Downloaded from YTS.MX
-The best entertainment I could possibly imagine.
-None other than psychic tarot card reader Miss Cleo.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
-Find out what I see for you.
Call me now for a free tarot reading.
-"Call me now." -"Call me now."
-Don't make me take you to church, young man.
-She had such a presence.
-Those commercials were epic and legendary.
-You have questions. I have the answers.
-She did things that no one else would be able to do.
-Oh, my God, I cannot believe how right you are!
-She was so relaxed in it,
so you bought it hook, line, and sinker.
-This is amazing me.
-It's okay. It amazes me every time I do it, too.
-Who's this woman? What is this commercial?
-What country are you from?
What mystical tradition are you working in?
-There is more than one man. -Uh-huh.
-Uh-huh. Uh-huh. -[ Laughs ]
That shit is bomb. -Why does she have an accent?
-Wasn't she arrested for fraud? Didn't she goes to jail?
-Scammers gonna scam. [ Laughs ]
-And everybody had an opinion about who she was,
but they had no idea.
-Her personal identity was a real struggle for her.
-What's really going on here? Who is this person?
Don't be fooled by thinking what you know is the whole story.
-So what's -- what's the real deal?
♪♪
I was 12 years old in 1997
when Miss Cleo first got on the airwaves.
The '90s for me, that is television shows
in the height of sitcoms...
-Monica's gonna totally freak out!
-...just like, really, really warm and inviting.
-Have no fear. The Urk man is here.
-But there were so many commercials.
You couldn't skip them.
-Let's play Furby Says. -[ Babbles ]
-Commercials in the '90s were saccharine sweet.
-Commercials and infomercials -- specifically infomercials --
were on the rise. -BeDazzler --
the kit that can change your wardrobe
from dull to daring.
-Wrap and snap your hair into the perfect bun.
-Take it to the max with Glow Pens.
-My problem with most exercise programs
is finding time to do them.
-The Internet was in its infancy,
and people used their phones to dial all these hotline.
-A 1-800 or 1-900, you called --
Now, I never did this, Mom or Dad.
This never happened. I don't know how I know this.
You know what I mean? But you call,
and it's either to talk to somebody, to get information,
and they charged you per minute.
It's all going on your parents' tab.
You don't necessarily know how much you're racking up
because it wasn't like minutes like it is now.
-You now could, at that time,
get information about any industry,
any hobby that you wanted -- sports information...
-Dial 1-900-860-4GAME.
-...jokes. -♪ This is Dial an Insult ♪
-If you call me right now, I'll give you my private number
-...pick-up line, telling you where to meet girls,
how to meet them, and what to say.
-Psychic hotline was something new.
-Psychic hotlines were huge.
-Psychic Readers Network -- so many good reasons to call.
-Congratulations. You recently got engaged?
-I just got engaged two weeks ago.
-Well, you better hope she doesn't find out
that you spent last Sunday night with your old girlfriend.
[ Dial tone ] -Oh! Ooh! Hello?
-They could be your soothsayer and your therapist.
-I felt like she was just right with me
and knew my life as soon as I picked up the phone.
-By the end of the conversation,
I found -- it felt like I had a friend.
-By the time I hung up the phone, I was very pumped up.
-There were four or five psychic networks out there,
all pitching the -- the same thing
in pretty much the same way.
-There's a psychic on every corner.
You can call psychics,
you can go see a psychic, and whatever.
But there was something about Cleo.
-If you've never seen a Miss Cleo infomercial,
I beg you to go to YouTube.
♪♪
-If your love life has trouble, the power of the tarot can help.
Call me for your free reading now.
There is a secret, baby -- you understand me?
-Yes. -...in this relationship.
The situation that we're looking at
that is one of another relationship.
Let me stop trying to be polite. You understand me?
And the secret is yours, is it not?
-He was with someone else. -And you are, too.
-Miss Cleo was a psychic advisor,
and she read tarot cards.
-"Girl, no, he didn't." "Yes."
Like, I felt like I was watching a "Maury" episode,
but, like, just her.
-You were feeling as if she was cheating on you, weren't you?
-Yeah, I did. -That's 'cause she was.
-It was the best Insta Live you could have had in 1997.
It was so good. So good.
-If anyone watched TV after midnight
from, like, '99 to, like, 2002 or whatever,
like, you knew who Miss Cleo was.
-Well, you never know where Miss Cleo is going to show up.
I'm on TV, I'm on the radio, and sometimes, like today,
I'm on TV while I'm on the radio.
-There's a dynamic energy to her,
and there's a presence to her.
