because nothing or no one was going to get in the way of a trial lawyer once described as “a flamethrower attached to a bulldozer.”

“You don’t make friends in this business,” he says. “You don’t do it because you want to be Mr. Popular. If you do it to be Mr. Popular, you’re not gonna do it very well.”

If Rick Perry was going to have his criminal charges dropped, Buzbee knew his friend had to have the mug shot of all mug shots. The pair of Texas A&M alums had gotten to know each other when Buzbee cold-called Perry in 2011 to say, “You need some debate help,” after the governor’s “oops” moment during a Republican presidential debate, in which Perry blanked and couldn’t remember the third of three federal agencies he said he’d said eliminate if he were to become president.

So when Perry was indicted on an abuse-of-power charge linked to a veto threat against the Travis County, Texas, district attorney’s office, he turned to Buzbee, his friend, to lead the case. It was more than a little ironic considering Perry had previously villainized personal-injury lawyers such as Buzbee for going after companies and governmental entities. “He tried to put me out of business for fourteen years as governor,” says Buzbee, cackling at the memory.

But all that mattered now was getting that first public image right to set the stage for the eventual dismissal of Perry’s charges. “I knew very well that the mug shot was super important, so we made sure the suit was right, the hair was right, the makeup was right, the tie was right—and the mug shot was fucking beautiful,” Buzbee says of Perry, who was his best man when the lawyer remarried.

Buzbee, who still has a framed photo of Perry’s mug shot on display in the conference room of his office, says it one more time to savor the flavor: “It was a beautiful mug shot. I mean, he’s a good-looking man. And I think Trump took some pointers from that. I really do.”

On the phone from his local grocery, where he’s shopping for tortillas, Perry says he remains grateful to Buzbee for what he did to get the indictment dropped nearly a decade ago: “I’m really glad that I had him, just as I’m sure that the people who have been abused by Diddy are very thankful that they have him.”

Also among Buzbee’s admirers is Milena Loree, the widow of David Loree, a fifty-six-year-old pipe fitter who was killed on the job in 2021 when a massive AC unit tipped off a crane from ten feet above and crushed him. TNT Crane & Rigging, one of the nation’s largest crane companies, initially offered about $7 million to settle the case. But Buzbee took the civil suit to trial, and the jury found the crane company responsible, awarding a massive verdict of $640 million in damages. “My protector was taken away, and look how God put Tony Buzbee in my path to take care of me,” Milena, sixty-one, tells me. “And he sure has.”

When his career first started to take off, around the time of the BP lawsuits, Buzbee says that sexual-assault cases weren’t a top priority. “I always said, ‘Nah,’ not because I didn’t care but because those just are hard cases,” he says. “As far as bang for your buck, as far as keeping a business going, they bog you down. They take a long time, and there’s not a lot of money involved.”

That changed with Watson, who was the starter for the Houston Texans and one of the NFL’s top young quarterbacks in 2021 when women began to come forward. Shortly after Buzbee first met with massage therapist Ashley Solis and heard her allegation that Watson had sexually assaulted her, he sent a letter to Watson’s team, Buzbee says. Watson’s management was dismissive of him and the letter, he says, and “that kind of pissed me off.” Eventually, two dozen female massage therapists came forward to accuse Watson of inappropriate behavior. Watson has denied the allegations and maintains his innocence.

Buzbee, in light-blue sport coat, hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his house in Houston in 2016. He and his son Anthony Jr. (left) gifted Trump a cowboy hat.

Knowing there would be backlash when the news went public that the local sports hero was being accused of sexual misconduct, Buzbee texted his daughter a hypothetical situation, without naming names, so he could get an opinion of, as he says, “a liberal woman” at NYU about whether he should take on such a case. She texted back: Dad, isn’t this the reason you went to law school?

“She shamed me, basically,” he says. “But that’s how it all started.”

To date, settlements have been reached in all but one of the twenty-four cases involving Watson. Solis declined to comment. Watson, through his agent, also declined to comment. Hardin, who represented Watson but declined to talk about his case on the record, pointed out a pattern that Buzbee has repeated since the Watson case.

“What he’s done is—and Jay-Z said this—he’ll pick people who have a lot to lose in the world of public opinion,” Hardin tells me before launching into a rant and criticizing the media’s coverage of Buzbee. “I don’t have any faith any of you are going to tell the story the way it really is, and I really don’t want to spend my time being candid about Tony or seeing an article that makes him sound like the fucking second coming.”

