Dame Dash is giving his own take on one of hip-hop’s most talked-about moments, claiming Jay-Z’s 1999 stabbing of music exec Lance “Un” Rivera wasn’t just about bootlegging, but had a lot to do with Charli Baltimore.
Speaking with The Art of Dialogue, Dame said the clash at a New York nightclub, right before the release of Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, wasn’t mainly about Rivera leaking the album, despite what was reported back then. While that may have been a factor, he insisted the bigger issue was a personal one involving Baltimore, who once dated The Notorious B.I.G.
According to Dame, Rivera confronted him, bringing up “his shit with Charli Baltimore” while she was involved with both him and Jay. Dame said Jay later told him Rivera was bootlegging the album, but the mogul still believed it was more about Baltimore—especially since Rivera allegedly dropped to his knees in the club and said, “Jay, I would never betray you.”
“But to me I was like damn, n***a got on his knees. You don’t have to do nothing,” Dame recalled. “That shit was over a girl… And that wasn’t gangster to me either. That was all over a girl. And you know what was fucked up about it? Think about how life is. These n***as end up getting into this over Biggie’s girl. Both of his best friends. That was crazy. But again, no disrespect, that was crazy.”
He went on to slam the situation as a betrayal of brotherhood: “If any of my friends fuck my wife or with one of my chicks when I’m not here, that’s fucked up. I don’t do that. That’s not real n**a shit to me. You don’t fuck your man’s girl after he dies. That’s crazy to me. That’s insanity to me. You know the mob kills n***as for fucking with each other’s wives. But your brothers? Both of them? That’s why you don’t trust n**as.”*
Dash isn’t the first to make this claim. Cam’ron has long said the stabbing was tied to Charli Baltimore, repeating it during a mid-2000s press conference and even working it into his Jay-Z diss track “You Gotta Love It.”
In 2001, Jay-Z pled guilty to third-degree assault for the stabbing of Lance “Un” Rivera and was sentenced to three years’ probation. Charli Baltimore, who had once been linked to both Biggie and Jay, continued to carve out her own path in hip-hop afterward.
Rivera later revisited the incident in a 2023 sit-down with VladTV, insisting Jay wasn’t the one who actually stabbed him. “Jay-Z was not the guy that actually stabbed me that night,” Rivera said. “I don’t know where people got Jay-Z stabbed me from because if anybody knows Jay-Z, Jay-Z’s a nice guy. He’s an artist. He’s a poet. He’s gifted and it’s never been his history […] If Jay-Z had stabbed me, y’all wouldn’t have got The Black Album because through my whole history, I’m an eye-for-an-eye type of guy.”
Although Hov has never outright admitted to stabbing Rivera, he’s nodded to the incident over the years. He addressed it in his 2010 memoir Decoded and again on his 2005 track “Dear Summer,” spitting: “N**as back up, they know I’m not no fronter/I don’t talk shit, I just flip it Un’ ya/Sorry Lance, I’m just trying to advance my quotes/I ain’t making you the butt of my jokes.”*