-I guess I would describe it as charisma.
-She's entertaining.
She's got the look.
-All right, go ahead. -I recently divorced.
-Mm-hmm. Congratulations.
-Thank you. -[ Laughs ]
-The thing that stood out about the infomercial was her accent.
-Look at those faces. Those are beautiful faces.
-It was clear that she was appropriating the accent
and that it wasn't an authentic Jamaican accent.
-She was quick on the draw.
She would take these sort of ordinary questions
and launch into sort of, like, very funny,
very unexpected sort of spiels
about whatever the topic at hand was.
-Who asked you to go out of town, the stupid young one,
or the married one? -The married one.
-That's what me thought. Don't go. You hear me?
-This was like the girlfriend you invited over for coffee --
your Black friend that you invited over for coffee.
She was like, "Mm, honey, I told you. I could have told you this.
Oh, yeah, no, no. No, that's the one. He's been cheating on you.
Oh, see, I'm gonna tell you the real deal."
They didn't just want to hear about the future.
They wanted what she gave,
which other psychics and other infomercials didn't give.
She gave you the truth.
-I don't want you nowhere around him --
not in his car, not in his presence.
Your mother would have a proverbial fit.
I once had gone from him. You understand?
-Yes, ma'am. -I don't know that much
about who she was.
I don't know that much about what her actual
mystical abilities were or weren't.
I don't really believe in, like, psychics or magic,
but I do think that there are certain people who are, like,
good at being able to talk to someone and sort of understand
who they are in an instinctive way
and be able to give advice in a way that feels magical.
-I believe everyone has the ability to tap into an energy
that allows you to connect to other humans.
Some people practice it a little bit more,
so they're able to really see auras and understand
the human energy field
and understand what chakras are moving and what's not --
you know, this whole new-age practice.
So when I saw Miss Cleo, I did believe.
-With the help of the spirits and my tarot cards,
I can see your life even more clearly than you can yourself.
-At that point, she was inscrutable.
We didn't know enough about her personal life.
We didn't know anything about what she did prior.
-Who's the real Miss Cleo, right?
Who is the real Miss Cleo?
-There was a documentary came out called "Hotline"
that she was on, so she was hoping
that she would be interviewed enough
so people would see that she was the real thing.
It was actually filmed in my living room at the house.
-[ Speaking indistinctly ]
Check your focus.
Oh, you look wonderful. -Oh, thank you.
[ Both laugh ]
My name is Youree Dell Cleomili Harris.
I'm also known as Miss Cleo.
I am a trained priestess.
I have many ways and abilities to divine information.
I absolutely commune and chat with those on the other side.
Some call them the dead. Some call them spirits.
[ Laughs ]
But absolutely, with the energies
and the vibrations of those that have crossed over.
I would not call myself a medium
because it is so much broader than that for me.
For me, it is a belief system.
Some may even label it a religion.
-She would claim she was a voodoo priestess.
That's what her job was.
-You know, people say, "Oh, I don't -- I don't agree with you
about this, that and the other," and I'll say, "Well, that's not
what your aunt is saying," or whoever the spirit is
that's come over, or, "That's not what your dad is saying,"
you know, and -- and more over than not,
people hear that, and there is a sense of peace.
And -- And the spirits are always so wonderful to me
because they always give me a piece of information
that makes that connection.
-You could sit down with her,
and she could give you the most insight
on what is troubling you the most.
And you don't have to say anything.
She could see it.
-She was disciplined in her practice.
She made sure she meditated. She kept her altar.
She'd think that that really helped her
manage her relationship with the spirit world.
-This poor woman.
She was very, very, very hurt in life.
And two things happen.
You either want to hurt others when you're treated like that,
or you decide that you want to help others.
And I felt that she wanted to be the person that helped people.
-Cleo could read people. She could look at you and clock you.
And I think when she knew that she was in the presence
of people that were open, she would want to kind of go in
and see what she could pull out and also kind of teach you.
-She started telling me about my uncle that had passed away.
I never mentioned my uncle.
She was so specific about his death
and things that he was accused of.
See, this was not even a story that I knew.
I had to call my mother when this was all over and said,
"Cleo said this and this. Does this make any sense?"
She goes, "Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense."
-She had told me about my friend Dolly --
that her presence was there with us.
Dolly had passed away at a very young age.
She had said, "She's here,"
said, "She's holding something up.
She wants you to know she's okay.
You worry about her. You think about her all the time.
She gave you something to remember her,
and she's holding up something silver."
Dolly gave me a little silver ring.
I still carry it.
And it was pretty remarkable.
