Bittersweet Infamy - #31 - Miss Cleo

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

Season premiere! Taylor tells Josie about the billion dollar scam behind the top TV psychic of the '90s. Plus: cross-pollination drama from the world of corn.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Taylor, welcome to season two, baby! I thought something looked different in here. Yeah, yeah, I got a haircut and it's season two. All these marble columns all over the place. I didn't remember these always being here. Upgrades. Yeah. Wow, is that a gold skylight? This place is amazing. This is a beautiful vaporwave hellscape. I love it. There's a hot tub inside now. Wow. I'm taking the hot

tub from outside and we brought it inside. Does that give you mildew problems? You know, I don't care. It's season two, baby. Ew, ew. But yes, it does. It's kind of a problem. Clean your hot tub. You can't work it out. Yeah, dude. Season two. We're still episode 31. 31. Yeah. Very good year. But, you know, it's just a whole, it's a whole new year. We've done this for a year. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. It's funny because now when I think about our first efforts, I think about how much I didn't know. I didn't know at the time. You know, for sure. And it's not even bagging on our old episodes because people are always like, people have this weird thing where when they tell you they're going to listen to your podcast,

they really think they need to start at episode one. And with a show like ours, it's not the case. Read through, see what interests you, and pick that one first. That's exactly how you do it. That's exactly how you do it. But no people are always like, wow, I really like you and your friend are funny. I liked you talking about Barbara Streisand, and I'm always just like, oh man, we didn't even have an infamous then. What were we doing with our lives? It's like the early Simpsons, like really, like, scratchy sketch lines. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go grab some frosty chocolate milkshakes. Absolutely. Yeah. But here we are. Basically, thank you for sticking with us for a year. And we really

appreciate those of you who tune in and tell us you tune in and leave little comments on our Instagram and whatever. You're very sweet. Thank you. No, it's amazingly, it always confounds me. It's like, oh, people, oh, people listen. Yeah. It's very sweet because I think of it as Josie and I both have pretty disparate backgrounds when it comes to writing in the sense that we've taken a radio play class together, we've taken a stage play class together, we've taken fiction classes together, we've produced nonfiction, we've written a play together, and we've we've been in a play together, at least one play we've been in together. That's how we met. That's not how we met. Wow, are we having a fight now?

Oh my god, these two starts a fight. Yeah, conflict, conflict. Wait, we were in that playing, you were like a monkey. I was a monkey, but that's not how we met. We met at Cafe de Soleil at a poetry salon. Oh, that's right. And I thought your date was your brother. Yes, yes, that's correct. So that gives me a good light. I like that. You went out and watched or stayed in and watched on home box office. That is yeah. That's correct. That is absolutely right. The new Britney Murphy documentary. I did, I did. So in episode 24, Girl Interrupted, Josie covered the mysterious death of Britney Murphy. And at the end, she mentioned, by the way, it seems like HBO is doing an imminent

documentary on this. Yeah, that was supposed to be slotted as like, this is not the sensationalist inquirer news. Like this is the the real down to earth story of this woman, Britney Murphy. I think it achieved that. Really? Yeah, I think it achieved that achievement. Well, it takes her and her death seriously, right? Which is kind of the issue with a lot of like, Perez Hilton was never very good at taking women in pain seriously. You know what I mean? And nor nor were we as a society for a really long time. And in many ways, we still aren't right now. I mean, low rise genes. Jesus. It's true. Why did we do that? But so I feel like it's, it's two episodes long. So it's not long. It's a mini series. It's a two part movie, basically. And without kind of giving too much

away in case you want to watch this, I would say that yes, it it treated its subjects fairly. It was not particularly kind to Simon Monjack. So if you're a Simon Monjack fan, you might want to sit this one out. It never posits that it knows 100% what happened to Britney Murphy. But the general stance that it seems to take is this is not a direct murder, so much as a case of a young woman getting very sick, who might have sought help, had she not been cloistered away in this like, abusive, isolated relationship. Oh, okay. This huge toxic relationship that she was in, in many ways, indirectly led to her death seems to be the tape, which I buy that. I bought into that. Yeah. Yeah. No, but that's that's a pretty substantial take, though.

Yeah, it is a substantial take. It's a nuanced take. It doesn't point the finger at Simon Monjack or Mother Murphy too hardcore in terms of saying like, they put they poisoned her or anything. Or we're having a behind her back relationship or anything. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, watch it. Watch it. I give it a thumbs up. Canadians, you can watch this on Crave. Americans, Josie will tell you. Get the free trial on HBO for HBO Max. There you go. It's a horrible app, though. It crashes all the time, which is super frustrating. We're like, HBO sucks, am I right? They've had years to get this home box office situation figured out. Years above all the other competitors. It's true. Crash and left and right. It's true. Shit in the bed. We should have our own home streaming

service. We should. Bittersweet in your house. Fuck yes. That was great. You're better at that. You're getting a raise. So I recently for for a class of mine was reading this article called Mujeres de Maíz by Maria Melendez. Women, corn and free trade in the Americas. Oh, interesting. I don't know. I was like really pulled into it because she tells the story of the ancestral roots of corn and the domestication of it. Sears, you've stumbled ass backwards into a subject that I weirdly know a bunch about. Oh, really? Yes. So I I don't know how much of it has held up. So I should say it's a subject that I at one time knew a bunch about. But when I was like 18, somehow I stumbled into like three

classes that ended up being about corn. I had no intention of doing this. So one of them was I remember we read the omnivores dilemma by Michael Pollan and one of them, which is all about corn. And the kind of monocropping of corn, that all this and all that, that the subject of corn also came up in my earth and ocean sciences class because, you know, modern farming practices revolve around corn. Yeah, yeah. In ways that are not necessarily good for the planet. And then I took a Latin American archaeology class. And of course, oh, there we go. Mujeres de Maíz, right? So yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so cool. Wow. That was it all in one semester. Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. Cornhole. I was just being force fed corn man. And I didn't

try this wasn't something I was trying to do. But I remember doing like three assignments on corn at once. And I was just like, it never ends. It's the corn is never ending. Were you were you like, at a point in your education to you're like, Oh, my God, the world is corn. Corn is the world. Like, was that kind of open up or were you just like, Wow, everyone's talking about corn. Quinky dink. I think I think it was the first one where I was just like, they didn't tell me that when you get to university, they tell you the secret of the world, which is that everything revolves around fucking corn. It's all corn. I was like, how has nobody told me this up until this point? And then the fucked up thing is,

