Lauren London STUNS the Entire Industry With This Bombshell Revelation! | HO!!

The hinged sentence is what makes the footage hit like a wave years later: the happiest clips become evidence when time turns them into before-and-after.

“What was Cross’s first word?” Lauren asked, already confident.

“Bye-bye,” Nip said.

“No,” Lauren replied, delighted to catch him. “Hustle. Da.”

“Oh,” Nip laughed, like he could accept losing the point because he’d already won the bigger thing—being there to hear it.

And then, in the way modern life whiplashes, the breaking news voice cut through the warmth: overnight, Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hustle shot and killed outside his own clothing store in Los Angeles, tributes pouring in from NBA stars and political leaders praising his focus on stopping violence and helping kids. What happens when a gang member from Crenshaw becomes the only person who could unite rival gangs, tech billionaires, and the entire city of L.A.? And what was the mysterious documentary about a controversial healer that some believed cost Nip his life?

The story always arrives in two layers—what everyone saw and what only a few people understood.

Born Ermias Joseph Asghedom on August 15, 1985 in South Central Los Angeles, Nipsey entered a world where survival wasn’t guaranteed. He said it plainly in interviews: South Central in the ’90s meant gang culture, drug culture, and police brutality that was “really rampant” when he grew up. His mother, Angelique Smith, was African-American. His father, Dawit Asghedom, had fled Eritrea in the 1970s, escaping a brutal war that shaped how his son saw the world.

“None of my family members was from Rolling 60,” Nip explained once. “My dad came from Africa. So his whole side of my family is in Africa.”

But the part most people didn’t know, or didn’t want to sit with, was that by fourteen he wasn’t just hanging on street corners—he was already a member of the Rollin 60s Neighborhood Crips in the Crenshaw district. He explained it the way people explain geography: an area, a history, a gravity. Not glamor. Not cosplay. A system of streets and names and reputations that can raise you or bury you.

The business mind people later called “genius” showed up early, too. Long before the tech partnerships and real estate plays, he was watching how money moved, how attention moved, how stories got told and who got paid for telling them. At seventeen in 2002, he joined Buttervision, a creative multimedia collective, and that’s where his name took shape—Nipsey, a play on comedian Nipsey Russell, handed to him because of relentless work ethic. Hustle wasn’t just branding. It was a description.

The hinged sentence that explains why his life read like a blueprint is simple: when you grow up where the rules are unforgiving, you either learn the system or you become its proof.

In 2004, when he was nineteen, his father did something that altered him in a way no contract ever could. He took Nip and his brother, Samuel—Black Sam—on a three-month trip to Eritrea. No distractions. No rims. No daily weed. No loop of the same blocks and the same pressure. Nip admitted he was sick the first two weeks—culture shock, depression, the feeling of being dropped into a place he didn’t know how to move inside. Then something clicked. He let go of his comfort zone.

What struck him most wasn’t a speech or a monument. It was a schedule. In Eritrea, he said, everything was built around food and family. From noon to three, the city shut down. Men went home. School let out. Everybody ate lunch together every single day.

He came back to Los Angeles and tried to bring that home, too—sitting around the table, eating, joking, connecting, realizing he had a genuine relationship with his grandmother now that life wasn’t only about running.

But vision doesn’t protect you from reality. Back in L.A., he still had to survive.

In December 2005, at twenty, he independently released his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Volume 1. It created enough buzz to get him signed to Cinematic Music Group and Epic Records, and this is where the story takes its first dark turn—not because of scandal, but because it showed how precarious the path was.

Years later he revealed he signed his deal while on the run from police. He was hiding at his homie Tiny Cobby’s house. Someone he’d been involved with was in jail for the crime, and Nip knew police were looking for him. There wasn’t a warrant out yet; they didn’t want to alert him.

“I was on the run when I had a case pending,” he said. “I hid out… for three months.”

“They signed you?” an interviewer asked, half-amused, half-stunned. “They didn’t know you had a warrant?”

Nip laughed because sometimes you laugh when the truth is too wild to say straight. He explained he signed to get the check and fight the case.

“By the grace of God, I got out of that situation,” he said. “We went to Jamaica to celebrate. We came back and the police was at my store waiting for me the next day and took me to jail.”

He fought his case for two months in county, got out, went to New York, and started recording what became bullets…—the words in the interview rough and raw, the kind of sentence that still carries the smell of metal and concrete.

The hinged sentence that reframes his early “break” is this: sometimes the first contract isn’t a launch—it’s a lifeline you grab while the ground is moving under you.

Nothing, though, compared to what Black Sam went through during those years. Nip told the story like a parable people repeat because it sounds like a movie until you realize it’s just how desperate planning looks in real life. His brother buried **$200,000** in the backyard. Just buried it and started from zero again, grinding back up. When they went back to dig it up, **$107,000** of it was ruined—mildew, gone.