-One of my fraternity brothers came over.
She said that, you know, "I see
you're gonna have a problem with the left side of your body.
You're gonna be numb, the left side of your body.
Something's gonna happen," and, like, two weeks later,
he had a stroke
and was paralyzed on that side of his body.
She saw it happening.
-Everyone perceived something different from Cleo.
I think that was, like, one of the mysteries of Cleo.
-But not everyone had the same experience.
♪♪
[ Boat horn blowing ]
-Seattle has a thriving Black arts scene.
We've always had tons and tons of amazing performing artists.
-You know, Seattle is a small city,
and it has a small Black community.
And Langston Hughes was the center for that.
I was the director. I was in charge of the space.
So we developed a season of theater
and performing arts events.
She was known for doing plays.
She wrote plays, and she directed plays.
She made an arrangement with us here
at the -- at the facility to produce a play,
and she brought in a lot of the actors,
and the play was regarded as a good production --
good enough that I asked her to be a part of the season.
-I remember her as Ree -- Ree Perris.
Ree was short for Youree.
It always sounded made up to me.
But I'm also the type of person that's like,
"Who am I to question, you know?"
I remember being comfortable with her.
I thought she was a really nice lady,
really interesting, a little eccentric.
-Having a character like that moving through the space
gave us all something to laugh and joke about.
-She could turn into a character,
you know, in conversation.
You know, she could do different things with her voice.
But as far as everyday speaking,
she did not have a Jamaican accent.
And I don't recall if she ever gave any indication
that she was Jamaican.
I don't know.
I want to say St. Louis or something,
but I don't know -- like, Midwest.
And we didn't even ask back then.
-Miss Cleo is a character that was born out of a play
that Youree was working on here at Langston Hughes
called "For Women Only" that she was to play.
And so that idea of this Jamaican shaman psychic
was really birthed out of a character
that she was working on
when she spent a time here in Seattle.
She was under contract and was paid her base amount,
and then it was up to her to pay the actors and different people
that she was gonna involve in the productions.
It was several thousand dollars,
and she got the check and never paid people.
-They were pretty pissed off.
-There was more excuses
than there was actually follow through.
I think that she mentioned having cancer at some point.
You don't want to not believe somebody
when they're saying that they're ill
and they have something going on.
But things started to not add up.
-There were some challenges with her relationships with people.
I didn't know her, really, right?
I trusted in her artistic pursuits.
So there's a lot of mystery around her time at Langston.
There was a lot unknown.
All I know is that one day she was here,
we did some cool plays, and then she was gone.
-And no one ever heard from her again.
♪♪
-Caution -- a tarot card reading
may be very personal and intense.
Be prepared for amazing revelations.
Call for your free tarot reading now.
-I came to work for the Hotline as a suggestion
from my sister-in-law for a source of income
that would work with my schedule.
And so she said, "Well, you should go
on one of those psychic lines." And I was like, "Really?
Those commercials are really silly, you know?"
I said, "I don't know. I..." And she's like, "Just try it.
If you don't like it, you don't like it."
-Psychic Readers Network,
-We're talking '98, '99.
We both were behind the camera with the Psychic Network
for about a year before she became Miss Cleo.
-We had a nice host, and she was wonderful,
but we were losing her,
and they just didn't know what they were going to do.
They bring in this white woman
that looks like she's straight out of Boca.
She's telling stories and flipping cards,
and nothing made any sense.
I mean, we don't know. We -- we're not tarot readers.
And Cleo sees this commercial, and she just goes nuts.
It's like, "What? What -- What are they doing?"
Talks to the producer and saying,
"I was watching television,
and I see your latest commercial.
It doesn't make any sense."
So they hired Cleo to come backstage with us
to set the deck, so we hired actors, we had writers,
but nothing looked right.
Nothing sounded right. It looked staged -- sound stage.
The worst acting you've ever seen.
It was horrible.
-Amazing Accuracy.
-Psychics who are friendly, who care.
-They're trying different hosts. Nothing's working.
They're looking everywhere.
So they hire Cleo to host a show.
-When they approached me about being a spokesperson,
my first initial response was,
"I have a reputation to maintain.
I really can't. I don't want to.
You know, I don't think that you all take it seriously."
Now, this is me being on the line,
recognizing now that this is a business.
And I thought, "Well, it would be nice to do a commercial
where people actually can get some feedback.
And I said, "Look, I'm gonna --
you can put a camera in front of me.
I'm gonna do what I do at home. I'm gonna read my cards.
You can't tell me how to read my cards.
You can't tell me when to read my cards.
You can't tell me what formation to use.