Since taking on Watson, Buzbee has continued leaning into sexual-assault cases. He recently helped oversee a 1-800 hotline that collected hundreds of sexual-assault allegations against Combs that were deemed worthy of review. The hotline asked callers the same question: Were you or your loved one sexually abused by Sean “Love” Combs, known as Diddy, Puff Daddy, and P. Diddy? Combs’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment but have previously noted that Buzbee was nothing more than a “1-800 attorney.”

Buzbee doesn’t hesitate to explain what has unfolded with the case of Sharpe, the ESPN host and popular podcaster. He says that the mediation went on for about six weeks and the Nevada woman suing Sharpe was offered $10 million to drop the case. The day after Sharpe released his video statement saying that the relationship was 100 percent consensual and said Buzbee is targeting Black men, Buzbee sent TMZ an audio recording of what appears to be Sharpe threatening to choke the woman in public. At that point, the story went nuclear.

“I didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I want to sue Shannon Sharpe.’ He has no relevance in my life. I actually think he’s very entertaining when he yells and screams and talks about sports that he’s not involved in,” he tells me. “But if I think it’s a legitimate case, then I pursue it. And I think this is worth my time.”

From across the desk, Buzbee appears irked when I bring up Sharpe’s assertion that the lawyer has been targeting Black men in these recent high-profile lawsuits. This is where the smartass in him comes out: “I guess a bunch of old white men could say I’m targeting them, and a bunch of multinational corporations could say I’m targeting them as well,” he says. “I guess you could say I was targeting BP.”

He gives it a quick think. “Well, I probably was targeting BP.”

At the time, Sharpe’s legal team disputed Buzbee’s version of the facts and challenged his tactics, providing this statement to Esquire: “While others appear intent on trying this case in the media, we will remain focused on the facts and the law. Shannon Sharpe has great faith in the justice system and looks forward to addressing these matters in the proper legal forum.”

On July 18, however, Buzbee announced that the two sides had reached a mutually agreed upon resolution to the suit. “All matters have now been addressed satisfactorily, and the matter is closed,” Buzbee wrote on X. “The lawsuit will thus be dismissed with prejudice.”

Neither side released details.

After the dismissal, Sharpe's lead attorney, Michael Marino, gave this statement about the resolution of the lawsuit against his client: “Like many highly successful individuals, Tony Buzbee is a complex and formidable figure. In the matter involving Shannon Sharpe, although we stood on opposite sides of the legal aisle, our shared experience as former officers in the United States Marine Corps fostered a mutual respect that guided our discussions. That brotherhood enabled us to speak candidly and constructively, ultimately allowing us to reach a resolution that served the interests of all parties involved.”

As the profile of his cases has increased, so has the coverage and criticism of Buzbee, which he can’t help but brag about—“I obviously sell a lot of newspapers, but there’s a flip side to that and there’s a lot of bad to that.” The attention has admittedly taken a toll on Buzbee and his wife, Frances Moody Buzbee, of the prominent billionaire Moody family of Galveston.

“I don’t love conflict,” says Frances, a thirty-two-year-old philanthropist. “I worry about his safety because there’s a lot of people who are obsessed with him and love him, and also people who don’t love him. But Tony is a grown man, and I have to remember that he’s a Marine.”

Joanne King Herring, the American socialite and diplomat who collaborated with Representative Charlie Wilson to lobby the U.S. to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan (and inspired the events of Charlie Wilson’s War), was initially surprised that Frances Moody would marry Tony, who is twenty-five years older than his wife. And Herring didn’t know what to think of Buzbee when she first met him. (“Tony, you might say, is a wild boar in court.”) But she has become close friends with Buzbee, and marvels at the drive that it took for him to reach the success he has in life.

“He has to win,” Herring tells me. “Against all odds, he was a winner.”

At ten years old, Buzbee already had a lot of experience at knowing when his father was drunk. And he knew it that day at the bar when his old man wasn’t going to take shit from another inebriated customer. Even if that guy was literally half his size.

Bobby Glenn Buzbee was as perpetually angry as he was larger-than-life to his son growing up. A butcher at a local grocery who raised his family in Atlanta, Texas, a town of about five thousand near the Arkansas border, Bobby Glenn was well-known in the community as a guy you didn’t want to mess with. He liked to proudly declare, “I would fight at the drop of the hat—and I’ll drop the hat.”

Stories are casually shared about how Bobby Glenn got shot in the face and lost an eye. Or how, in a drunken stupor, he chased after the neighbor in the middle of the night in his tighty-whities because the neighbor’s son had dumped Buzbee’s stuff out the window of the school bus. Or how Bobby Glenn once got so liquored up that he paid to wrestle a muzzled bear at a bar in Texarkana.

