Danielle Johnson assured readers that the eclipse was not the end of the world.
“Oh are Christians looking at the eclipse tonight as the apocalypse?” Johnson tweeted in April 2014, hours before the Earth was scheduled to shroud the moon in shadow. “Lol.”
Johnson was in the business of moons and stars. An astrologer and reiki practitioner, she was among the earliest influencers to adapt the ancient tradition of astrology for a Twitter audience, posting her predictions under the username MysticxLipstick. Johnson’s clients looked to her for more than horoscopes. Her practice incorporated strains of spirituality, self-help, and alternative health.
“The healer in me processes eclipse energy through this filter,” she posted in April 2014. “What patterns do you need to release which will then release toxic situations.”
But ten years later, in April 2024, just before a solar eclipse, Johnson announced to her more than 100,000 followers that “THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE.” Her final message, a repost from a QAnon account, is dated April 7. “ALERT,” reads the post. “THIS IS THE FINAL WARNING. TURN NOTIFICATIONS ON. DO NOT LOOK AT THE ECLIPSE. SOMETHING BIG IS COMING.”
In the hours between that post and the April 8 eclipse, Johnson stabbed her partner to death and pushed her 9-year-old and 8-month-old daughters from a moving car, killing the infant, before driving into a tree at more than 100 miles per hour. She died on the scene.
The gruesome crime, with its New Age overtones, has inspired investigative deep dives as well as social-media speculation that thrust Johnson’s industry in the spotlight. Was astrology — a trade that surged from an estimated $2.2 billion valuation in 2018 to a $12.8 billion valuation in 2021 — leading its largely female flock of believers to madness? The tens of millions of American astrology practitioners who do not commit murder suggest otherwise. Instead, Johnson’s story is that of a small but troubling subset of women who look to alternative wellness for support in challenging times and find themselves following a kernel of counter-scientific belief into a wider world of conspiracy theories. In a country with a threadbare public support system, the spirituality community can weave a backup safety net. That safety net is positioned over a deep conspiracy rabbit hole.
In the American imagination, the stereotypical conspiracy theorist might look something like Infowars founder Alex Jones, a red-faced and middle-aged man ranting about government plots. They might look like a desert doomsday prepper or a Capitol rioter or a QAnon-pilled Orange County mother convinced that the furniture company Wayfair is trafficking children. But the woo-to-Q pipeline is flowing. And in the last years of her life, Johnson — facing a competitive industry, a heavy workload, a new baby, and a history of postpartum depression — got caught in the current.
Johnson and Danielle Arias became friends in the early 2010s when they were among the first astrologers working primarily on Twitter. “Back in the day, you read your horoscope. It wasn’t very commercialized,” Arias tells me. In those early years, Johnson distinguished herself from older styles of astrology by posting detailed self-help threads. “She would do threads like, ‘Get your stuff together!’” Arias says. “It was cute. It was something different.”
The threads, and the moon rituals Johnson prescribed alongside them, began making headlines. In a 2016 interview with the Fader, she explained how the internet was making wellness more available for women. “We are in a time where everything is so accessible and people are offering and extending healing to those who want it,” Johnson said, “because we don’t have to live in the same country or the same city.”
Even astrological anomalies like eclipses typically represented opportunity, not end times. Arias recently reviewed Johnson’s tweets about eclipses from the early days of their friendship. “From an astrological standpoint, we have eclipses four times a year. We’re not afraid of them,” Arias says. She searched Johnson’s tweets about past eclipses and found them to be “normal. They were like, ‘Get your money, we’re gonna manifest new things!’ Not like this eclipse. That’s a bigger sign to me that something was going wrong.”
In revealing interviews with Rolling Stone, Johnson’s ex-husband, Cecil Rice, and her mother, Sharonda Cole, confirmed that Johnson had experienced postpartum depression following her first pregnancy, though it was unclear if she had ever been formally diagnosed. On social media, Johnson disclosed a history of mental-health struggles that both challenged her and guided her efforts as a healer. “Trust me it’s not easy,” she wrote in 2016 in a series of tweets about the pressures she felt “becoming a healer and healing myself.”
“I’ve been depressed I’ve been suicidal I’ve felt like I was going crazy before I had it all together.”
In another thread about a disastrous tarot reading, she described struggling after the birth of her first daughter. Johnson believed her Wiccan tarot reader disturbed the Hindu goddess Kali by doubting the deity’s existence. “It scared the piss out of my reader … but it was obviously the message I needed at that point of my life,” she wrote. “I was going through postpartum struggles and over working.”