Nip remembered the scene vividly: his mom, his little sister—about ten—everybody in the living room with blow dryers trying to salvage stacks of wet money. The whole house smelling like damp paper and panic. His brother having a breakdown because he’d tried to protect the future and the future rotted anyway.

He learned the hard way: you can’t bury cash and expect the world to keep it safe.

In 2010, Epic Records had financial issues and the label went through a regime change. Nip didn’t renew his contract. He walked away from the major-label system and never looked back. He broke it down with clarity that sounded like somebody who’d already done the math.

“It was a regime change,” he explained. The people who believed in him left, a new cast came in, and in those transitions, signed talent becomes someone else’s problem. He told the general manager, “Bro, I know how to get it out the trunk.” Give it another year, and if the album can’t drop, let him go back independent. He wasn’t begging for a seat. He was asking them not to block the road.

XXL named him to their 2010 Freshman class as most determined, but by then he’d already learned the most crucial lesson of his career: he didn’t need the industry’s permission.

He founded All Money In Records. On December 21, 2010, he released The Marathon. A year later came The Marathon Continues with YG and Dom Kennedy. And then, in 2013, he made the move that forced everyone to pay attention.

He announced he was releasing a mixtape called Crenshaw and would sell **1,000** physical copies for **$100** each.

People thought he was crazy. Elliot Wilson told him Rap Radar wouldn’t post a link unless Nip wrote something explaining why he was charging $100.

“I ain’t going to do that,” Nip said—then corrected himself in real time. “But if you write something about why you charging 100 for clarity, I’ll post that.” He typed up a text explanation and sent it. Rap Radar posted it.

Then something happened that made the idea feel inevitable in hindsight: Jay-Z bought a hundred copies.

“That’s ten bands,” Nip laughed in disbelief when the call came in. “Rock Nation sent ten bands.”

A hundred copies. Ten thousand dollars. Not because Jay needed a mixtape. Because he understood the message in the move.

And there was an industry detail that almost nobody talked about: Jay-Z’s earlier negotiation over the “Hard Knock Life” sample included a deal that opened the door for other hip-hop artists after him. So when Nip wanted to touch that record years later, the path was already cleared through Jay. That kind of forward thinking—setting it up so others could benefit—was exactly the kind of business spirit that influenced Nip. Not just money, but infrastructure.

Nip sold all **1,000** copies in less than 24 hours.

“A thousand the first day,” he said, grinning. “A hundred racks.”

He made **$100,000** off a free mixtape. Then they did pop-up shops in every city on tour—Brooklyn, Chicago, everywhere. People pulled out stacks, buying ten, twenty-five copies at a time. It wasn’t just commerce. It felt like a salute, a ritual of buy-in.

The hinged sentence that defines the Crenshaw move is the one the industry hates admitting: scarcity isn’t just marketing—it’s a boundary that forces respect.

Success brought criticism, because it always does. In 2013, Complex magazine put Nip on their “underachievers” list three weeks before Crenshaw dropped. After it dropped, they wanted an interview. Nip emailed back: “Suck my—” and added, “That’s $10,000 for an interview.” He was furious, not only for ego, but for what the label “underachiever” implied in the environment he came from.

Mark Ecko, who owned Complex at the time, ended up meeting Nip. They talked, became friends. Mark told him, “Bro, the magazine’s got their own individual opinion.” Nip countered with something that was more than PR.

“You got to vet your writers,” he told Mark. “Before they speak on behalf of your brand.” He pointed out the danger in making jokes about people’s lives from a safe distance.

Then Nip got on the phone with Complex and didn’t hold back.

“Y’all got your whole metrics wrong,” he said. “Where I come from, I’m not on drugs. I ain’t dead. I’m not doing a hundred years. I’m an overachiever. Don’t judge me on rap standards. Don’t put me on rapper time. You got to judge me as a man.”

He made it even more direct: if you cover a culture and you don’t love it, you’re not native to it, you don’t understand its values, you don’t have a right to speak on it with disrespect. He wasn’t threatening them, he insisted—he was asking for reality. If you wouldn’t say it to my face, don’t say it behind a brand on the 32nd floor.

“Either I can quietly tell you fact for fact how you got your story wrong,” he said, “or I can tell you you was a— and slap you. But let’s find a middle ground.”

It was a line drawn not in ink, but in lived consequence. He was telling them: your words can touch my business, my safety, my neighborhood, and you don’t get to pretend it’s only entertainment.

By then the industry was watching, and in 2013 another storyline began—one the public loved because it looked like relief: Nip started dating actress Lauren London.