after that, never heard about it again. Yeah, no, that's the thing, right? Until now. Until now. Okay. Okay. They have found that the first archaeological evidence, archaeological biological evidence of domesticated corn was in Oaxaca. So in southern Mexico, right, corn is super important across Central America up into Mexico. But in terms of like cultural identity in Mexico, corn is huge. You can separate the country into like, you know, in the north, they have flower tortillas in the south, they have corn. It grows elsewhere in North America. And so it is part of different traditions as well. But they can trace back to southern Mexico, the state of Oaxaca,

these very old and ancient varietals that grow in Oaxaca. Right. And the people who take care of it most are the women of Oaxaca. And there's a lot of factors for that. One is that women are in charge of the cooking and the cooking uses the corn to make the corn tortillas, all of that. But another more recent factor is that so many men from the state have immigrated up into the US, that only women are left in the rural areas, particularly in the rural areas. So women are the only ones to to harvest and to plant and to tend the corn that's there. And the corn that's there is so particular. And the varietals are so intricate that you could have one type of corn grow on one hillside. And then just on the other side is a whole is another

varietal. Right. Wow. It's like it's would be like, you know, vineyards and Napa or in France or whatever, you know, like these very particularly like, oh, this soil is really important because we get this air from the from the ocean. Yeah, that's very intricate. These varietals are all really specific and precise and particular. And of course, too, these women have been raising this corn for Josie, sorry, of corns. Continue continue. Oh, shit, boy. So these women tend the corn, but they also plant it and they also save the seeds and plant it again. So they're very aware and in tune with what varietals are being grown and how it's being produced the soil, all of that. And of course, because it comes out in the taste in the tortillas.

So they know the whole production line. What's another interesting thing about corn, which you probably do know is that it's because you know everything about corn. That same professor from my Latin American archaeology course, he was like, come to the Museum of Anthropology, I'm doing a talk. And I was like, sure, I'm a first year. I think that's what, you know, university is about. I want to go to these talks or whatever the new opportunity. Good for you. So I went there and I didn't know what the talk was going to be about. And he's like, so today we're talking all about the domestication of corn. And I was like, oh, my God, it happened again. I can't, I can't escape it. Of corn. Of corn. We should keep it down. The corn has ears.

Man, I'm really on a tear. I need to let you get to your story. I don't know. I'm running rampage. They're good. They're popping. They're popping. Oh, they are indeed. They are indeed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is a guy like this. Yeah. Corn is maybe that is that where the word corny comes from? Because they're so easy to pun on the word corn. I choose. Let's say yes. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. So corn is an air pollinated plant, like most pollination. It needs to be, it happened like by something else, right? Like the B is a good pollinator. Sure. But the most typical way for corn to be pollinated is by wind. Yes. The seeds can go in the air. In this case, it makes it really, really delicate

in terms of its pollination. And considering that these varietals are centuries old, ancient, ancient, a huge part of the culture, maintaining those varietals is really important. So in 1994, January 1st, when the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into being, millions of tons of transgenic corn floods the Mexican market from the US. Right. Corn that has been genetically modified for production, for shipping, for, you know, all the good things that we can kind of get corn grown and to people. And of course, there's a lot of different viewpoints on GMO and what that actually means. That's opinions for people to have, you know, some view GMOs is really, really negative and like their mutations

and other people are seeing it as like a very natural way of changing the gene pool of certain fruits and vegetables and produce so that we can up their production and we can feed more people, less starving people, never a bad thing. So there's a give and take on the GMO topic. All of this GMO corn is coming down and it's pollinating with these very particular varietals. Oh, wow. How frustrating. Absolutely no way to stop it. And what's happening is that the transgenic corn, which has, you know, it's, it's designed to be very robust to travel across continents, you know. Yeah. It's genetically modified to be the perfect commodity. And it's relatively unlabeled too. Because what it is is just like, it's the one that works. It's

the one that works and it's a monocrop more or less. And because corn is pollinated by air, all of this transgenic corn, the GMO corn is pollinating with the varietals and essentially wiping them out. I know. So it's really like, poor corn. Oh, corn. I don't know. That one really worked. I liked it. Okay. It's a really interesting kind of eddy of consequence that, consequence of NAFTA and how this idea of like opening borders and having free trade, wonderful, wonderful. I mean, of course, there's a lot of other negative implications with NAFTA and what that has done to commerce in North America and across the world. One very small pocket of NAFTA

is that it's wiping out ancestral beginning of the domestication of corn varietals. It's so fragile, the balance of everything. And we really fucked it up in a lot of ways. We also just pretend that we know a lot when we don't too. You know? Yeah, we do. But imagine if NAFTA had taken into account these testimonials and experiences from women in rural Oaxaca growing corn. No, for sure. Like, I think that's also important takeaways. Like, part of it is just listening. We ignore our matriarchs at our own peril, man. Big time. We ignore our matriarchs at our own peril. They're very clued in usually, I feel like. They're probably a great group of ladies too. Oh my god, I bet. I bet their

corn puns are 10 times better than ours. Because they're doing them in like, no hodl or whatever. So, you know. I'm going to tell you the story of a woman who went by many names. But we'll start with the one on her birth certificate. Yurei Del Harris. Okay. Any bells, any bells? Maybe you know her by one of her other names. I think, I think, is this the true life story of Kamala Harris? Corn. Little is known about Yurei's early life and times. She was born in the early 1960s in Los Angeles to wealthy Catholic parents. Okay. Her parents, so the family is a Caribbean American

family, but both the parents are born in America as is Yurei. Okay, okay. So she's second generation. Yes, yes. I explained all of this for a reason. She attended an all girls boarding school where she met her first love, a classmate who would date boys while seeing her in secret. Yurei said, quote, I know society didn't accept me. This was the 70s. Things were changing, but they weren't all that changed. My first girlfriend was in high school. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and was on the swim team. I thought she was the best thing since sliced bread. In the last months of our senior year, we were found out by her father and she was sent to a college out of state. I was heart broken. She came out to some friends and family in the 80s, but met a lot of rejection. So she

lived her life in a sort of half in half out closeted situation common at a time when American society was less accepting of variant sexualities, let's say. She married a gay man at 19 and they kind of bearded for one another. She gave birth to a daughter, I believe his, but I'm not entirely sure. She divorced the guy at age 21. They remarried. She had a second daughter in her late 20s. And then her husband died of AIDS in the early 90s as tragically often is the case in stories around this time frame around gay men. Yeah. So after that, she pursued long term relationships with women. When she left an abusive long term relationship in 1997, her daughter asked her to stop bringing women around, which she obeyed until her daughter turned 18. I should note I'm

