Jayden Nikorima opens up on cocaine use, brothels, cheating on drug tests
Jayden Nikorima was the classic rugby league bad boy. He’s revealed how low he sunk before making the decision to turn his life around - and the conversation that changed everything for him.
NRL
Don't miss out on the headlines from NRL. Followed categories will be added to My News.
This is Jayden Nikorima. You might have heard his name.
The stereotypical professional footballer. The off-field scandal-plagued party boy who gets paid an exorbitant amount of money to play the game of football.
Signed to the Brisbane Broncos straight out of high school and then to the Sydney Roosters on a $750,000, three-year contract, Nikorima had no interest in becoming a role model for young kids who dreamt of playing in the NRL.
Instead, he was the cliche. He partied and took drugs and drank to excess and cheated and lied to everyone.
He was the classic rugby league bad boy. He was the kid who had the world at his feet and threw it all away.
But Nikorima, who turns 25 on October 5, has done some growing up since he was sacked by the Roosters and suspended from the NRL for failing drug tests in 2017.
He is now shamed by his audacious and selfish plan to bribe another player to lie for him on a statutory declaration in a desperate attempt to save his career.
To Nikorima, it now seems like another person entirely who took MDMA at Mad Monday benders, who snorted his way through $900 worth of cocaine every weekend, who cheated on club drug tests by substituting someone else’s urine into the testing cup, who was busted for drink driving at more than three times over the legal limit and, despite losing his licence, continued, on occasion, to drive, sometimes drunk.
Now more mature, chastened, with a fiance and a baby boy on the way, Nikorima, who has recently signed a new NRL contract with the Melbourne Storm, is owning the mistakes he made.
He has found meaningful work with charity fundraisers and by connecting with adolescents on youth development camps and in schools. He has embraced a no-holds-barred honesty to repair his shredded reputation and the shame he says he brought to his family name.
Nikorima grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, as one of four boys – with Kodi, 27, Isaiah, 23, and Harlim, 22 – to Deb, 50, and Calley, 47, who have been married 20 years.
The family moved to Brisbane in December 2004 when Nikorima was eight so his older brother Kodi, who now plays for the New Zealand Warriors, could pursue football opportunities.
Deb worked as a police communications officer receiving triple 0 calls, while Calley, formerly in the army, worked as a fly-in-fly-out welfare officer on Manus Island in PNG. The family now owns a freight and courier business at North Lakes.
Nikorima also showed early talent for rugby league and was offered a Broncos development contract when he was 15 and in Grade 10 at Wavell State High School, in Brisbane’s north.
He says he was offered his first illicit drug, a “pinger” or ecstasy tablet, at a “silly Sunday” session following the NRL Broncos Under-20s grand final loss to the New Zealand Warriors in 2014, which fell on his 18th birthday. Nikorima accepted the pill without question.
“For me, I saw NRL stars ‘going to the toilets’ (code for taking drugs), some were Origin stars, and in my head I’m thinking: ‘If they can do it, I can do it’,” he says.
“You see them back up each week and putting in man of the match performances and it seems like it obviously doesn’t affect your performance, so it won’t affect mine.”
Nikorima lapped up the party lifestyle, and the traditional Mad Monday sessions at seasons’ end, he says, were his “best day of the year”.
With some irony, it was players behaving badly that gave Nikorima his first chance in the Roosters’ starting line-up.
Beginning Nikorima’s first year at the club, on Australia Day 2016, he was present but not involved when then Roosters captain Mitchell Pearce engaged in a lewd act involving a dog that was captured on video.
Pearce’s resulting eight-match suspension gave Nikorima a spot in the team’s top 17 and he made his professional debut in England at the World Club Challenge (an annual competition between the winners of the Australian NRL and English Super League) against English counterparts St Helens. He had a standout game, despite getting knocked out in his first tackle before returning to the field. After the match, he says he was on “a massive high”.
“There were videos of my footy game all over Facebook. There was lots of praise,” Nikorima says.
“Lots of people were saying that Latrell Mitchell, Jackson Hastings and I were the next dynasty, the next big thing. It did get to me, it did all go to my head. But from that point onwards, everything started to go downhill.”