I'm gonna read my cards. If it works for you all, fabulous.
If it doesn't, it's all right with me."
-Caller? -Yes.
-Oh, hello. How are you today? -Fine. How are you?
-I'm doing absolutely fabulous, darling.
Can I get your -- -Wonderful, darling.
-[ Laughs ] I like you already.
-And it blew up.
-It was an infomercial. [ Laughs ]
That's where my head was at.
It was no -- literally, no big deal.
If you want him to believe that it's over,
then you got to stop accepting the booty calls
at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.
You understand? -Yeah.
-She didn't have to sell hard, 'cause her thing was,
"You can come to me or not, but I do have the answers."
Let me take you back five months.
He got out and cussed somebody out,
fi taking him parking space, did he not?
-Yeah. Oh, my Lord.
-The conversations that she's having
on the phone are just like, "You got that right,
and you got that right and you got that --
and you got that right?"
-The greatest numbers they've ever had
in the history of the Psychic Network.
Within two months of that one show,
everybody knew who Miss Cleo was.
-It is my pleasure to welcome the one and only Miss Cleo.
[ Cheers and applause ]
[ Both speaking indistinctly ]
-How you doing, sweetness?
-I'm doing fine. The question is, how are you?
I can't go anywhere without hearing your name or seeing you.
-Yeah, it's a little bit painful, huh?
-I was doing her makeup on the set when we met.
-It was an experience. She was so big --
her voice, everything about her.
-You couldn't help but just pay attention
to everything that she said.
-Whose mother is this that I see that seems to have
a great deal to input. -It's his mother.
-Aha! Now we're getting down to the good stuff.
-I remember that -- that young producer saying to me, he said,
"You realize now that your life
is not ever going to be the same."
-We're very excited to have our next guest here.
Her voice is as familiar as her face,
and her expert psychic advice is just a phone call away.
Please welcome shaman and author Miss Cleo!
-Miss Cleo can't possibly be taking
the whole world's calls, you know?
Even if you are calling and getting a psychic,
it's certainly not gonna be Miss Cleo.
-Our operators are standing by right now to receive your call.
Our phone lines are open.
-21 years ago, in 2001, I worked for the Psychic Readers Network
for one summer as a phone psychic.
My roommate had just been looking in the back
of the "Village Voice" for stuff that we could do to make money.
The first one she found, actually, was for phone sex,
and we thought that seemed great.
But the phone sex people wouldn't hire us
because young people would always quit
the phone sex jobs after two days
because, like, it turns out, like, it's very disturbing work.
-I found out about PRN through a little flier
that was put in my door, and there was an advertisement
if I could do readings over the phone.
So I contacted and was hired on the spot.
I was there at the very beginning.
-I met the owners of the place. That's who hired me.
There was no interview. There was nothing.
"What's your name? That's nice. Go. That desk is open.
Sit there." That's how I got hired.
-I was unemployed.
I saw "telephone psychic" in the newspaper, and I thought,
"Wow, that sounds fun."
I had been reading tarot cards as a teenager
for friends and stuff. I'm like, "Sure."
-They were looking for Jamaicans 'cause they realized that
the Jamaican accent was -- people were willing to spend more money.
It wasn't a hard job to get.
-Call me now for a free tarot reading.
We fought constantly because they wanted me to say,
"Call me now," and I would say, "But they're not calling me.
They're calling all of these other people."
But, you know, by then, I was in a contract.
-So this is how it worked.
First of all, remember, again,
this was 2001, so we had a landline.
They would route calls through to your landline phone.
So what you would do is you'd dial in
to, like, a 1-800 number,
and that would put you in the system.
You would listen to a recording, saying, like,
"Welcome to the network. You're logged in now."
You hang up, and you would start waiting for the calls to come.
-I was working in an office.
There were six of us at the time.
-They said we're gonna be wearing these headsets,
and when the phone calls would come in,
it was up for us then to be ready to do a reading
and, to the best of our ability,
to stay on the phone with people.
That was the instruction.
He started running ads where the first 3 minutes were free.
-Our lines are wide open. Call in now for a free reading.
-Try us right now for free.
-In that 3 minutes, we had to get their names and addresses,
and then the next day, we'd have to call in
all the names and addresses so they'd have a large roster
for mailings for advertising.
-People were calling, paying an outrageous sum to talk to me.
People always ask me, like,
"Oh, were you trained for this job?"
No, there was no training.
-The training that I received when I started the job
was mainly just to go over the script.
-"Welcome to the Psychic Readers Network.
Thank you for calling. I'm Eileen."
I got to use my real name.
