Gay Rapper Exposed as Fraud

Gay rapper Caushun has been exposed as a fraud after his manager, Ivan Matias, admitted to writing and performing all of Caushun's rhymes. In an interview with Allhiphop.com, Matias reveals that Caushun, who's real name is Jason Herndon, is really a hairdresser with no musical skills.

A few years ago, Caushun was a moderately popular figure in the New York hip-hop scene. Caushun was created when, as a joke, Matias called a hip-hop station and pretended to be a flamboyantly gay rapper. Matias, a straight man, recorded demos and passed them to radio stations as the work of Caushun. The lie snowballed, and Matias enlisted Jason Herndon to portray the public face of Caushun.

"I kept telling him play your position, but then he got locked up for identity theft," explains Ivan Matias.

Caushun, who, at one point, was given a GLAAD award, attracted high-profile fans like clothing designer Kimora Lee Simmons, wife of hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons. Hernon was Kimora Simmons's hairdresser, and he convinced her he was also Caushun, the talented gay rapper. Caushun was almost signed to Kimora's record label, but after Herndon was arrested for identity theft, the lie started to unravel.

"The whole time he was Caushun, he was still boosting. When he got arrested, Kimora bailed him out and picked him up in a limousine from in front of the courthouse. He started to play us against each other. Kimora even moved him into an apartment Uptown. She basically gave him an advance in the form of an apartment. She wanted to give him $50,000 and make her driver/assistant the A&R person. I was trying to be edged out, but I knew that couldn’t happen because I wrote everything and created the name. She didn’t even know she could edge me out: She tried to sell the publishing not realizing that the publishing rights already belonged to me," Matias told Allhiphop.com.

AllHipHop.com asked Matias if he though Caushun's acceptance did anything good for Hip-Hop.

"I don’t think he was mocking Hip-Hop. He was just a fraud with it. I think a part of this project was good because it showed that Hip-Hop is not as homophobic as it projects. Out of everyone else who could have popularized something as trivial as the color pink, it took a masculine culture like Hip-Hop to popularize that on men. This showed a good side of Hip-Hop that’s its open and diverse," Matias replied.