Just over two weeks later, Nikorima debuted in the NRL against the South Sydney Rabbitohs – his favourite team growing up – playing against childhood heroes Greg Inglis and Sam Burgess. The Roosters were thumped 42-10 and it was the first of five straight losses before his first win in round six. Nikorima admits his attitude towards training and recovery was “pretty poor”.
“Then I got dropped out of the 17, back down into under 20s. I was lacking confidence, I think I was lost. I didn’t have my family around, I didn’t know how to ask the coaches for help because I’d never had to ask for help on how to play footy. It was a weird time for me where I just felt alone.
“The only time I felt good was when I was taking drugs and alcohol and my mind was off. I was doing two or three bags (of cocaine), about $900 worth, every weekend. And drinking straight after a game. I’d usually go for two days with mates with no sleep. That was my go-to.”
At the end of his first Roosters season, Nikorima bought a ticket to Paris and spent a wild 31 days of “full partying” in Europe with a mate where nothing much was off limits.
They went to Oktoberfest in Germany and the notorious Spanish party island Ibiza. They did drugs, went to brothels and drank to excess.
In mid 2017, in his second Roosters season, Nikorima, then 20, failed his first drug test.
As a first offence, the result was kept between him and the club CEO, Joe Kelly.
He had to attend 12 sessions of drug and alcohol counselling but he was still free to play footy. Nikorima thought he got off lightly and admits, “I didn’t learn anything from that.”
Nikorima says he sometimes switched urine samples for his in-house drug tests.
“There’s no one in the toilet actually watching you,” he says.
“So you can get someone to piss in a bottle and you pour that in the (testing) cup. I’ve done that before, once or twice.”
His second-strike drug offence, in September 2017, came three days after a Mad Monday celebration for Roosters feeder team the Wyong Roos, where Nikorima had been playing. This time he faced the sack or a 12-game suspension.
And so he concocted a now infamous plan to pay Wyong Roos teammate Brad Keighran $7000 to lie for him on a statutory declaration to say he had spiked Nikorima’s drink without his knowledge.
Both players signed statutory declarations and Nikorima deposited an initial $2000 into Keighran’s bank account. The plan unravelled when Keighran failed to show up to an NRL hearing and when the whole deception came out in the media, it became a police matter.
Nikorima narrowly avoided jail, instead he was fined $5000 with a 12-month community corrections order. Time the case spent going through the courts meant Nikorima wasn’t able to play football for 18 months.
In May 2018, Nikorima, now living back at home with his parents, working as a storeman and delivery driver and training (but not able to play) with the Redcliffe Dolphins, was also busted for high-range drink driving.
He blew 0.153, more than three times the legal limit, when police found him in his car, parked but with the engine running and the lights out, at a Goodna shopping centre. T
here was a carton of Coronas on the back seat and he has no memory of driving there from an Ipswich party he attended. He was fined $900, had his licence disqualified for six months and lost his job.
Nikorima says the shame he felt for his behaviour was immense.
He was self-destructing, still doing drugs and abusing alcohol, living a victim mentality, lying to everyone. He knew he was bringing shame to his family name but he didn’t know how to stop, how to change, what to do.
At his lowest point, he admits to crying himself to sleep. He could see the rest of his family achieving goals and moving forward in life. He felt depressed and suicidal.
“It was all bottled up … I had lost my contract, I couldn’t play rugby league, I lost my (driver’s) licence, I had fines to pay, I just had no purpose in life,” Nikorima says.
“I had thrown away a good opportunity and I was still doing the wrong thing as well.
“My dad instilled values of respect, honesty in us and I wasn’t a representation of my family. I felt shame, loneliness. I was letting them down.
“Since the drink driving charge, there were times when I was like, ‘Should I just overdose this weekend?’ I was still indulging in drugs and that seemed like an easy way to go out.
“There were times I just wanted to get in my car and drive it into a pole and kill myself. Just not be here. Even after losing my licence, I’d jump in a mate’s car and drive, sometimes when I was drunk. I was always doing the wrong thing, just waiting for something bad to happen. I didn’t care if I got caught.
“I literally felt like I had nothing to live for. I was just waiting to go out with a bang, for the right time to do it.
“I was done with life, I didn’t care.”
Nikorima credits a conversation in early 2019 with his little brother Harlim as a turning point. In tears he walked into Harlim’s room and broke down, laying bare how much he was struggling.