"And I'm here to give you
your very own personalized tarot reading.
So let's begin."
-Miss Cleo people didn't know a damn thing.
They knew nothing. They weren't psychics.
They read from a book.
They didn't know what they were talking about.
You called them, and they opened their book, and they said,
"I feel you have a problem. What is the problem?
Why are you calling? I feel this about you.
You are disturbed about..."
All this was in a book.
They gave them more garbage, and they got paid.
That was it.
-The script was total crap.
-Main reason people call is 'cause of love,
and there was a term -- "money or honey."
They're either calling about money or love.
-Did you have a particular question for me, Hope?
-Um, yes, I have a question about this relationship
what I'm in. -Uh-huh?
-We have two different lifestyle, and I want to know,
like, will it last, or should I move on?
-People are open on the phone.
It's almost like a confessional.
There was a couple that called,
and the debate was about oral sex.
[ Laughs ]
And they wanted me to referee.
There was no reading needed here.
They had the wrong 800 number, wrong 900 number.
I don't know, but they were cute.
-Most of the people who call didn't care if I was psychic.
They really just wanted someone to talk to and give them advice.
They just wanted to tell me their problems
and have someone to talk to and have me be a sounding board.
-When I went to become their spokesperson,
I still took calls on the hotline for another six months.
In order to stay in a high priority on the phone line,
your phone calls needed to average 18 minutes or more.
The objective was not to help someone quickly.
It was to drag it out.
-So if you were able to keep people on the phone
for a really long time, you would get more calls.
Usually, I did a fake voice.
I realized quickly that, like,
if I pretended to be a woman, it did go better.
I had Cassandra, who was, like, sort of, like, Southern.
I mean, I'm sure it's, like, totally offensive to people
who are actually from the American South.
"Thank you for calling the network.
This is Cassandra speaking. How may I help you?
Hmm. Every day we're faced with so many choices in life.
I cannot tell you what the future holds,
but on the road of life, we're always presented
with forks in the road, and when we come to a fork,
we must be prepared for the choices that we must make."
She was popular. People liked Cassandra.
But, like, you can only do a voice like that for so long,
especially if you're, like, chain smoking
while you're doing it, which I was.
Myself was, like, a strange thing to be as a phone psychic
because it was very obvious, I think, that I was just a kid.
We were given instructions about what to do
if people did ask for Miss Cleo.
"Oh, hold on just a second.
Like, let me go see if I can find her."
Like, put down the phone and, like, walk around
and be, "Oh, Miss Cleo! Miss Cleo, like, can you come?
Like, uh, someone wants to talk to you,"
and then, like, you're supposed to do that for as long
as you possibly could and then come back and be like,
"Oh, I'm sorry. She went to lunch or something
and she's not here. Like, you're gonna have to talk to me today."
[ Dial tone ]
-You know you made it big when people are making fun of you.
When people are making fun of you, you're golden, girl.
[ Telephone rings ]
[ Laughter ]
-Miss Talula on the line, ready to tell your future.
-When I was doing "That's So Raven,"
it was fun to be able to create that character
loosely based around her, but Raven's version.
There must have been a super fan of Miss Cleo's
on our writing staff at the time.
-Call me now! Call me psychics!
It was also something new and fresh,
and there were many eyes going to there,
so everybody wanted a piece of it.
-Dave Chappelle's Educated Guess Line.
-Hold up. I'm seeing something.
It's your parents. -Oh, God.
-They're angry -- real angry.
They kicked you out for dating a Black dude, didn't they?
-Oh, my God, there's no way you could have known that
unless you knew me.
-Or if I dated four white girls myself.
Thanks for playing. [ Dial tone ]
-Call me now, darling.
-Actually, your accent sounded a little like Ireland
for a minute there.
[ Telephone rings ]
-♪ Call me now ♪
♪ C-Call me now ♪
♪ C-C-C-Call me now ♪
-Princess Destiny. Your future is my commission.
-Ooh, that was my 173rd call today.
I'm starting to believe in myself.
-Hello, darling.
This is Miss Cleo coming to live from our studio.
-When MADtv said, "Okay, we're gonna start
doing some Miss Cleo parodies," it was not so much about her
more than it was about the predictions.
How do we have fun with that?
-Hello. Is -- Is this Cleo? -Yes, baby, it is.
-Oh, honey, you're the one that can see into the future?
-Yes, darling, you got the right Cleo.
-Oh, honey, can --
can I ask you a questions. -Go on.
-Was you working on September the 10th?
[ Laughter ]
-Hey, Miss Cleavon, I'm no psychic,
but I got a feeling you're not even from the islands.