talking about this woman for a reason. She's obviously a public figure of some kind. She has never to my knowledge publicly given names for any of these people, including her daughters. Oh, for which I commend her. Keep your people's privacy. Yeah. Yeah. The first time you Ray Del Harris emerged in the public eyelet, not quite the public eye, but the first real tangible story we have about her. Okay. Is in the mid 90s, and she's producing theater in Seattle under the name Ray Paris. Okay. I told you she was a woman of many names. Very many names. Don't know that name either. She claimed while in Washington that she had graduated as a theater arts major at the University of Southern California. Although the school has

no record of anyone under any of her names studying there. Oh, mystery. Spooky. She wrote, produced, and starred in three plays for the Langston Hughes Center, For All Women, Supper Club Cafe, and Summer Hrap City. Okay. So unfortunately, Ray Paris whipped up some controversy in her time in Washington. According to the Seattle Post IntelliJer, Paris was hired by the Langston Hughes Nonprofit Advisory Council and provided a budget with which to pay the cast and crew of her plays, but only some were even partially paid. Oh my god, I think I know who you're talking about. Continue. Okay. Okay. Me and probably not. Bad at this. You know I'm bad. Let's see. It's alleged that she set up separate payment deals

with different cast members, which she reneged on, saying that she was suffering from bone cancer and sickle cell anemia, promising future payments that never came. Okay, rough. Some of the cast members she allegedly stiffed were teenagers, and she was also accused of inappropriately charging various supplies and services to the advisory council, which she never repaid. She seems to have made a lot of promises that she broke, and then she skipped town and disappeared. It's one of those situations where whoever the representative for the Langston Hughes Center said like basically it would have cost us more money pursuing this, like it was like three grand or something. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Yeah. The next time the recipients of those broken

promises saw Ray Paris, a.k.a. your Ray Del Harris, she was on their television screens. She looked a little different, and she sounded a little different, and she had a different name. And if they wanted to give her a piece of their minds, all they had to do was call an ever-changing toll-free number. And hey, they'd even get a free tarot card reading. And in the words of the top TV psychic of the 1990s, Miss Cleo, the cards never lie. I knew it! 1,800, baby! Whoa! I'm more than stoked. Oz, I thought you'd like this one. I thought you'd like this one. Yes. Let's chat about Miss Cleo for a bit here, because I feel like if you are maybe a little too young for this cultural reference, Miss Cleo in the late 90s, early 2000s, was a household name. Yes? Totes. Magots. Yes.

Everybody knew who Miss Cleo was. You could make a Miss Cleo impression and people would know what it was. You know what I mean? Like everybody knew Miss Cleo. She was the number one psychic. Totally. And like TV late night, it was like a late night, and that's what I remember. It was a come on like kind of after the 10 p.m. slot. Yeah. And she totally fit and reconfirmed the stereotypical psychic. Like she had a turban or a headdress kind of piece going on. She was seated at a table and like the crystal ball. She also had a very thick Caribbean accent. Yeah, very stereotypical Jamaican. Yeah, very stereotypical, yeah. But like charismatic enough to carry it off. Just totes. Yeah. You knew watching that for there was not one remote possibility that this

woman was Jamaican, but she made you want to believe it. Yeah, yeah. You were like, okay. And also in the 90s, people, I don't know, it was a little bit more like, oh, yes, that's the, at least in the circles that I was rolling in in the 90s. Yes, yes, Jamaica, yes. What circles were you rolling in in the 90s? I don't know, very white and very suburban. I was going to say the academics from Candyman, is that? We're all just smoking at the table. Yeah, yeah. Josie, do you believe in psychics? Yeah, my cousin's a psychic. Okay, so I have to watch what I say. Yeah, you do. So here's the thing. It's funny, I turned on an episode of Criminal just at random right before recording this, and it's about the fight that broke out between Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle over this

exact thing where there was a lot of medium scams going around at the time and Harry Houdini had kind of made it his life's work because he's this ultimate magician, right? He knows how all the confidence tricks are done to kind of expose these mediums as fraud. Meanwhile, Arthur Conan Doyle was like very much a believer, very heavily invested in this. I think his wife was a medium. Okay. And they had been previously very tight, and it really did a number on their friendship. Oopsie. Yeah, that would. One of the things that I learned is that at the time there were what was referred to as open-eye mediums and closed-eye mediums. And this is like an insider term that was used among, I guess, the medium community. And what it meant was a closed-eye medium thinks it's all real,

and open-eye medium is running a con on purpose. Oh, interesting. So even among psychics, I think that there are, do I know if I believe in psychic powers? No, but I think that there are two types. There are those who legitimately believe that they have a gift, and there are those who have some other motivation. I think, too, that even independent of legitimate proof of psychic power, let's say. One thing that the con artist has that they are using is this ability to cold read people and quickly figure out just based on experience interpersonal cues, various little bits of evidence picked up visually what this person wants and needs to hear. I think that's almost a cooler gift. Yeah, I worked at a bookstore when I was in high school, and they were selling, I think

it must have been the Goblet of Fire, the fourth one of the Harry Potter series, and it was like a midnight release of this book. And so we were going to have a big party, and some of the staff were dressing up as characters from Harry Potter. And one of the booksellers was supposed to dress up as Professor Trelawney and do readings for kids that would come through. And she, I think she got scared and chickened out, and she came to me, and she was like, Josie, will you do it? I don't want to do it. I just really don't want to do it. And I'm like, okay. You got to be the psychic? They gave me these huge glasses, and I teased out my hair. That's so fun. And they set up a table in front of the bookstore with a starry mapped tablecloth, and then they had one of those balls

that you see in the Science Museum, where you touch it, and the electric field goes to your finger. A cataclysm ball, yes. Yes, yes. I know exactly what you're talking about. It is a cataclysm ball. Is that what it's called? Yeah, and you touch it, and a purple bolt hits your finger. No, this is what I call it, but I've just decided this is what it's called. Okay, good. But we're talking about the same thing. Yeah. And that was supposed to be the crystal ball. And so these kids, and it was just like loads of them, because it was, you know, Harry Potter, they would come, and they would touch the ball, and then they had to ask me something about their future, or like, what did they want to know? And I would tell them. And I, of course, was like,