As Johnson’s audience grew and her Twitter presence became more professionalized, she continued to discuss mental health, though she became more circumspect about her own struggles. Although she often shared clients’ testimonies about her energy-“cleanse” treatments, which purportedly aided with anxiety and depression, she’d also note that astrology cannot replace clinical treatment for serious mental-health issues. “I can’t namaste someone away when they’re contemplating suicide or about to lose their job,” she wrote in 2016. She addressed post partum struggles directly two years later: “Mental health issues post partum is real and sadly the kids suffer the most when mothers don’t have the help and support they need to be mentally healthy after birth.”
She reiterated that advice in 2021 when another astrologer tweeted skepticism about postpartum depression. “Women have literally harmed their children due to postpartum psychosis and depression this is an INCREDIBLY dangerous take,” Johnson responded. “If you are a new mother PLEASE speak to a professional if your mental health has declined since pregnancy/birth.”
Still, clients kept coming to Johnson for help — and some weren’t happy with the kind of professional support she was able to provide. One client who shared Johnson’s invoices and emails with me says she signed up for Johnson’s “Mystic Boxes” (a subscription service for boxes with goods like crystals and tea bags) and began purchasing Johnson’s zodiac-themed cleanses. The client found some of those therapies lacking. In a 2018 email to Johnson, the client wrote that “since the end of the Leo cleanse, I’ve actually felt a lot worse and more self conscious than ever. Today I woke up depressed (which I haven’t felt in a really long time being clinically depressed) and really unhappy with my appearance and who I am.”
Johnson emailed back suggesting that the client look deeper to find the source of her depression. “Remember it’s okay to be yourself and the cleanse will make this process a lot easier,” Johnson wrote.
The client signed up for a $150-per-month reiki training course in 2020 but developed new reservations about what she described as a lack of professionalism. Messages from a group chat for members of the reiki class show students remarking that certain instructional materials, such as PDFs and recorded lessons, were unavailable. Students complained that course-completion certificates were issued with typographical errors and that Johnson was sometimes unresponsive to messages. The client later asked Johnson for a refund, unsuccessfully. “I was vulnerable in my desire to heal,” she says. “She knew who her audience was.”
The new astrology industry was competitive, and Johnson was all in on the game.
“She really took off. That had its own complications,” Arias said, pointing to Johnson’s early Twitter verification, which marked her as one of the leading figures in an industry about to go stratospheric. “It did bring online attacks, which she conveyed to me were very upsetting. I felt like it was a lot of pressure for her, going back even to 2015, 2016. And it is a lot. I’m not saying she was thin skinned, but you cannot be thin skinned in any type of limelight.” Johnson could be an active participant in industry feuds, some of her fellow astrologers and former clients said. Even Arias said they had undergone a rift but made up several years ago.
Astrologer Amy Tripp’s friendship with Johnson began in 2014. By 2015, however, Tripp says Johnson accused her of backstabbing. “She said, ‘I’m really worried that you and these other two girls in our community are conspiring against or talking about me. I’m gonna have to block you,’” Tripp says. “I’m like, ‘Okay, but no one was talking about you.’ No one was talking about her. It was really paranoid.”
Others have come forward to allege even more dramatic changes in their friend. In an Instagram Story after Johnson’s death, beauty influencer Thomas Halbert said Johnson had been a “dear friend” for approximately five years. “We would talk every single day,” Halbert said. “I’m not joking. Every single day.”
That friendship ended painfully in late 2019. Halbert, who did not return requests for comment, said he perceived an “increasing spiritual psychosis that I recognized her falling into.” Signs of that change, said Halbert, who is gay and nonbinary, included Johnson’s embrace of conspiracy theories. “She talked about how she could pull me out of the matrix. She talked about how if I stayed a homosexual man or tried to transition, that I would die.”
Johnson’s tweets had long contained a conspiratorial note. She appeared skeptical of vaccines, posting in 2015 that she would rather homeschool her new child than have the child go to a school with mandatory vaccinations. Johnson had good reasons to distrust doctors, suggesting that medical racism had led to her dismissive treatment and misdiagnosis postpartum. (Her ex-husband told Rolling Stone that she was diagnosed with preeclampsia after her first pregnancy.) The relationship between the scientific and the spiritual can range from harmony to hostility, and astrology practitioners are not predestined to fringe ideologies. But by late 2019, and increasingly through the pandemic, the extremity of Johnson’s beliefs appeared to be escalating, and in 2024 she began posting antisemitic conspiracy theories and ominous messages about good and evil.
Karen Douglas, who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories at the University of Kent, said people can turn to conspiracy beliefs when they feel insecure in their control over their information intake, their surroundings, and their relations to others.
“Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when one or more psychological needs are frustrated,” Douglas says. “The first of these needs are epistemic, related to the need to know the truth and have clarity and certainty. The other needs are existential, which are related to the need to feel safe and to have some control over things that are happening around us, and social, which are related to the need to maintain our self-esteem and feel positive about the groups that we belong to. People might be attracted to conspiracy theories to try to satisfy these needs.”
