Joe Manganiello’s new memoir says a shaman told him Sofía Vergara’s ex put a voodoo curse on him, and her former fiancé answered with a sharp one-liner.
Fox News Digital reports that the “True Blood” actor’s book “Bloodlines,” out now, lays out the collapse of his marriage to Sofía Vergara in raw detail, from failed IVF attempts to a seven-year mystery illness and a Cuba-based shaman’s startling claim.
Manganiello and Vergara married in 2015 after a Kauai proposal. They announced their separation in 2023, and the divorce was finalized in 2024. He writes that he left the marriage. Her representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the memoir, Manganiello describes consulting a Cuba-based shaman after years of unexplained sickness. The shaman’s diagnosis went far beyond medicine.
Manganiello writes that the shaman told him:
"Someone from your past is still in love with you. He put a voodoo curse on your husband. He did it in New Orleans."
The shaman offered a two-day cleansing outside the United States and asked whether Manganiello could meet in Ecuador. Manganiello says he was stunned that the man knew private details that had never been in the press.
He also writes that the thought crossed his mind that Vergara herself might be the one carrying a hex from a man in her past, a theory he admits sounded bizarre even as he entertained it.
Nick Loeb, Vergara’s former fiancé, did not play along. After learning of the accusations, he told Page Six:
"I pray they find Jesus, not another shaman."
Vergara and Loeb had dated for two years and were engaged for another two before calling it off in 2014, the same year she began seeing Manganiello.
The book traces the couple’s trouble to more than superstition. Manganiello says they began IVF before they were even engaged, at her doctor’s urging. After two years of trying, they still had no child. A surrogate plan that would have cost about $200,000 was dropped when his health failed.
Roughly a year into the marriage, he was admitted to a hospital for two months straight. Symptoms had started soon after the wedding. While he was under anesthesia for a ten-hour procedure, Vergara, as next of kin, authorized removal of his entire large intestine and an ostomy. He says he lost 60 pounds in two weeks.
He writes that she had to hide from paparazzi to visit, lying down in an assistant’s car, then sneaking in through a loading dock in a wig and hat. When he woke, she was at the foot of the bed to tell him the surgery had saved his life but left him with an ostomy bag, possibly for good.
Afterward, he says he lived separately on the opposite side of their Beverly Hills house during the day. With the parenthood dream gone and his enthusiasm for life drained, “the fire between us began to go out.” When she left for a vacation in Italy with a friend, he found a place in Venice Beach, ordered a bed and a TV, packed his things, and moved out. Then he filed for divorce. He writes that was the last time he ever spoke to her.
Money stayed tangled. On the 2019 film “Bottom of the 9th,” which he produced and starred in, a budgetary error threatened a bond-company takeover. Vergara offered a $500,000 loan at 0 percent interest. He says he had never taken a dime from anyone he dated, but he accepted. At separation he still owed her $400,000.
He also disputes media storylines about the split and says parting comments cut deeper than headlines. In his account, she told him he was not healthy after all, that he would get sick again, and that no one would love him once they knew the full extent of what he had.
Manganiello further suspects Tom Cruise, whom he links to Vergara’s past and describes as a possible executive producer on Amazon’s “Reacher”, could have helped block him from a role he says Amazon executives had been set on. Fox News Digital notes that Cruise is not listed as an executive producer on the series on IMDb Pro. Cruise’s response is not included in the reporting.
Hollywood memoirs often dress up score-settling as soul-searching. Readers can decide how much curse, clinic, and pride explain a marriage that did not survive the facts on the ground.