well, fuck, what am I going to say? I have no clue. But then it became so incredibly easy, because one, they had to ask me a question. Yeah. So if they asked me like, how am I going to die? I'm like, oh, you're a little egg lord. I'm going to push this. You're going to like this, like, you know, whatever, whatever. Or if they'd be like, what am I going to be when I grow up? And I just like, kind of look at them and be like, okay, well, she's got a whole bunch of friendship bracelets. So she's going to be an artist doing like, it was just like, cold reading, cold reading. It was so easy. I mean, when they were kids, too, they were excited. But like, I was, I was surprised how easy it was to just be like, well, I'm going to be a little fucker. You're wearing your soccer

uniform. You're going to be a professional soccer player. I'm done. Yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah. And they would be like, whoa, how did you know that? Or there would always be the little like, snot nose one. He's like, you know, a real thing. You're not really professional. I'm like, jokes on you, jokes on you. Yeah. But it was hilarious. That's so sweet. So easy. So easy. Have you considered then a career in the psychic services? No, but I have considered careers in counseling, because I feel like that's kind of similar, like high school counselor. You're just like, what am I going to be when I grew up? Well, you're wearing friendship bracelets. So yeah, let's see. So Josie. From 1997 to 2001, Ms. Clio was

the on-air front woman for a tangle of dozens of interconnected psychic scams, which I will refer to by the public facing name they're best known by the psychic readers network. Yelling her catch phrase, call me now in her signature Jamaican accent, Ms. Clio promise to get to the bottom of your romantic woes, career issues, financial conundrums, baby daddy mysteries, all in the space of a single free terror reading. But don't take it from me. Here's Ms. Clio herself. Why am I still seeing, is he still going through the divorce or is he still married? He's still married. Who asked you to go out of town, the stupid young one or the married one? The married one. That's what I thought. Don't go, you hear me? And you know what,

you're not listening to me because I see you're going. I see you're going. I'm just telling you, I'm trying to help you to avoid the heartache. Don't go blindly through life. Let me use the power of the tarot to show you the way. Call me now for your free reading. Call 1-800-974-6221. Oh, oh my gosh, that accent and like the outfit, the like her nails. I, you know, actually in my memory, she had like painted like bigger nails, but maybe that's like a modern memory that I'm splicing on top of it. No, for sure. And it's also like, there were many different Ms. Clio ads in which she looked different in all of them. That was just a little commercial. But as Josie said, there were longer form infomercials that would come on late night at

like 2am when you were sitting up with your brother and you were watching like rom-po-peel rotisserie and you were watching OxyClean, all the hits, right? Like all the greats. And Ms. Clio would come on from time to time. I had a thought about it. Sorry, that was like, those were all in there. Shamwa was very much in there. Shamwa was in their magic bullet. Magic bullet was the shit. It was this weird swingers party they were all at where they were like fucking sitting at the table, just eating fajitas and drinking mixed cocktails. It was amazing. Man, you talking about this, like it's seeing that, then you talking about Ms. Clio too,

like I can see my living room. I like that blue couch and like the built-in with the big like cathode ray tube situation. Yeah. We didn't have laptops then. We weren't on the computer. We were just like sitting there watching Ms. Clio. We didn't have the laptop. We did it. We went to school uphill both ways, baby. It was happening. Sometimes when you couldn't find the clicker, you could not ever watch the TV. It was over. Game over, bro. I did a lot of thinking about why some people from our generation have this real nostalgia for infomercials, and I was trying to think about why. Because we nostalgize everything, like obviously.

But the conclusion that I came to, because I watched an infomercial, obviously I watched a lot of Ms. Clio for this, which was a joy. I came to the conclusion that there's a real safety in the infomercial, because any problem that anybody could conceivably have is solved by the product that's on sale. Other than that, there are no problems. You're at this stupid party, this stupid psychic party, or this stupid magic bullet party. A fight's not going to break out. It's this completely false, warm. Yeah. There's a real safety in this space. You know exactly what you're here for, and it's to find out about a convection oven. The comfort of capitalism. It really is. That's the conclusion that I came to. The infomercial

is a world fee of problems. I'm also going to add, though, to that, because I think my relationship with them, too, is when I would be watching TV late at night when I wasn't supposed to, either. So I have an outside connotation of them, too, where it's like, oh, this is what adults watch. It's true. Fucking slap chop, yep. Yep, yep, yep. And there's, you know, a sense of, like, excitement in that, too. You know, it's like slap chop. But yeah, that's Ms. Cleo. She's quite a character. She's very warm. She's amiable, but she's a straight shooter. You know, she's going to give you the facts, whether you want to hear them or not. Yeah. Do you ever listen, do you all have Delilah? No, what's Delilah? She's a radio personality that I haven't heard.

I think she's like, she's on a whole bunch of different radio stations. But I haven't heard her until Houston. But she, you call in and you have problems or issues and she tells you what to do and then she'll play you a song. But she's like- Is it always either Delilah? No, no. It's something from the 90s. And I don't think she decides. Somebody, you know, the radio, the radio producer does. But her intro song is like Delilah. In conclusion, I'm sorry, your daughter is dead. Here's Rhythm of the Night. This is Rhythm of the Night. Yeah, no, this is exactly. Got you. Yeah, yeah. And she's, she believes in God. She like speaks nice and softly into the mic. Thanks for coming out tonight. I know a lot of you might be a little lonely,

so I just want to play you something on the radio. Make you a little less lonely tonight. This is the Rhythm of the Night. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. It's like one of those things. Yeah. So I think interestingly, one of the great functions of the hotline, whatever it is, is to make people feel seen. Yeah, yeah. I feel like there's a value in being seen. It's just when people predate upon people's need to feel seen, then we have an issue. At the height of her popularity, Ms. Clio appeared on commercials, infomercials, radio and talk shows, on tarot decks, merch, anything and everything, psychic or psychic adjacent. Whoa, like her face on the tarot deck. Yes, seen on TV kind of a thing. Gotcha. Okay. There were contests to meet Ms. Clio. There was a $19.95 a month club called Ms.

Clio's Elite Circle of Friends. Let's get it out of the way now. The Psychic Readers Network profited to the tune of $1 billion. In the 90s. Late 90s, early 2000s. Whoa. So that's what? Like $2 billion? That's when Ms. Clio was a thing, but the Psychic Readers Network predates Ms. Clio, and I'll explain that. Okay, okay. Details on the PRN, as I'm going to call it, because we're going to be talking about it a lot, are appropriately sketchy. As I said, it is one of a cluster of other organizations, all of which seem to be different LLCs. I don't know if that's the right term, but I wrote LLCs. No, I like it. Run out of the same 10th floor office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, owned by the same people that all do the same thing. Provide telephone psychic services.