“He told me he needed me, that our whole family loved me and needed me … hearing that from my younger brother … I was supposed to be his protector but here he was protecting me,’’ Nikorima says.
“It still gives me goosebumps. I’m forever thankful for that moment.
“My family is the best and my brothers and I are really close. Growing up, Mum would work night shifts so Kodi would be the one to look after us, take us to school, feed us sometimes at night too.
“When I got sacked from the NRL I knew I had tarnished our name and disrespected Kodi and my family. When I would have these bad thoughts of ending it, I would always think of my brothers. I just couldn’t do it to my brothers or my mum and dad.”
In a telling insight into the significance of his family, Nikorima has a full sleeve left arm tattoo of animals depicting his brothers – Kodi is a tiger, Jayden a silver-backed gorilla, Isaiah is a wolf and Harlim, a tiger cub.
His dad is depicted as “God”, his mum as an angel.
Sometimes, pieces of a puzzle fall intoplace.
At the end of 2019, with Nikorima now playing for the Redcliffe Dolphins, the club was looking for an army-style boot camp as a team bonding exercise in the 2020 pre-season.
Dolphins head trainer Michael Casablanca suggested the camp be run by his friend Glenn Azar, a former soldier who owns Project 180 gym at Newstead.
In 2017, Casablanca, head trainer at the Dolphins since 2009, attended a talk by Azar’s daughter Alyssa who, in 2016, became the youngest Australian, at age 19, to summit the world’s highest peak, Mt Everest.
Casablanca and Glenn Azar struck up a rapport and have since trekked together on the Kokoda Track, Mt Kilimanjaro and the Aussie 10 Peaks.
Casablanca now also works with Azar on his Building Better Humans project that runs podcasts, seminars, youth camps, personal development and corporate workshops.
And so the Redcliffe Dolphins came under Glenn Azar’s gaze. Nikorima turned up to the 18-hour team camp, in December 2019, full of attitude and having just downed half a tub of ice cream.
The camp, as expected, had a lot of tough physical workouts but it also included aspects of personal development.
Azar also talked about his 17-year-old intellectually impaired son, Christian.
“The club wanted an 18-hour flog session boot camp but I put some personal development in there. I wanted to build these young blokes up,” Azar says.
“So I talked to them about communication. I made them write things down, get up and speak in front of each other. And I told them about my son who is 17, he’s autistic and intellectually impaired with the capacity of a five year old. He fully believes in Santa and Spider-Man. I go past kids playing footy and think, ‘He will never get to do that.’
“So my whole point was that I don’t want to hear anyone say, ‘Why do we have to do this?’ Because you don’t have to do it, you don’t have to play football, you can do anything you want.
“That seemed to particularly resonate with Jayden. Later he said to me that talking about my son made him realise how much his own dad gave up for his sons to become footy players, yet there are some dads who never get to do that.”
Three days after the camp, Nikorima Instagram-messaged Azar confessing how much he had been struggling “in the shittiest mind space” and how he wanted to give up on football and on life. He told him the camp had given him a new perspective.
Azar, straight down the line and “staunchly anti drugs”, arranged to meet up with Nikorima again, telling him to come to his gym at 5am, mainly just to see if he would turn up at all.
He did, travelling from his then North Lakes home to Newstead to arrive at 4.45am.
Azar, a qualified life coach, who is studying psychology, started mindset sessions with Nikorima. “He embraced it so fully, like no one I have ever worked with before,” Azar says.
“People make mistakes and then they start to believe they are the mistake and they keep making them. You’ve got to tell the world who you are, otherwise the world tells you.
“He made a mistake, a significant mistake maybe, but a mistake. He was 18, 19 years old, is that your mistake forever? That can’t be fair.”
Azar and Nikorima started producing a men’s issues Brochat podcast with personal trainers Ziah Faasee and Brodie Charles.
Azar says Nikorima, who has now worked for him for about a year, has become his “right hand” in his Building Better Humans Project, joining him on podcasts, youth development camps and talking to school kids, as well as charity fundraising.
“My goal wasn’t to help him make it back (to the NRL), it was to help him be happy with life,” Azar says.
“If I’m really honest, he’s got no right to be getting offers from clubs based on football time – he has barely played rugby league in four years – but it’s testament to the work he’s done on himself and for other people. Jayden is one of the most amazing young people I know.”