Seldom have those needs converged as suddenly as in 2020, when illness, economic precarity, and epistemological upheaval sent the world searching social media for new understandings of wellness and wealth. Many found astrology, which boomed in valuation that year.
Other women who used the internet to discuss crunchy wellness found extreme outlets. Shelly Lewis, a California woman who became a conspiracy influencer after concluding that natural foods — not medicine — helped her overcome lupus, went viral in a clip of her protesting a supermarket’s face-mask requirement. Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother who “sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games,” began dabbling in COVID-19 conspiracy theories as the pandemic spread, the New Yorker reported. The health-based fictions grew more sensational throughout the year as Powell became involved with far-right anti-lockdown politics. By January 6, 2021, Powell was on the front lines of the Capitol Riot, smashing a window with a pipe-shaped object and issuing directions from a bullhorn while wearing a soft pink pom-pom hat that made her easy to identify in a sea of MAGA caps and paramilitary headgear.
This synthesis of New Age and far-right conspiracy thinking is so common that in Germany adherents have come to describe their fusionary politics as “querdenken,” meaning “lateral thinking.” During the height of COVID-19, the movement “forged worrying alliances between New Age health obsessives, who are opposed to putting anything impure into their carefully tended bodies, and several neofascist parties, which took up the anti-vaccination battle cry as part of a Covid-era resistance to ‘hygiene dictatorship,’” Naomi Klein writes in her book Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World. The book traces fellow journalist Naomi Wolf’s arc from liberal feminist to overt conspiracy theorist during the pandemic. Johnson’s second-to-last post on X was to share one of Wolf’s observations about “Druid symbolism” in Madonna’s 2019 Eurovision performance.
“The ominous creepy symbolism is too dense even to describe,” Wolf wrote in the post Johnson shared. “’Not everyone will make it to the future. Not everybody here is going to last..Wake Up.’”
Shahem Mclaurin, a therapist and influencer who was once close with Johnson, said she could be aggressively controlling of people in her life. In an April TikTok, Mclaurin addressed speculation that postpartum issues might have contributed to Johnson’s killings, but suggested that they were not solely to blame: “This person bragged to me about having a lack of empathy.” Mclaurin, who declined further comment, said on TikTok that they remained close with Johnson out of fear. “I was scared at some points to leave,” they said. “I’ve seen this girl take somebody’s picture, put nine nails through it, and freeze that ho.”
As Johnson’s standing in the astrology community grew embattled, competing astrologers and former friends offered mystical descriptions of her behavior. In a New Age industry that preaches awareness of vibrational energy, the bad vibes of a burned friendship weren’t just emotionally hurtful; they were something external, dark, deadly. Mclaurin was among several to accuse Johnson of attempting witchcraft, culminating in multiple car crashes, especially directed toward industry rivals.
Tré Melvin, a musician and internet personality, said he and his best friend, Katherya Pacheco-Mendoza, had been close with Johnson until 2019, when he came to believe Johnson was performing “black magic” on people in her life. “When Kathy and I found out, we cut ties with her completely,” Melvin said in an April TikTok.
“After she found out that Kathy and I cut her off, she cursed us,” he said. Melvin believes Johnson was responsible for a June 2020 hit-and-run that killed Pacheco-Mendoza and left Melvin hospitalized with a dangerous brain injury.
Mclaurin also claimed that Johnson had boasted of attempting car-crash spells against a rival astrologer. Tripp, who survived three serious car wrecks from 2017 to 2021, said she was the target of the attempted cursing. “Honestly, I didn’t really believe that kind of stuff,” she says. Now she’s less certain.
The reiki student who had fallen out with Johnson over the refund in 2020 also survived a frightening car wreck soon thereafter. “She set up a group ritual on her top-tier Patreon coven around December 20, 2020, and my life went to shit shortly after that,” the former client says. “I got into a car accident with my ex at the time that totaled the car,” and her ex later “physically abused me to the point where I thought he was going to kill me.”
It was a moment when the student needed support — a community, a healer — and found nothing, either in Johnson’s practice or in Johnson’s social circles, from which she had been exiled. “I was gaslit into thinking I was making progress on my own,” she says, “but only in a way that the slaughterhouse fattens up cash cows.”
On April 4, 2024, four days before killing her family, Johnson posted that “this eclipse is the epitome of spiritual warfare. Get your protection on and your heart in the right place.”
She was no longer discussing healing but battle, driven to the end by stars that she once held out as guidance in an uncertain world.
“There were two eclipses when I was pregnant with my daughter,” Johnson consoled a Twitter follower in 2016, “and she’s fine.”