Other organizations under this umbrella include Mind and Spirit Psychic Network Access Resource Services, Quintel, Traffix with an X, New Lauderdale, OpenHorizon.com, Ocean 5 Communications, and at least 16 others. These were all fronts for one group of scammers, with the masterminds variously lending between them, using some collectors for the debts of others, etc. All of them have been sued by someone in some state, at some point, for something. It's way too complicated and dense for me to lay out here. Jim Gaines of the Broward Palm Beach New Times did a great breakdown, if you're interested. I'll shout it out in the end credits, very thorough. But in lay terms, a big ol' shell game. Okay. I want to say that everything I'm saying

on this podcast is alleged. Ooh. Alleged. By people other than me. Okay. These people still exist in their litigious. Of note, despite being its public face, Ms. Cleo is not and never was an owner of the psychic reader's network. Okay, that feels very important to establish. Yep. The minds behind PRN were a man named Stephen Fetter, his cousin Peter Stoltz, and possibly Fetter's romantic partner Lou Thomas Trasclere, who is listed in various articles as an owner. Okay. All out of beautiful Fort Lauderdale. Yeah. Which is exactly where you would expect this to be run out of. I'm sorry. No disrespect to anyone listening in Fort Lauderdale. Lovely study. It is incredibly difficult to find any substantial information on any of these people online, their ghosts.

Hmm. After the events of this story, Fetter and his romantic partner Trasclere retreated to an anonymous life of purchasing, living in, and then selling incredibly expensive real estate for a profit. At one point in 2008, they lived in a $24.4 million apartment in New York City. In March 2021, they sold their waterfront property in Fort Lauderdale for $14 million. So they are clearly still living very wellfully off the profits of the Psychic Readers Network. Yeah. Yeah. Moving it around, hiding it under the show. Yep. Well, I think they're just happily retired, is the thing. So they just do this property thing and live anonymously. Gotcha. Another important note, this is not the same organization as the similarly named Psychic Friends Network,

which took off in the early 90s with celebrity spokesperson Dionne Warwick. Oh, okay. With that said, the Psychic Friends Network opened the door for a variety of knockoff services with PRN at the forefront. In January 1993, Fetter and Stoltz launched the network, relying on celebrity names like Billy D. Williams and Philip Michael Thomas, who played Tubbs on my brother's favorite show, Miami Vice. He loves Miami Vice, dude, to advertise the service. Interestingly, so Billy D. Williams is a black guy, Philip Michael Thomas also black, Dionne Warwick black, Miss Cleo black, Latoya Jackson and Esther Rolla from Good Times were also front people for these psychic services at this time. So it seems like maybe they were

trying to target a black market. I don't know. Yeah, we're trying to target some, I'm just kind of going off of the Miss Cleo thing too, like this exoticized blackness. Mystical stereotype. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did watch and the infomercial that I watched, one of them was the Billy D. Williams one, where he's having, he's in his lavish LA mansion, and he's having people over to like, these are people who have had like meaningful things happen to them via their psychic hotline calls, and they're there to meet the psychic in person for the first time and thank them. And it's this like very bougie LA apartment, it's like kind of like a cocktail party. Everyone's kind of dressed for like a cocktail party. And then they have these

flashbacks when someone meets the psychic that, you know, profoundly changed their life. They have these flashbacks where you get like a dramatization of this thing happening. Oh, yeah. That's about layers. There's a lot of layers there. One of them was like this girl who she'd been beaten down doors trying to get a job forever. And she'd, you know, lost, she'd lost some faith in herself. And then she called up the psychic, the psychic said, you will find work near a dinosaur. And she's like, that's fucking stupid. She didn't say that. But like, you, it's probably what she was thinking. It's stupid. So that might be what she's thinking. She's, she goes out, has yet another unsuccessful day, a hand in out resumes, and then she's,

she's just about to throw the whole thing away. And then she looks up near the sculpture of a dinosaur. It's like a public art piece in a park. And then right next to it, there's like a Japanese grill that's hiring. Oh, look how that turned out. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And she's, she's still there. She's still there. She owns the place now, man. She owns. Boom. Top of the beat. She owns that place. Piran also launched other complimentary telemarketing companies, including weight loss and hair care, but the real money it turned out was in psychics. Would not have seen that. Would not have seen that. They did. Eventually, celebrity spokespeople Williams and Thomas left. Thomas would sue PRN for $400 million, alleging they withheld his cut of the profits. I don't know how that turned

out. Right. This left PRN with an urgent need for a new face for the service. And so Ms. Cleo, a billion dollar idea, was born. I'm okay. Tell me who came up with the idea. So how did you Ray Del Harris become Miss Cleo? Yes. To hear the woman herself tell it, which I mean, there's no reliable narrators in this story, unfortunately, but this is, this is your raise account of this. Okay. To hear her tell it, she responded to an ad to be a hotline operator for 24 cents a minute, which she said was on the high end. Higher ups noticed that her extension was doing really good traffic. So they brought her in to act as the on-air talent for their new infomercial. So she was an internal hire.

Yeah. We love, we love opportunity. She found it near the dinosaur. She was like, this is it. She says they paid her $1,750 for the first infomercial and instantly recognized her as a potential commodity and face for the brand. Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of money when you're coming from 24 cents a minute too. Apparently allegedly conning $3,000 off a community arts council while you're making a play there and you know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Don't forget all that shit that I told you at the beginning before you knew she was Miss Cleo is still true. It's all still true. Yeah. So in Harris's version of the story, from beginning to end of the entire experience, she made about 450 grand. Not a small chunk of change, but there

doesn't seem, while I'm inclined to be skeptical of the woman generally, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that she profited on the level of Federer, Stoltz, and Trostler who invented this whole, who orchestrated this whole thing. Yeah. They built the shells. Yes. Yes. Speaking in 2014, Harris said, quote, I had a bad contract, but everyone else thought I had more money than God. And my response to that usually was, well, God is a poor son of a bitch. And still now, people believe what they want to believe. So they say I still have money, but I want to know where it's at. In any case, Harris claims that in presenting the infomercial, the bosses at PRN wanted her to seem, in her words, fresh off the island. So she recalled the

character she had portrayed in one of her plays back at the Langston Hughes Center. Cleo, a Jamaican spiritualist. Okay, yes. So this is, this is a character in one of, you know, I don't know, maybe some of her app city or for women only or one of these. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Cleo was a character from this play that she sort of like elaborated on for this infomercial. Okay. In one infomercial Cleo gives her backstory. I was born a shaman. This is part of African Haitian and Jamaican spirituality. My grandmother, a shaman herself, recognized the mark of a shaman at birth. This is the life I was born into. And this is the life I live. A web bio put her birthplace in Trelawney, Jamaica. Okay. Okay. Of course, we know better.

