One September afternoon, Flau’jae Johnson mounted two steps onto a small wooden stage. She wore an off-white hoodie, a backward beige hat and pinstripe shorts.
Johnson is not some ordinary 19-year-old freshman on the LSU women’s basketball team. She’s also a rap artist, signed to a major record label. Her two talents have taken her to large stages, both in the worlds of college basketball and entertainment, on shows like “America’s Got Talent.”
But this stage was different. It sat at the front of a dimly lit chapel, before a few rows of wooden pews. Brown walls adorned with religious imagery flanked each side. Her audience was only a few dozen — quite smaller than what she’s accustomed to.
Prison guards stood at the room’s exits.
Johnson was on Rikers Island, in a chapel inside the gates of one of the nation’s largest and most notorious correctional facilities. Inmates, all awaiting trial or serving a short sentence, sat in the pews to listen to Johnson speak.
This was before Johnson logged a single minute for one of the top college teams in the country; before she blossomed into the SEC Freshman of the Year as LSU’s starting two-guard and third-leading scorer; before she became a key defensive cog and one of the nation’s best rebounding guards.
But it was after Johnson’s rap career took off, after she signed with Jay-Z’s music label, Roc Nation, and only four days after she signed an endorsement deal with Puma that’ll pay her $1.4 million over four years, per a source familiar with the contract. In her music, Johnson raps with both force and skill. She’s not afraid to tackle heavy topics, like grief, loss and gun violence.
Now, business opportunities are flooding in — the result of a decision she and her family made during her recruitment, when she made it clear to coaches: In college, she’d pursue both basketball and rap, refusing to let one take a backseat to the other.
The move made her a pioneer of sorts. It made her not only one of the sport’s highest-earning female athletes, but also the first to pursue a separate career in an entirely different industry. In this new era of relaxed name, image and likeness (NIL) rules, Johnson is testing the limits of what a college athlete can accomplish.
For college athletes, building a brand is more important than ever. Cameras usually orbit Johnson wherever she goes. But none followed her to Rikers Island.
There, she spoke for 45 minutes. She told the inmates her story: How she grew up in Savannah, Georgia; how her father, Jason Johnson, was a popular rapper named Camouflage; how he was shot and killed in broad daylight, having already signed a record deal, and only months before his daughter was born; how she was now living out her father’s dream, signed to a label and rapping in front of sellout crowds.
The men asked Johnson questions.
How did she avoid the rough crowds as she grew up?
How did she avoid the traps that life set for her?
How did she keep her focus?
After her speech, some of the inmates stayed and approached her — either to introduce themselves, ask more questions, encourage her or simply thank her for coming.
“What really hit home to me was that they were my age,” Johnson said after practice one day in February. “And their life is gone. Some of them got life sentences. That’s crazy to me. They’re never gonna be outside ever again. And that just really hit home, because I’m the same age as them.
“Imagine me not being able to see nothing but a prison cell at my age,” she said from a courtside seat in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, her voice drifting off.
“Living in two different realities.”
‘This girl inspires me’
A couple of hours before LSU hosted Arkansas on Jan. 19, Kia Brooks sat outside a Baton Rouge coffee shop, her back to the setting sun.
Brooks, Johnson’s mother and manager, wore a gold shirt and purple jacket. Two phones sat on the table to her right — one for business and one for personal use. The business one rang three times in 40 minutes. Each time, Brooks reached down and silenced it.
Managing Johnson keeps her busy. Brooks takes calls from anyone who wants a piece of her daughter: brand reps who want to strike an NIL deal, reporters who want to profile Johnson or entertainment insiders who want to collaborate.
All the attention could overwhelm the typical college freshman. Not Johnson.
“She’s handling it because she’s been doing it,” Brooks said. “If this kind of pressure was put on somebody when they never had it, it’s like, all this is overwhelming.”
Johnson has had it — cameras, spotlights, fame — for six years now. At 13, she debuted on the Lifetime reality show “The Rap Game,” and at 14, she appeared on “America’s Got Talent.” A clip from her performance on the show has more than 800,000 views on YouTube.
“Flau’jae was blessed,” Brooks said, “and she knows that. When her father got killed, she could’ve went a whole ’nother way. Just into depression. She could’ve pushed towards drugs. She could’ve just been depressed to where she wasn’t doing anything to help her life, to better herself. A lot of kids are in that situation, but she’s not.”
Johnson is not only a student, a basketball player, a rapper and an influencer, Brooks said. She’s also a motivational speaker.
Before she enrolled at LSU, Johnson used to visit high schools and middle schools in the Atlanta area. Since then, she’s visited two schools in the Baton Rouge area — White Castle High and Zachary High.
Tammy Washington-Pierce, White Castle’s girls basketball coach, used a contact in LSU’s athletic department to ask if any of the women’s basketball players were interested in visiting the school.
So Johnson crossed the Mississippi River and spoke to an auditorium of more than 250 students, then met individually with the girls basketball team.
“She just felt like it was something she wanted to do to help,” Brooks said. “She just wants to be different. She don’t want to be the average athlete out here, getting deals, shining, driving cars, buying homes, but not giving back to the people.
