“So they told me, ‘No, no, no, we can’t use that word we’re going to call you a psychic.’ I said, ‘But I’m not a psychic!’ … They would take me somewhere to do an interview, and as soon as I’d say, ‘I’m not a psychic, and I don’t own the company,’ the handlers would say, ‘No, no, no. But the hotline marketers thought “voodoo” sounded scary. “I come from a family of Obeah - which is another word for voodoo,” she told Vice. My mother was very deliberate about that, and so was my father,” she said.Īnd, in case you hadn’t figured this one out, Miss Cleo wasn’t really psychic. “When you grow up in America and you’re Caribbean, your parents beat it into you that the only way to succeed is by dropping the patois. She also told Vice that her patois was indeed put on - but it did have family roots. “I didn’t own the company.”Īnd the hundreds of millions of dollars PRN raked in? Harris said she had “a bad contract” and made a fraction of the money that her likeness brought in. “I never went to jail,” she told Vice in 2014, to clear the record. For years afterward, people pinned the fraud on her, and even claimed she served prison time for it. While Miss Cleo was never alleged to be the mastermind of the enterprise, she was undeniably its embodiment. PRN agreed to forgive $500 million in outstanding charges and paid $5 million in fines to the FTC. “I’m no psychic, but I can foresee this: If you make deceptive claims, there is an FTC action in your future,” he said when it settled.īut the lawsuit was no joke. “You don’t need a crystal ball to know that the FTC will continue to stop unfair and deceptive trade practices,” he said when the complaint was announced. Howard Beales III, then the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, clearly enjoyed the press releases. The company also bullied people into paying charges they weren’t legally obligated to pay. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against The Psychic Readers Network, the company behind the “Miss Cleo” hotline, for telling viewers they would get a “free” reading and then charging them. If a free session with a psychic who can answer all your questions sounds too good to be true, it was. Then she appeared on TV screens as the tarot-reading Miss Cleo, promising a no-cost first reading. She “left town with a trail of debts and broken promises,” the paper wrote, after failing to pay the cast and crew who worked on plays she put on. In one of the plays she wrote and produced, Harris played a Jamaican character - named Cleo. Miss Cleo, aka Youree Dell Harris, aka Rae Dell Harris or Cleomili Perris Youree or Ree Perris, was a cult icon.īefore she was Miss Cleo, Harris was a Los Angeles-born playwright and actress.Īs “Ree Perris,” she was working in Seattle in the mid-’90s, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed in 2002. “Call me today,” she’d intone, with a broad smile and a Jamaican patois of dubious authenticity. “The cards never lie,” she’d say, to questioning souls she called “darling” or “baby” or “honey.” What should I be doing? Which person should I be with? Is my life on the right path? Who’s the father? In late-night commercials in the late ’90s and early 2000s, she promised answers to all life’s most pressing questions. “Miss Cleo,” the television psychic indelibly fixed in the memories of ’90s TV-watchers, died Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla., of cancer.
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