Eurea Del Harris was born in Los Angeles to American born parents as I specifically told you. Yes. She went to USC. Yeah, maybe. Maybe went to USC. Yeah. She has variously been known as Eurea Del Harris, Ray Paris, why Cleo Milly Harris, Eurea Cleo Milly and Eurea Paris, among other names. Dang. While some people whispered and Jamaican people screamed that Cleo wasn't who she said she was. Like, I gotta believe that not there cannot be a soul. A Jamaican soul who watched that and was like, yes, this is representative of our culture. Wait, her parents, what's her, what's her heritage again? Her parents are from LA, but where were her grandparents from? Caribbean. I don't know exactly. Caribbean, maybe Jamaican, but Caribbean. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So while all these

people said that Miss Cleo is a character, Miss Cleo is an act, her true identity wouldn't be revealed until her likeness had propelled the psychic reader's network to a ten figure payday. So you're probably thinking one billion dollars, that's a lot of free tarot readings. Well, it's time for the most fun part of the con, how the magic trick is pulled off. So Josie Mitchell phones up the psychic reader's network saying, I want to collect my free tarot reading. I want to collect my free tarot reading. The first thing she gets is an automated message indicating that she has been upgraded to a preferred customer ship. Congratulations. Yeah, baby.

They then redirect her to a non toll free number based out of the tiny island nation of New, N-I-U-E. Where is New? In the water, in the ocean. Okay. It's in the South Pacific. Okay. Okay. And from what I gather, there's sort of a, there's a lot of really interesting history around how small South Pacific islands make money, much of them having been, you know, either stripped of resources by colonialism or not being places where natural resources are easy to come by regardless. Right. So there's a lot of like, I remember now, like invest in a play, they have big prisons, and some of them have these like incredibly expensive, non toll free numbers that you can redirect psychic customers to. Right. Okay. Okay.

So if you take them up on that offer, that premium preferred customer ship, and they redirect you to this number. If I hit one, yeah. Yeah, you hit one, you're now on the hook for up to $7.86 per minute. But they haven't told me that. No. And that's $7.86 in like 1997. So just swirl that around. That's, that's a strong $7.86. Yeah. If you don't take them up on that offer, then a call center in Omaha redirects your call to one of the many independent contractors hired to be psychics. Okay. The call is no longer on the 800 number. So it is no longer toll free. The free tarot reading, it seems, was a heartbreaking scam. There is no free tarot reading at any point. It will never happen.

Yeah, never. So who were the psychic brain trust operating the phones? I know you're like, I'm sure they went out there and dragged the net for the most legit quality psychics they could. Top of the heap. For sure. Yes. In 2016, Bennett Madison wrote a piece for the New Yorker detailing his experience as a 20 year old college student working as one of Ms. Cleo's minions, downing wine and chain smoking out windows and making up random advice as he went. Oh my God. Dream job. I'd feel guilty. There was another account of someone who stopped because they're like, I felt guilty. So I get that too. This was getting weird. Yeah. Yeah. Someone asked me if she should get a divorce. I don't feel qualified to answer that, you know. He said that the network

offered bare bone scripts and a computer program to simulate a tarot spread. But in actual practice, it was a lot of cold reading and telling people what they wanted to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Nancy Garan, the author of a book called Tarot Made Easy alleged that PRN told readers to crib their readings directly from her book. And the Ms. Cleo websites were found to have plagiarized the same book liberally. Oh, shiitake. Victims alleged that the hotline was letting callers eat up their quote unquote free reading time on hold, switching callers to pay lines without telling them. Yeah. Promising gifts that never materialized and billing minors without parental consent. That was in my brain because that's how I was exposed to it, right? It's like, you're at a

sleepover and you're like, let's call Ms. Cleo. Yeah, let's call Ms. Cleo. Two hours later, $500 later, right? Yeah. Parents were then shocked to receive bills in the triple digits. Said one Fort Lauderdale man who called the contest to charge quote, I started receiving automated collection calls at all hours of night and day. The moment the man answered the phone, his only response to anything I said was, are you paying by credit card or check? He then became very belligerent and irrational and ended the conversation by saying, if I don't get a call back by 2pm with payment, we're going to fuck up your credit and then hung up. Shit. One customer complained to the Florida Attorney

General, I rue the day I even placed a five minute call to these money grabbing extortionists. I am disabled on a very fixed budget and refuse to submit to their thievery. Good for them. Sometimes PRN would send out next nasty collection letters to people who hadn't even used the service. Oh fuck. With the bolded final line, taking responsibility for your actions is an important step in your spiritual journey. Ooh, gross. What the fuck? Oh, that is gross. They're not subtle about it. And apparently they like the second there was any bill, whatever, they would send that bill to one of the 16 names that are all based out of this Fort Lauderdale office and that organization would serve as collections immediately, immediately collections.

Yeah. Wow. They wouldn't even just wait for people to be like, oh that's more than I thought. No, if you placed that call there was like a letter in the mail threatening you like within a week. Jesus. God. So the PRN themselves wouldn't be forced to take responsibility for their actions until 2002. What about their spiritual journey? Well, a young reporter fresh out of J school named Matt Bean got his hands on the keys to the kingdom. Oh fuck dude. See, Matt Bean was able to get a copy of a sample script for a PRN operator. Someone had given him the script that they're told to use. Right. Some other college kid maybe. Yeah. And when he called the hotline the call he like posing as someone seeking services what they told him matched the script exactly.