“This girl inspires me, and I’m 40 years old. So imagine who else she is inspiring.”
‘They don’t even think about Rikers’
Jayare Robinson and Johnson have a few things in common. They’re both 19 years old. They both play basketball. They both like to write.
Just four days before the two crossed paths, Johnson inked her Puma deal. But Robinson, who is from Brooklyn, was incarcerated, near the end of an eight-month stay on Rikers Island. He had been charged with second-degree attempted murder, two counts of assault, two counts of attempted robbery and criminal possession of a weapon.
He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery. All other charges were dropped.
When Johnson spoke at the jail, Robinson sat in one of the pews, scribbling in a notebook. He approached her after she finished speaking, introduced himself and told her she was fortunate “to do the things that we haven’t gotten a chance to do yet.”
”She didn’t seem intimidated by us at all,” Robinson said. “You could tell it was a different type of energy she brought into the room. Everybody took out the time in the moment to actually engage in her story.”
Robinson started to take basketball seriously when he was 9, he said, when he played at St. John’s Recreation Center. He made the varsity team at his high school, Brooklyn Laboratory Charter. And he played AAU ball for a club called the New York Lightning.
He’s a point guard, a lefty who likes to drive the lane and look for his teammates first, he said — except when the offense bogs down. That’s when he likes to step back and shoot.
“At a point in time, basketball was everything,” Robinson said. “I didn’t think about nobody else, I didn’t think about anything. I was basically on this path that I only focused on basketball.”
Then came early February 2022, when he and another teenager were charged with the attempted carjacking and shooting of an off-duty New York police officer and held without bail. Robinson has since been freed. He declined to address the incident.
Instead he spoke about his time at Rikers. While there, he played basketball twice a week, and he started taking notes whenever he had a meaningful conversation, or when someone shared with him a nugget of wisdom.
The notes, which started in a small notebook, have since migrated into the rough draft of a self-help memoir about Robinson’s life and his experience in the criminal justice system. He’s already written the first six chapters.
And he now works as an intern for Alani “LaLa” Anthony, an actress and TV host, and the wife of ex-NBA star Carmelo Anthony. Robinson said he one day wants to start a program that supports at-risk youth and helps people re-acclimate to society after serving time in prison.
He said Johnson helped open his eyes to more possibilities.
“When she came to the jail and she was saying she was 19 years old,” Robinson said, “it kind of changed me, because look at me at the age of 19. Not to say it makes me look bad, but it does, honestly, because she’s in a great position at the age of 19.
“Her even coming to a place where a lot of people don’t choose to come,” he added. “They don’t even think about Rikers Island when they come to even think about helping people.”
‘One of the best speakers I’ve heard’
It took weeks for Tim Johnson to strike a connection with the inmates at Rikers. For Flau’jae, it took minutes.
Tim is an NFL player turned pastor. He starred on Penn State’s defensive line in the mid-1980s, then rushed NFL quarterbacks for nine years and three different teams. In 1992, he started all 16 games for the Washington franchise, helping it win Super Bowl XXVI.
After he retired, Tim found a new life as a pastor, first in Washington, D.C., then Nashville, Tennessee, and Orlando, Florida. One day he decided on a whim to move to Rikers Island. After finding a way to drive an RV through the gates, he lived there, ministering to inmates for the better part of five months, 6-8 hours per day.
Before Flau’jae visited, he warned her: It won’t take much to distract the inmates. Some may fall asleep in the pews.
“But when she spoke, it meant something,” Tim said. “You should’ve saw the life that hit her. It was like she was in her zone.”
Tim’s daughter is Kayla Johnson. (Tim and Kayla are not related to Flau’jae.)
Kayla is the head of original content at Togethxr, a production company founded by a group of pioneering female athletes: Sue Bird, Chole Kim, Alex Morgan and Simone Manuel.
A Togethxr camera crew followed Flau’jae around during her senior year of high school and compiled the footage into a documentary called “Fenom.” Tim watched the doc, and through his daughter, invited Flau’jae to speak at Rikers.
Kia Brooks and her husband Ameen Brooks, along with Tim and Kayla, joined Flau’jae at Rikers. They screened the documentary for the inmates. Then Flau’jae climbed those two steps to the stage.
“When I tell you: Flau’jae is one of the best speakers I’ve heard,” Kayla said. “Her parents as well. She was just speaking so much life and encouragement to the guys in that jail, and they were just all ears.”
Her mother stood in the chapel and watched. She saw a young girl, forced to grow up too quickly, command a room, speaking with authority and compassion.
Yes, Flau’jae is abundantly talented in two arenas — basketball and rap. But she has also displayed grit. She has displayed wisdom. And she has the type of charisma that’s tailored to the new world of college sports.
In hoops and music, Flau’jae was ready to take the grandest stages at a young age. Yet she’s unwilling to leave the smaller ones behind.
“I let her know that her dad is watching her,” Brooks said, “and you need to show him that your legacy will not die. You will not die in vain. I’m gonna show others that no matter what your situation is, you can overcome.”
Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that Flau'jae's daughter, Jason, had already signed a record deal before he was shot and killed.