-Oh, don't be messing with Miss Cleavon now.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Miss Cleavon is from Jamaica.
-With Miss Cleo, I thought of her character as intriguing.
I was drawn to her because you don't see,
at least at that time, you didn't see many representations,
first of all, of Black women,
but specifically of Jamaican Black women.
And so as a Jamaican, she immediately caught my attention.
-The light of truth will not be denied. Call now.
-I guess on some level was the question
"Why is this person impersonating a Jamaican?"
-If she just had a New York accent
or, you know, a Wisconsin accent,
it would feel inauthentic.
I didn't know if it was real or not.
But it made me feel like I could trust her.
-There is no one in my circles back then or now
who has ever suggested
that they believe she is Jamaican.
And this is among, you know, Jamaicans, African-Americans.
But it's interesting that, in other communities,
there is almost a defense of that identity as Jamaican.
She tapped into what people believed
were the kinds of characteristics you needed
to have to be a psychic.
It's clear that there was something about
that renegotiated identity that was valuable.
-When we think of Caribbean accents or even African accents,
we're thinking old world.
We're thinking the power of things that we give credence to,
whether it be psychic, mystic --
because when we think of the Caribbean
and we think of Africa, we think of tribes.
We think of voodoo.
Caribbean and African Diaspora in general
has a long history of being framed
as a place that is bizarre, that is other, that is unusual.
And all of those characteristics connect to the fantastic.
The idea that a Black body has these fantastical capabilities
taps into sort of an underlying understanding
I think many of us have of Blackness
as strangeness, really.
So there were things about her race,
I would say even her size and her gender,
that helped to make it believable
that she was associated with the fantastic.
She's sort of progeny of Mammy in some ways
and the mammy figure, who was seen as nurturing but other.
-Us is gonna kill the high-steppin'-est rooster
in the yard and a great big bowl of milk gravy and grits.
And waffles? -There was a level of comfort
that the owners of the Psychic Network
needed customers to have.
And the mammy figure has historically,
though problematically, been a figure
that provides nurturing to the white community.
-Thank you for spending time with me
and allowing me to share my life, my culture,
and my sense of spirituality here on "Mind and Spirit."
-We don't have a lot of back story.
She didn't talk about what went on before.
-A lot of her life was such a mystery,
even for people that spoke to her a lot.
Part of her not wanting to talk about her history --
history was just painful.
The little we do know about Cleo's back story
can really only be understood by piecing together
the different things she told each of us over the years.
-I recall the story going something like...
um, she was brought to America when she was very young
from Jamaica.
-She told me her mother brought her to the states,
in particular Los Angeles, and gave her away.
-Cleo had a sense that her biological mother
needed to do what she did.
It wasn't because she was some young woman
who didn't want the responsibility.
It was deeper than that.
-She gave her away to a Jamaican couple
who took in several children from Jamaica
to give them a better life.
-I think she had eight or nine brothers.
I always got the sense that she was kind of one of --
if not the last one to be adopted,
maybe one of the last to be adopted.
-So this woman that didn't like her,
didn't want to have a girl,
didn't want anything to do with her,
but she promised this woman that she'd raise her daughter
in the States with education, so she would raise them,
support them, and educate them.
-So she went to school.
That gave a little more discipline.
-I remember her talking about how much
taller she was than her classmates
and how awkward she felt in school.
Enrolling her in that private school
was to put her in an environment that was more religious,
more traditional, to kind of keep her in line,
you know, spiritually, sexually.
[ Laughs ] It didn't work, but...
uh...
-You know, on television, they wanted me to appear
like I had just arrived on the scene,
straight out of bush.
Well, that wasn't the case. I was educated.
I actually had a higher up tell me one time,
"Well, don't tell me you went to an all-girl boarding school."
"Why not?"
"Well, we really don't want people, you know,
to think that, you know."
"What, that I'm educated?"
-She was a person that suffered for the way she looked,
the way she spoke,
because she would not silence herself from what her truth was.
-This is the story she told all of us.
But we'll never know how much of it is true.
-Truth is dimensional, my dears.
It is not one dimensional. It is multi dimensional.
And that is why the cards work.
Here she is. There is one...
[ Static ]
-It's about to go down, y'all...
-I used to watch a lot of BET growing up.
I always had the TV on,
and I do remember hearing the voice
and looking up and seeing her face,
and basically going, "Oh, shit." [ Laughs ]
-I hear she's on TV,
doing this character called Miss Cleo.
-It kind of was this trickle down of coming back here
and being like, "Did you see?