Oh fuck. And then he paid $300. Exactly. They're still looking for him. Once Bean's expose came out the complaints rolled in civil suits against PRN in nine states and a federal fraud case from the granddaddy of them all the FTC. Oh shit, shit, shit. Attorneys for PRN blamed all the suits on religious prejudice against psychic powers, political grandstanding by attorneys general, and racial hatred against Miss Cleo for being a successful black woman. Okay, okay. So that's their defense. Wow. It's a well thought out defense. I'm sure you agree and it's gonna get them further. Yes. So I'm gonna focus on the FTC case as it was the largest with the most publicly available info. Yeah, that makes sense. But

I will give you this morsel from the Florida civil case. They entered Cleo's California birth certificate into evidence as proof she was not Jamaican to which Cleo pled the fifth. Ooh. Oh my. So with that said, the FTC lawsuit only briefly named Harris before she was dropped as a defendant with the FTC acknowledging that spokesperson's couldn't be held liable for violations. Especially when they're probably capped in their salaries or in their payments and she's not getting anything. Yeah, exactly. And she's still she apparently was still working the 24 centimeter extension this whole time, by the way. So you could call in and get Miss Cleo. Whoa. What, but I think she was getting paid for the info commercials.

Yes, she was getting paid more for the info commercials. Okay, okay, okay. Wow. But she says she had a shitty contract and as much as she seems crooked and I do think she seems crooked. Yeah. Well, she's willing to make yeah, she's willing to make those those decisions that benefit her and nobody else. Yeah. Basically, if Cleo didn't make a lot of money from her likeness neither would she be on the hook for the damages it had caused. Well, I guess that worked out. While rumors persisted for years that Miss Cleo was locked up in jail, she never faced any legal repercussions for her role as the face of TV tarot. Okay, okay. In 2002, the psychic readers network agreed to pay a $5 million fine to the FTC and to forgive $500 million in consumer debt.

The lesson in this case is that companies that make a promise in an ad need to deliver on it, whether it's about availability, performance or cost, said J. Howard Beals III, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, continuing, I'm no psychic, but I can foresee this. If you make deceptive claims, there's an FTC action in your future. Apparently, he did that all the time. He was those all his quotes are like that. You don't need to be a psychic to know what's going to happen here. Yeah. Good for him. Enjoy your job. So do you think that's a fair punishment, fair outcome? Because let's break it down.

It was a $5 million fine. A $5 million fine. And $500 million. To forgive $500 million in consumer debt. They still have the first $500 million that they made. So basically, all they've done to these people is said you only get to keep $500 million from your scam and you just don't collect on the $500 million that are outstanding in your collections. And anybody who... And you pay a $5 million fine.

Yeah. But anybody who paid them, who was terrified about their credit or was scared about all these collections... I don't think they have any recourse. That might be... I think that's like a civil thing at that point, right? Oh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hence why they're getting sued in nine states. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. But at the same time, why couldn't the FTC or why couldn't a court just be like, no, we're going to take all your money.

Everything that you've earned. That's the thing. And so that's why I think this is actually for as much as Jay Howard Beals, the third director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, wants to front. I think this is actually like a pretty weak ass slap on the wrist. Like... Yeah. They paid $5 million. That's what they got off. And they lost $500 million in like collectible earnings that they shouldn't be entitled to anyway, because this is gone.

Right. Anyway. And they still live quite large, as I said. Yeah. And yeah, and they're not, there's no, there's no jail sentence. There's no other personal, yeah. Yeah. Besides maybe the civil cases. Yeah. The Psychic Readers Network still exists to this day. Whoa. Semi-dormant, as Ms. Cleo would later find out the hard way.

Oh no. As the lawsuits rained down, your Ray Del Harris parted ways with the PRN in 2002 on bad terms to hear her tell it. From there, she just sort of moved on with her life, giving private readings, doing shamanic work, officiating weddings, and doing other odd jobs out of West Palm Beach, Florida. Imagine if your wedding was officiated by Ms. Cleo. I fucking wish. I'd get married to have her, to have her do the do your shtick. Oh my god, I'd fucking die.

Should we get married and call Ms. Cleo? See if she's available? For sure. We can go to Florida. In 2006, she came out in an interview with the advocate, saying she'd been inspired by her gay godson. She said there is Ms. Cleo, and now it's going to be Ms. Cleo is gay. I'm not sure how that's going to look, but as much bad stuff has been said about me up to now, what's another slur?

Yeah, fuck it. Also, living your truth, baby. Well, let's talk about that. She slowly started to tell the story of her experience with the PRN in a way that downplayed her responsibility and made her seem to have been acting ethically. And that, but like, that's the way that I frame it. Maybe she's telling the truth. I think that she is telling the story in a way that downplays her own ethical culpability. If only we had a psychic who could see the truth.

Today we have a number. Yeah. She claims that she argued with PRN over their practices often, and that she wasn't complicit in swindling customers. Quote, if someone called me on the line and I knew that they didn't have any money, I didn't have any intention of keeping them on the line, and it was more about me rather than them, even though it was their pocketbook, it was more about my karma.

No, you just walk away from the job then. If you firmly believe that they're swindling people and you're concerned about the ethics of that, then you walk away from the job. Can I do you one better? Harris still spoke in her Jamaican patois, which she said was her real voice, and she put it down to code switching. So let's talk about code switching. Let's unpack that term.

Basically, if you've never heard of this before, the idea is that we all have, just culturally, we all have different ways that we communicate with different people. And for example, I come from a Spanish family, as I've mentioned before, so sometimes I'll chat a bit in Spanglish, really bad Spanglish. I know you don't need to tell me. But that's that's sort of an example of code switching. And so basically the idea is that like, culturally,

Yurei Clio, whoever says she comes from this kind of Caribbean background that this is just how she speaks. There you go. That's what she says. Yeah. She maintains that her powers of divination were the real deal. Quote, I come from a family of spooky people. I don't know how else to say it.

I come from a family of Obia, which is another word for voodoo. My teacher was Haitian, a mambo born in Port-au-Prince, and I studied under her for some 30 years and then became a mambo myself. So they refer to me as psychic because the word voodoo scares just about everybody. I'm sorry to always do this to you, but in pro wrestling, there's a term called kayfabe. And kayfabe is basically the fake staged world of wrestling. Anything that happens in real life is not kayfabe.

In real life, you know, Sean Michaels and Diesel are best friends. In kayfabe, they hate each other because Sean is jealous that Diesel is the world champion. How do you spell kayfabe? K-A-Y-F-A-B-E. Okay, okay. It's like carney talk, apparently. It's old school carney talk. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, it is.

Miss Cleo, as far as I know, never broke kayfabe. I never found a video of her talking in her quote-unquote real voice. I never found a video of her saying that she wasn't, in fact, psychic. Right. Never. The Miss Cleo character would recur in pop culture, sometimes with Harris herself returning to the role. In 2003, her likeness appeared in the PlayStation video game,

Celebrity Deathmatch. Of the appearance, she said, I love it. I gave my permission. I have a copy and I tell my kids, whenever you get pissed at me, play the game. And if I get angry at myself, I play myself. Whoa! So she's just going there and wailing on Miss Cleo.

