Roc Nation: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Since about 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon, my timeline has been one long séance. Nicki Minaj fan accounts found a court filing, screenshotted one paragraph, and by dinner time Roc Nation's CEO was being called a witch and a demon worshipper. One post alone did roughly 182,000 views.

"I have never done 'witchcraft,'" she wrote. "I am spiritual, believe in God and the saints, and practice the Yoruba religion that Desiree and [a relative] put me into as a young child."

That woman is Demoree Hadley. The document is her sworn declaration, filed September 24 as Exhibit H to her statement of facts opposing summary judgment in Hadley v. Perez, in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. Desiree Perez has moved to strike that statement as untimely because it landed a day after the deadline, and that motion is pending. Roc Nation itself was dismissed from the lawsuit in October 2025; the claims are against Perez personally.

So forget the witch hunt for a second. The real story is worse, and it's sadder.

A daughter vs her mother

Demoree Hadley is Desiree Perez's biological daughter. Her amended complaint says so, and it notes that in the State Attorney's close-out memo on her husband's arrest, Desiree is listed as the "victim's mother."

Sit with that. This is a woman taking her own mother to federal court. Not a blogger, not an ex-employee. Her mother. The surviving claims against Perez include conspiracy, false arrest and imprisonment, and claims over her iCloud account and recorded conversations.

Perez has denied the allegations. She has said her actions were rooted in legitimate concern for her daughter's safety. That's her position, and she's entitled to it.

But look at what "concern" has looked like on paper, according to her daughter's filing. On March 26, 2024, when Dr. Bober, the doctor who would later sign the Baker Act certificate, texted Perez, "Do you want me to do this tomorrow?", Perez answered, "Yes." The next day, before Demoree arrived at the marina where she was detained, a man her filing identifies as Fondo, a defendant in the case, told Broward deputies on bodycam that Demoree was "mentally unstable" and that Bober "was going to Baker Act" her. Bober, also a defendant, denies telling Fondo or Perez that he would Baker Act her. The Baker Act certificate, as quoted in Demoree's filing, recites a "hx of psychosis per family." It doesn't say which family member.

Now the other side of the ledger, from the same filing. Demoree's own therapist, Dr. Berrio, testified she has never observed psychosis, hallucinations or delusions in her. Her toxicology was negative. A hair drug screen in April 2024 was negative. Bober released her after 38 hours.

And weeks before any of that, on February 1, 2024, an attorney named Brett Schwartz, whom her filing identifies as Perez's lawyer and who had entered an appearance claiming to represent Demoree in her husband's case, wrote prosecutors, according to emails quoted in her filing, that he wanted "the game plan to include some type of involuntary temporary commitment." I'm not telling you what was in anybody's heart. I'm telling you what the email says.

So when I hear that this woman is unstable, I ask the obvious question. Why would she make this up?

What's actually on paper

Key parts of her story sit next to documents.

Start with the lawyers. Her amended complaint reproduces what it presents as an April 30, 2024 email from Joanna Menillo, an associate at Quinn Emanuel, to an assistant state attorney in Miami-Dade, with Alex Spiro and Reed Smith's Lara Gatz on the To line. Attached was a memo from Spiro titled "Investigation of Javon Hadley," arguing there was "sufficient evidence to sustain a charge" against Demoree's husband under Florida's threats statute, Section 836.10. The memo names no client. Her complaint alleges Perez paid the firms involved. These images have not been authenticated in court. It was sent four months after Javon's December 30, 2023 arrest, so it played no part in that one.

Two days later, on May 2, 2024, a Miami-Dade assistant state attorney wrote an email, also reproduced in the complaint, complaining about "various forces and interests insisting the State Attorney's Office take actions not in line with our policies." When a prosecutor writes that, pay attention.

Then there's the camera. Demoree swears she never consented to any Blink camera. In a court filing, Hadley's lawyers say Perez testified she "authorized" a Blink camera that captured "every single word"; the transcript is not public.

Here's where it gets rich. The day after Demoree's declaration hit the docket, Perez and three co-plaintiffs, Olga Zayas, Miladys Garcia Gonzalez and Denisse Gonzalez Escribano, filed a motion for sanctions against Javon, not Demoree. They say he used Hik-Connect, the remote-viewing app for the home's Hikvision cameras, to watch them, and that the app data, his browser history and his texts were lost after the suit began. They're asking the court for an adverse inference. They even cite Demoree's own deposition, where she says she installed the Hik app on his phone. So both sides accuse each other of surveillance. Perez's side accuses her son-in-law of destroying camera-app data, while Hadley's filing says Perez testified she "authorized" a Blink camera in the home.