When asked how they met, Nip smiled like the answer still surprised him.

“She reached out through a mutual friend,” he said, “when I dropped the Crenshaw project.”

What started as business turned into something deeper. Lauren had a son, Cameron, born September 9, 2009. Nip had a daughter, Emani, with Tanisha Foster. They weren’t building a fantasy. They were blending real life.

On August 31, 2016, Lauren gave birth to their son, Cross Ermias Asghedom. In the GQ couples quiz—the clip the world keeps replaying—Lauren teased him, corrected him, laughed at him, and he looked at her like she was the only room he wanted to be in.

“What is my favorite movie of all time?” Nip asked her.

“You got like three or four,” she said. “Of all time though… the one I’m always like, one day if the win—”

He lit up. “That’s right,” he said when she landed it.

Then she asked his favorite color. He guessed red. She laughed: “Purple.”

“Purple for royalty,” she said.

Nip tried to claim the point anyway. “So I got that right too,” he said, half-joking, half-serious, like it mattered because it was her.

When Lauren asked who her celebrity crush was, Nip didn’t hesitate.

“You don’t tell me stuff like that,” he said. “I don’t have a celebrity crush. I’m with my celebrity crush.”

It was spontaneous and corny and honest, and that’s why it stuck.

The hinged sentence that makes their footage feel almost sacred is simple: in a life built on strategy, love is the only thing you can’t fake without losing it.

They never legally married. Photos surfaced of them at a club wearing what looked like wedding rings, and people assumed they tied the knot. Nip clarified it was her birthday. He called her “wife” in terms of caliber, but they weren’t married on paper.

“The caliber woman Lauren is, that’s a wife off top,” he said. “Period. But we didn’t get married.”

That decision would later complicate things after his death, as family structures and legal definitions collided. In March 2025, after years of legal battles, Tanisha Foster was awarded joint physical and legal custody of Emani. Under the settlement, Emani lives with Tanisha for **60%** of the time and with Nip’s sister Samantha for **40%**. The battle had been contentious, Nip’s family initially fighting to maintain full custody, but the courts ultimately decided Emani deserved a relationship with her mother.

While building his family, Nip was building something bigger—an empire rooted in Crenshaw. After Crenshaw, he released Mailbox Money on New Year’s Eve 2014, again selling **1,000** hard copies for **$100** each. His pricing strategy wasn’t random.

“My products, my merchandise, my apparel line—$400,” he said. “We got hoodies that’s $100. It’s custom. We don’t want everybody having them. It’s just for the people that’s fully engaged.” He even described a Marathon book release: $500, limited to a thousand copies. People thought he was wild. Nip understood something most artists ignored: scarcity creates value. He wasn’t trying to be Walmart. He was trying to be Hermès.

On June 17, 2017, he opened the Marathon Clothing store at the intersection of Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard with partners including Steve Carless, Karen Civil, and Black Sam. It wasn’t just a storefront—it was designed as a “smart store” bridging culture and tech, giving customers access to exclusive music and content through an app. The year before his death, he bought the entire shopping center where Marathon Clothing sat, partnering with real estate investor David Gross. Ownership. Legacy. The marathon.

“The core of our brand is called the marathon,” Nip said. “The idea behind that is just being committed to the long-term process.”

On February 16, 2018, after years of delays, he released his debut studio album Victory Lap. It debuted at number four on the Billboard 200, selling **53,000** album-equivalent units in its first week. Songs like “Double Up,” “Last Time That I Checc’d,” and “Dedication” featuring Kendrick Lamar entered the Hot 100. Victory Lap was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2019 Grammys. It lost to Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, but Nip didn’t talk like a man who felt defeated. He talked like a man who’d finally placed a flag on the hill he’d been climbing.

Beyond music, he co-founded Vector 90, a co-working space and STEM education center in Crenshaw designed to connect underrepresented youth with opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math. He talked about cryptocurrency as an equalizer, invested in a company called Followcoin, believed the engineers and programmers had built something that could checkmate corrupt banking systems.

And then there was the other project—one that fueled years of whispers.

On The Breakfast Club, Nip said he was working on a documentary about the 1985 trial involving Dr. Sebi, a Honduran herbalist who claimed to cure AIDS and other diseases through a plant-based alkaline approach. The medical establishment called him a fraud. But Nip was drawn to the story.

“Somebody went to trial and proved in court that they cured HIV,” he said. “That’s a great story. That story should be told.”

He described how he got interested: Lauren put him on. He felt a frequency in what Dr. Sebi said. He tried it for himself—not because he had a disease, he explained, but because touring had him exhausted, eating wrong, living wrong. He felt better. He read more. He started telling people about it.