If she's having some internal struggles, she's like, I gotta beat up that bitch Miss Cleo. There's a lot of, like, whose personality? A lot to unpack there, yeah. There's a lot to unpack there, yeah, yeah, yeah. In 2005, Harris appeared as Miss Cleo in a commercial for Used Cars. She voiced the parody character Auntie Poulet in the video game Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

And in 2015, she recorded a commercial in character as Miss Cleo for French Toast Crunch. A great commercial. The Psychic Readers Network would stir from its slumber to throw around litigation about the latter two appearances, causing General Mills to pull the serial ad and bogging Rockstar Games down in years of legal bullshit over the Auntie Poulet cameo. Oh, so they claim that they own the entity Miss Cleo. Yeah, that feels so greedy to me.

But then that would make sense why she would be so careful about like, no, no, this is how I sound. This is code-switching. Like, this is like, this is who I am, right? Would that make more sense? Because... But here's my, here's my other thing. Why do you have so many names?

Yes, yes. That's the one, because I've gone back and forth on this, because she presents, when she's telling you, no, this is just kind of how I talk culturally. And, you know, I studied under a 90-year-old mombo and all of these things. She's very charming. She's like a very charismatic, as the best crooks are, right? Yeah.

She's very charming and she's very, and maybe... So it gets me to the point of like, well, maybe there is some validity to what she's saying, and maybe this is just like, culturally where she comes from and shit. But then I just come back to, why do you have like, eight names? Yeah. Well, I mean, she lived in an era where she had to be closeted for most of her life.

You know, like, what is not, maybe not most of her life, but like, for a very formative part of her life, like, I wonder if that's influencing any part of this too, that like, she has to divide herself to, to live in society. And so that just spills over to, yeah, this language and this identity that even further. If the P.R.N. planned to pursue Yurei herself, it didn't go very far.

Around the time of the commercial, she developed colorectal cancer, which metastasized. She died on July 26, 2016, at the age of 53. I did not know that. Oh. Her death resulted in an outpouring of grief from Gen Xers, who stayed up late, watching her infomercials well stoned,

and millennials who called in his kids and ran up their parents' phone bills. Yeah. To the end, Harris said she felt appreciated by her public. If I'm standing in line somewhere and I'm talking, someone will whip their head around and look at me. People gave me mad love, sweetheart. They'll say, do you see anything?

Where do we find you? When are you coming back? We miss you. I get a lot of love. Oh, sweet. Whether or not she deserves it, but sweet. That's, I think that there's like, because I end the story, feeling warmly about her,

even though I know, even though I know that she's got all these names and all these stories and was in bed with this like, psychic con operation and whatever. And I wonder how much of that is just, I never really quite got to the bottom of the why. I think it might have something to do with, just like you say, what you're saying about growing up and needing to compartmentalize your identity in certain ways

and keep certain secrets and all of this stuff. Yeah. Perhaps because Ms. Cleo guards her privacy about her early life, so maternally, right? Like she doesn't want you to know her daughter's names. She said that she wouldn't, because this, her husband who died of AIDS was never out, that she was never going to sit,

she was never going to out him publicly, she said. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's hard to kind of get a read on her and who exactly she is and where exactly she stands. I do feel like a lot of it is crooked, but I don't like small C-cricut, not big C-cricut. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?

Well, and you know, because the other angle of that too is like she didn't earn a lot of money. When these other people, when these capital C-crux earned a fuck ton of money. A fuck ton of money and now live this very decadent lifestyle. It's interesting too, because as much as I say that Ms. Cleo was hard for me to get a read on, other than the fact that they were rich men

and two of them were in a relationship with one another and two of them were cousins, I don't know anything about these people who ran the PRN, who they are, why they did this, et cetera. So it's, I don't know, a lot of ghosts in this story, appropriately enough, a lot of ghosts. Yes, yeah. Florida ghosts too.

Flosts. Nosts. And I think that it's also like, I never thought I'd use the phrase separating the art from the artist above Ms. Cleo, but. I think it's all right to kind of look at this piece of 90s kitch and take it for what it is, which is like a strange problematic performance for an incredibly

problematic business done with like great gusto and charisma by a natural entertainer. And I think that that is part of why people responded to Ms. Cleo. Whatever you want to say about the quality of her accent. Other than that, she did the shtick pretty well. It does kind of fade in and out, I found. It turns into like Cookie Monster in some parts. It's like, it's a little Irish on other parts.

Yeah, yeah. Damn dude, Ms. Cleo, look at that. Bring him back a little 90s nostalgia. I wanted, I wanted to pop the crowd for the season premiere. What can I say? Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts.

We usually release new episode every other Sunday. And you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.com. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. In preparing for this episode, I watched multiple PR and infomercials. And we used some sound clips from videos hosted on YouTube by Chuck D's, all new classic TV clubhouse, as well as Jezz and O.

I watched the documentary Hotline, directed by Tony Schaff in 2014. I read the article's ex-Miami Vice star wins first round in Psychic Network by Matt Bean on Court TV June 6th, 2002. Embattled Psychic Hotline owner puts mansion up for sale, also by Matt Bean on Court TV April 16th, 2002. Pop culture phenomenon Ms. Cleo remains a mystery by Jim Gaines and the Broward Palm Beach New Times January 3rd, 2002. Ms. Cleo left a trail of deception in Seattle by D Parvaz

for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer March 1st, 2002. Ms. Cleo settles for $500 million, you can find that on Consumer Affairs. The many lives of Yarei Del Harris, aka The Psychic Ms. Cleo, dead at 53, by Travis M. Andrews in The Washington Post July 27th, 2016. Ms. Cleo on her allegedly fake patois and getting ripped off by the Psychic Readers Network by Jordan Sawunmi on Vice April 30th, 2014. I Was a Hotline Psychic for Ms. Cleo published 2016 by Bennett Madison in The New Yorker. People share funny stories of calling Ms. Cleo by a man of Jackson on CNN July 26th, 2016.

And finally, Ms. Cleo's Psychic Empire by Jake Rossin on Mental Floss February 14th, 2019. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins, and the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. You know, people have been criticized and jabbed at and talked about throughout the ages for having different beliefs. And apparently I am no exception. Although it is a constant challenge, I will continue. I will not allow them to stop me. I will teach as a shaman and help those who seek the knowledge.