The faith

Demoree swears that her mother and "a relative" brought her into the Yoruba religion as a young child, and that they were her "mentors in the religion." She says they "often used my own spirituality and Yoruba beliefs against me to abuse and manipulate me." Her example is blunt: she was told "you have to do this or else the saint will punish you." She says she was "naïve and new to the religion and believed blindly" what she was told.

She also says audios she provided show Desiree instructing people, including an associate, to send her religious instructions about what she should and should not do, "to trick me into doing what they wanted." Those audios are not part of the court filing. They're her claim, and you should weigh them that way.

What "Works/jobs" really is

My family is from Charleston, so this part isn't abstract to me.

Yoruba religion comes from the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo. It has a supreme God, Olodumare, the orishas, diviners called babalawos, offerings, initiation and deep respect for the ancestors. In Cuba it survived as Lukumí, or Regla de Ocha, often called Santería, and devotees paired the orishas with Catholic saints. So when Demoree says she believes "in God and the saints" and practices Yoruba, that isn't a contradiction. That's the religion. The Supreme Court protected Lukumí practice in a case out of Hialeah in 1993.

In plain English, the "job" people are whispering about is a work. In Lukumí, a trabajo is ritual work, and most of it is protective: cleansing a person, guarding the door, carrying an amulet. The tradition acknowledges that harmful work exists, even has a word for a curse, and guards against it. Many practitioners go out of their way to say they have "nothing to do with" paleros, followers of Palo, a separate Kongo-derived Cuban religion that carries the reputation for aggressive work. Even there, one palero told Cuban researchers his basic principle is "no hacer daño," not to do harm, "because then my own harm is already on its way."

In the Lowcountry, the language is roots. Gullah Geechee people, generally devout Christians, kept a root-doctor tradition alongside the church. The University of California Press describes Yvonne Chireau's history of conjure as "the African American tradition of healing and harming." The Encyclopedia of North Carolina says root doctors use roots and spells "to help and sometimes to hurt." A College of Charleston history exhibit says Lowcountry conjurers were consulted on everything "from matters of love to protecting individuals from harm to attempting to cause harm to others." And a formerly enslaved man drew the moral line plainly in a WPA interview that exhibit quotes: "I could be a conjure doctor and make plenty money, but dat ain't good."

Then there's Dr. Buzzard, Stephany Robinson of St. Helena Island in Beaufort County, who died in 1947 and was known for "chewing the root" in court to protect defendants. Beaufort County Sheriff J. E. McTeer tried to prosecute him. According to the sheriff's own account, the case collapsed when the main witness went into convulsions on the stand, and McTeer went on to encourage the belief that he could remove roots himself.

The politically correct answer is that none of this is witchcraft, and that's true. The honest answer is that anybody raised around it knows the same power people seek for protection can be pointed at somebody. The scholars say so, and the practitioners draw lines against it. The faith is not the problem. People are.

And that is exactly why Demoree's claim matters. If you are a child, and the people teaching you the faith are the same people who control your house, your money and your family, then "the saint will punish you" is not theology. It's leverage. That's the allegation. Not that her mother is a witch. That her mentors used something sacred to steer a young believer.

The paragraph that went viral

The post driving the Nicki talk cites a paragraph alleging Perez arranged religious rituals aimed at several celebrities; the declaration offers no evidence for it, and Perez has moved to strike the filing.

So why would she lie?

Let me be clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not. A declaration is a sworn allegation, not a finding. No court has ruled on any of this. The religious-control claims rest on Demoree's word and on audios the public hasn't seen. The filing may never count if the judge grants Perez's motion to strike, and even if it survives, it may not do much for her legal case.

But credibility isn't only a courtroom question. Parts of Demoree's story sit on documents: the Schwartz commitment email, the Quinn Emanuel memo, a prosecutor complaining about "forces and interests," what her filing says Perez testified about the Blink camera, and a therapist and two drug screens that cut against the "unstable" label. When so much of what she's said lines up with paper, I'm not ready to wave away the part that doesn't have paper yet.

So I'll ask it again, plainly. What does a daughter gain by swearing, under penalty of perjury, that her own mother used her faith against her? The money? The clout? The family dinners?

Responses on the motion to strike are due October 9.