Did you -- you heard of Miss Cleo?"
-That's her!
-"You heard about Ree and what she's doing?
She's doing this Jamaican accent role on TV,
and she's telling people's fortunes."
-It was a shock, like, having the TV on
and looking up and being like, "What the hell?"
-Call me now for your free tarot reading.
-Call 1-800-980-8637. [ Telephone dialing ]
-I had callers that would call over and over again
whenever there was, you know, something happening.
-When you are calling at an odd hour
and you're spending $5 a minute,
you're in a vulnerable place.
-They were depressed or they were anxious
or they were concerned or worried
or afraid about something.
They wanted someone who they perceived as psychic
to tell them, to reassure them, to give them direction.
-I got this call, and the woman who called me was crying.
And she was telling me about the difficulties in her life.
I think her relationship had ended
and now she didn't have a place to live.
The call just went on and on.
I think it was, like, a half an hour.
And on the one hand,
I suppose that was a good thing for the network, right?
Because they wanted a long call. But for me, I felt awful.
I had crossed a line with what my own ethics were.
It didn't feel right for someone to pay --
I don't know what she paid -- $100 for the call.
It didn't feel right for her to pay so much money
when she could literally get it for free
at the community mental health center.
-I didn't feel qualified to help them,
and I felt like it was my responsibility
to help them sometimes.
I'm like, "The spirits are telling me,
don't call Miss Cleo.
Like, it's expensive.
You don't have the money for this."
Like, and also, like, I didn't have any money.
I didn't -- I probably didn't even have,
like, $10 in my checking account.
So just, like, there was something sick about trying to,
like, tell people that, like, "Oh, I think
you're gonna come into a large fortune," or whatever.
Like, it just was too depressing.
-The people that worked on the line
were working on the line for as little as 12 cents a minute
to as much as -- as 20, 24 cents a minute.
And so those people are not the bad guys.
Even if they weren't great psychics, you know,
even if they didn't give you -- they were not the bad ones.
-There were a lot of people involved
in the hierarchy of it, okay?
There were a lot of people involved
that were making money from this,
and they didn't want to stop making money.
And the more money they made, the more money they wanted.
-The psychics would get in trouble
if we couldn't give every name and address
for every call we had received.
-They will get your phone number,
they will get your name,
they will get everything you want to tell them,
and they will take you for every possible cent you can get.
-As things went along, we started to hear, like,
I think there were kind of, like, rumors.
-Well, I realized the company was having some legal trouble
maybe in the last, like, month.
It was just rumors. Just rumors.
-I do specifically remember that, you know,
when we would call in to the system
to, like, start a day's work or a night's work,
there would be a message that we would, like, have to listen to.
"This is the president of the Psychic Readers Network,"
or whatever, and he, you know, it was a prerecorded message
where he said, "I know many of you have been hearing
terrible things about Miss Cleo and the Psychic Readers Network.
I want to set the record straight.
Miss Cleo is a woman
of extraordinary talent and psychic ability.
The Psychic Readers Network is for entertainment purposes only.
If anybody is telling you anything else,
you are hearing a lie.
-Those hotlines definitely preyed on those souls
that needed to be seen.
-So that's why it was inevitable to be able to scam people,
because they're going in it with such an emotional desire
that they're not paying attention to anything else.
Those things were powerful, but that was why, also,
it became its downfall.
-If you're up in the middle of the night channel surfing,
you may come across one of those infomercials
that promises you to put -- put you in touch with a psychic.
Most viewers probably just keep on surfing,
but those who stop and call in,
well, they're put in touch with something, all right --
a telephone bill way beyond what they probably expected.
-Call now for a free tarot reading
and discover the truth today.
Call me now.
Call now and try it for free.
-Well, here's one she just didn't see coming.
A legal fight with the government
is in the cards for Miss Cleo.
-Miss Cleo calls herself a psychic,
so you'd think she would have seen this one coming.
Now, personally, I think she should have seen it coming.
-The state of Florida is suing you.
But then you probably knew that anyway,
didn't you, Miss Cleo?
-Hundreds of people have complained
about a so-called free tarot card reading --
one they were charged more than $100.
-Rather than consulting her tarot cards,
Miss Cleo and the Psychic Readers Network
had better consult their lawyers.
-My name is Dave Aronberg.
I'm the state attorney for Palm Beach County,
and I was the assistant attorney general
who started the investigation against Psychic Readers Network,
including Miss Cleo.
-The charges -- deceptive advertising,
billing people who never made any calls,
and sending out illegally threatening dunning letters.