On Saturday afternoons, after father and son picked up beer cans on the dirt roads so that Bobby Glenn could sell the aluminum, Buzbee, still in elementary school, would accompany his father to the same bar every weekend and quietly sit in the corner as he played pool for hours.

As Buzbee tells the story, one day there was a man at the bar with dwarfism who had obviously been drinking heavily. For some reason, the man decided to provoke Bobby Glenn. He started by staring at him. Then he began hitting the elder Buzbee’s pool stick just as he was trying to shoot. Bobby Glenn held his temper. But the guy wasn’t done. The breaking point, says Buzbee, came when the man kicked Bobby Glenn in the shin. The elder Buzbee snapped.

“He just hit that dwarf so hard and knocked him into the corner, and the guy just crumbled,” Buzbee says, estimating the guy went about ten feet. “I don’t know why that made such an impression on me. That was the last time I saw that guy. But that was how my childhood was.”

He adds of his dad, “You were always trying to please him, always trying to measure up— but my father is a very angry man.” (Bobby Glenn, now eighty-four, did not return multiple interview requests.)

Buzbee was one of four kids raised by Bobby Glenn and Buzbee’s mother, Patti, who worked in a school cafeteria and drove a school bus that she parked in the front yard. After graduating from Texas A&M, Buzbee joined the Marines and served tours in the Persian Gulf and Somalia, where he was a reconnaissance officer. As the weapons platoon commander for the 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, Buzbee delivered a message early to his squad while training in Coronado, California: I’m the best at everything, so don’t challenge me or get in trouble, because I will whoop your ass.

Before becoming an attorney, Buzbee was a Marine. He left the service as a captain to attend law school and set himself a big goal: make a lot of money.

“You could not challenge Tony to do shit because he would take it personally and he would better himself not to come in second place,” says retired Marine First Sergeant Chris Calhoun, who had Buzbee as a platoon commander. “He’s a cocky son of a bitch, but he will not back down. . . . I thought he was going to be a damn general. The only thing that stopped him from staying in the Marines was he didn’t get paid enough.”

Buzbee left the Marines as a captain and soon enrolled in law school at the University of Houston. He had two goals. The first was he wanted to make a lot of money. More money than he could ever imagine. The second was he never wanted to be a nameless and faceless corporate lawyer. You were going to know his name.

Yes, it does take three elevators to get to Buzbee's office on the seventy-fifth floor of the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston. A question about his beginnings makes him look out the window at the green skyscraper nearby housing the law firm where he started, before he left to open his own shop in a strip mall: “I always laugh at them and tell them, ‘I look down on you boys now.’ ”

Buzbee is bold, but that has occasionally backfired in memorable ways. He’s lost three bids for public office, including in a runoff for Houston mayor in 2019 and in a city-council race in 2023. “Maybe I should have thought through that a little bit more,” he says of his mayoral run, offering a rare regret. A woman once destroyed an estimated $300,000 worth of art, including two Warhols, at a party at his home, and a burglary at the same home resulted in an estimated $21 million worth of stolen goods. He quit drinking a few years ago after he was arrested on a DWI charge that was eventually dismissed.

Then there’s the time he wanted to take his son with him to hand out $30,000 from his Rolls-Royce to the homeless. Frances warned him that maybe there was another way to give out money to those in need, but he did it anyway. Well, word got out and some of the people started attacking the car and grabbing money from inside the vehicle, with Buzbee and his son inside.

“Everything he does is in a grand way, and handing out $30,000 in cash to people who are homeless in the Rolls is a very grand thing to do,” Frances tells me. “I thought there was safer and better ways to do it, but it makes for a very Tony Buzbee story.”

Back at his office, the shark is swimming and waiting to eat again. Buzbee insists he’s not worried about what’s unfolding sixteen hundred miles away in a Manhattan courtroom in the criminal trial for Combs. Buzbee is pleased with how the prosecution is working the case, even though “they’re not going to do it the way I would do it.”

Then, toward the end of our time together, he repeats a line from Patton that he thinks about a lot: Twenty years from now, when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, “What did you do in the great World War II?” you won’t have to cough and say, “Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

Buzbee thinks of these celebrity cases as part of his own great war, and he’s far from Louisiana and sure isn’t shoveling shit. He has the big-ass mansion on maybe the best street in Houston, the seven-thousand-acre ranch, the cars, the jet, generational wealth, the wife, the ex-wife, the kids, and more sharks than he knows what to do with. The quest for material wealth long ago ceased to provide his motivation.

“I don’t need any more money, and there’s not any stuff that I need,” he tells me.

So I ask him about the one obvious thing he still craves. “But don’t you need to win?”

“Of course,” he says with a mischievous smile.

The shark never stops searching for blood in the water.