Nikorima has been involved in two charity fundraisers, last year raising $63,000 and running 116km over 24 hours for the family of an eight-year-old Brisbane boy called Hendrix who was fighting brain cancer.
He has also raised about $20,000 for the family of Mitch Cronin, 27, a footballer who died in a backyard pool after a suspected heart attack.
“I wouldn’t be the person I am today with Glenn,” Nikorima says.
“The Dolphins camp was a game changer for me. After Glenn spoke about his son and us having a choice to be where we are at, it just clicked.
“He said he didn’t care what I did – drugs, alcohol – but if he found out I was lying to him, he was done. It was the accountability I needed.
“I didn’t want to let him down. I want to do Glenn proud, equally as much as I want to do my family proud.”
In October 2020, Nikorima was signed to theNew Zealand Warriors on a train-and-trial deal. He underwent shoulder surgery in December and this year played for Redcliffe in the Intrust Super Cup.
Storm scout Paul “Bunny” Bunn happened to be there on the day Nikorima scored two tries.
His one-year, $112,000 contract with the Storm is “double what I’m on now but less than half of what I was on before” and he couldn’t be happier. “I didn’t expect anyone to be knocking on my door,” he says.
“I have learnt that when you serve others or you do right by the world, other opportunities start to open up for you.
“Those fundraisers I was involved in … it was such a different feeling, I actually felt like I had done something good.
“Running the personal development camps for kids … I get better endorphins from that than any Mad Monday.
“It all just makes sense. I know I’ve got a lot to lose because I’ve lost it all before. I’m done with drugs. I haven’t drunk alcohol since New Year’s Eve. It’s just not worth it. I want to play NRL and bring my reputation back and be the best version of myself.”
Nikorima also has a baby boy on the way with his fiance Christa Miyoni, 27, a primary school teacher at John Paul College in Logan.
The couple, who live in West End, met on a party boat on the Brisbane River in October 2018.
They struck up a friendship that turned into a romance in April 2020. On their one-year anniversary, Nikorima proposed marriage with a printed kid’s story book called Love on the Brisbane River that featured Nikorima as his favourite silver-backed gorilla and Miyoni as her favourite animal, a quokka.
Miyoni grew up in Brisbane with her aunt Chrissie and her uncle Chris (Chris “Compass” Kallis who worked as a strapper with the New Zealand Kiwis, the national rugby league team) after her mum died when she was 13.
“I thought, this kid, he’s such a partier, he’s all about having fun, he’s not going to message me. I’m a schoolteacher, pretty reserved,” Miyoni says.
“But he did and the first time we went out he told me everything – that he was going through the courts, that he might be going to jail, everything he had done. It was a lot.
“A lot of people have a certain idea of Jayden, that he is a notorious bad boy, I get that all the time.
“I put his past down to immaturity but it’s all been a life lesson and he’s really grown from it all. It’s so hard to repair a reputation and he is definitely accountable for his actions but it’s kind of comical now because he’s grown so far from that.”
The couple’s baby boy, due mid November, already has a name – Mali Werahiko. His middle name is the same as that of Nikorima’s youngest brother Harlim, in honour of the special bond they share.
Nikorima says family is a priority for his new club and Storm coach Paul Bellamy and Paul Bunn have assured him he can start after their baby’s birth.
Sometimes, Nikorima, now as a father and husband-to-be, in his work with Azar and in his friendship with Christian Azar (“he’s like my little brother”), can’t believe he behaved as badly as he did only a few years ago.
But he also understands he is the person he is today because of it all.
For help call Lifeline on 13 11 14
More Coverage
The smart way to keep up to date with your Courier-Mail news
Originally published as Jayden Nikorima opens up on cocaine use, brothels, cheating on drug tests
Push to honour Qld rugby league’s mysterious Phantom of Lang Park
You’ve probably never heard of The Phantom but he stands as Queensland’s most underrated rugby league player ever - and the push is on to finally honour “Reg Gasnier before Reg Gasnier’’.
Read more
Seven Tackle Set: Blue Broncos, simple NRL bunker fix
From the NRL bunker to the Bulldogs, and Madge’s appointment at the Broncos, here’s a special seven tackle set edition of likes and dislikes from the season and what it all means for 2025.
Read more