When asked about the conspiracy chatter around holistic doctors, Nip didn’t play naïve about money. “These people’s checks is billions,” he said, pointing out the scale of pharmaceutical interests.

Later, Dr. Sebi’s daughter and grandson addressed the conspiracy theories directly, saying Nip did not die over making the documentary and that people were quick to jump to opinions instead of facts. They said the shooter was found quickly and speculation should have ended there.

But the timing still felt eerie to people because Dr. Sebi himself had died in 2016 under circumstances that raised questions in the public mind—arrested in Honduras, held without bail, dying in police custody with pneumonia listed as the cause while family claimed he was healthy when arrested. Whether you believe the theories or not, the internet doesn’t let eerie timing go without building a story around it.

Meanwhile, there was another fact that mattered more than theories: in March 2019, Nip had reached out to the LAPD to arrange a meeting with them and Rock Nation to discuss violence prevention in South L.A. The meeting was scheduled for April 1, 2019.

He never made it.

On March 31, 2019, at **3:18 p.m.**, Nip was attacked in the parking lot of Marathon Clothing and suffered fatal injuries. Two other people were hurt. All three were transported to a hospital, where Nip was pronounced dead at **3:55 p.m.** He was **33** years old.

Police identified Eric R. Holder Jr., then **29**, as the suspect. Testimony later revealed the confrontation involved an argument over a rumor that Holder had cooperated with law enforcement—being labeled a “snitch” in that culture carries consequences that don’t need explanation to anyone who grew up near them.

On July 6, 2022, Holder was found guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted voluntary manslaughter. On February 22, 2023, he was sentenced to **60 years to life** in prison.

The hinged sentence, the one that makes the end feel like a theft from the future, is this: you can build for the long term and still be taken in an instant.

The world mourned. Former President Barack Obama wrote that where most folks looked at Crenshaw and saw only gangs and despair, Nip saw potential. The memorial service was held April 11, 2019 at Staples Center. The **25.5-mile** funeral procession wound through South Central and Watts. The Nation of Islam provided security.

Then something unprecedented happened: gang leaders from across Los Angeles—Crips and Bloods—came together. They marched together at memorials. Summits happened between L.A. and Compton. Agreements were announced to stay out of each other’s territory and stop shooting. The peacemaking involved hundreds of gangs, echoing the truces of 1992. In death, Nip unified people in ways he couldn’t fully accomplish in life.

The intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw was renamed Ermias “Nipsey Hustle” Asghedom Square. More than fifty murals went up across Los Angeles within months. Local “Marathon Book Club” chapters formed, inspired by books Nip mentioned in interviews.

On August 15, 2022—what would have been his 37th birthday—he was posthumously honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Lauren spoke at the ceremony, voice breaking, but steady in the way you get when you’ve cried privately enough times that public tears become controlled.

After his death, Victory Lap surged to number two on the Billboard 200. “Racks in the Middle” peaked at 26. At the 2020 Grammys, “Racks in the Middle” won Best Rap Performance, and “Higher” won Best Rap/Sung Performance. Puma released the Marathon clothing collection in September 2019 with 100% of net proceeds going to the Neighborhood Nip Foundation. As of 2025, estimates placed Nip’s net worth around **$9 million**, built through catalog value, Marathon Clothing, real estate, business ventures, and intellectual property.

A Netflix documentary about Nip’s life is in development, co-produced and directed by Ava DuVernay. Black Sam was appointed permanent administrator of his estate. Lauren continues to raise Cross—now nine—and Cameron—now sixteen—while keeping Nip’s spirit alive through tributes, photos, quotes, and messages that aren’t morbid so much as determined.

And this is where people say Lauren “stunned the industry,” because the revelation wasn’t a secret affair or a hidden recording or a scorched-earth interview. It was something quieter that the industry rarely respects: she refused to turn him into a product she could cash out with shock, and instead turned herself into a steward.

When she posts, she doesn’t post like a widow selling a story. She posts like a mother building a bridge for a child who will have to know his father through fragments—through the quiz where purple mattered, through the way Nip smiled when he lost a point, through the way he said “I’m with my celebrity crush” like it was the simplest truth in the world.

The little U.S. flag magnet from that old clip is the kind of detail that returns in your mind when you see how America handles icons: it pins ordinary life to a cold metal surface and then acts shocked when it falls. In the beginning, it was just a prop in the background of a home. Later, it became a reminder that even legends have refrigerators, children’s questions, playlists, and inside jokes. And now, it sits in the memory like a symbol of what Lauren has been doing in public without begging applause: keeping the everyday parts intact so the myth doesn’t erase the man.

The final hinged sentence is the one Lauren seems to live by every time she speaks his name without letting the world own it: legacy isn’t what you announce—it’s what you protect when everyone is watching.