-Which of course means that the people who dial up
for $4.99 a minute are often played for the Fool.
-The Psychic Readers Network obviously thought that the words
"for entertainment only" was sort of like magic dust
that just made their false statement of,
"We're for real," gone into thin air,
that you could say all these lies you wanted,
but as long as you had those three magic words,
poof, they were gone.
But that's not how it works.
I wasn't there to take down the psychic industry.
I was there to investigate a company
that was defrauding consumers.
-We settled with them three separate times.
This is their fourth bite at the apple.
And now we decided to stop settling
and actually start suing.
-Dave Aronberg saw our commercial,
did not like what he was seeing.
I was very glad when I heard from Dave
that somebody was doing something about it,
because it had to be done.
-There were many hundreds, if not thousands of complaints
about the company over years from callers
who claimed to have been billed,
even though they never made the calls,
others whose children who are underage had made the calls
and the phone company had deleted it from the bills,
but then they were getting collection letters
from Psychic Readers Network.
-One of the complaints against Miss Cleo
came from Paula Castro.
-This is the first letter that I received on August 21st,
a collection letter for unpaid services, charging me $289.
-The Castros didn't pay because they say they never even thought
about calling the 800 number.
Then threatening collections letters started showing up.
-They pressure you.
-There were even some complaints from people who worked for them.
All these individuals were complaining
about a company based in Fort Lauderdale,
which just happened to be in our backyard.
There were other cases around the country
involving Psychic Readers Network
that were similar to ours.
Even though Miss Cleo was a very compelling character
and someone who could be seen as credible
because she held herself out
as a Jamaican Shango Shaman psychic.
And how would you know that's not true?
-The case went nowhere
until former employee turned whistleblower
Barbara Melot dropped this bombshell in a hearing.
-There were no Shango shamans working in the call center.
There are no Shango shamans.
-We were going to help in any way we could
because we agreed there was something very wrong there.
-The difference between our investigation
and the ones that had been conducted around the country
was that we included Miss Cleo
as a named party in this investigation.
The others just named the Psychic Readers Network
and perhaps the two owners of the company.
But no one had ever named Miss Cleo before.
And the reason we were able to name Miss Cleo
was because we found a document in doing our research
that was a collection letter given to us
by someone who complained about the company
that was signed by Miss Cleo.
-Since state investigators admit they can't read minds,
they've subpoenaed her birth records.
They want to know if the woman who lives
in this Broward County suburb is Miss Cleo.
And is she really the master tarot card reader from Jamaica
she claims to be?
♪♪
-So a friend and colleague knew about it first.
So she kind of just casually brought it up with me and said,
"You know, you might want to look into this.
This seems like it'd be an interesting story."
I was a reporter and columnist
at the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer,"
which was a newspaper.
Miss Cleo was here in the '90s,
and she worked with this community theater,
and she apparently kind of did the dirty on them a little bit.
You know, she left a little trail of broken hearts behind.
My editor was like, "Yeah, but everybody knows Miss Cleo.
Find out what happened."
And so I just started making calls
and asking questions about,
"Do you remember working with this woman?
What was she like? Where did she say her name was?
What can you tell me about her time here?"
-To be able to come into a community
that you're not from and embed yourself
in the way that she did and convince people
that they should pay her for the great things and her big ideas,
it was just like, wow, like, you know, she left here
and left a lot of people disgruntled.
Then she was able to go somewhere else
and convince people that she was this other person,
that she was a psychic, and that she was a Jamaican woman.
-She told people various stories about herself.
She said she'd gone to the University of Southern California.
She presented herself as a -- as a very together person, right?
Like, "I have -- I have this education.
I went to school in California. I have a degree.
I've studied, you know, like, theater and creative arts."
And the web of stories, it seems, is far and wide.
I just remember looking at the copy of the lawsuit
and the various names on it,
and I just thought, "Man, it's a long list of aliases."
You're Cleomili, whatever.
Like, there's, like, four or five names.
I don't know what this woman's actual name is,
so -- 'cause I didn't have her birth certificate,
so I just called the university and just basically said,
"I work for this newspaper, I'm a reporter.
And do you know anybody who, under these names --
have you ever had a student
either attend or graduate under these names?"
And they got back to me pretty quickly and said,
"Nope, nobody."
-That's the enigma of this woman.
That could really be her.
She seemed to be smart enough and skilled enough
to have gone to that school.
I mean, really, she was demonstrably
an intelligent woman.
-I got some random call one day from some private investigator.
She said, "Hey, I saw you on TV.
I've got her birth certificate. You want it?"
I was like, "Yes."
-She was asked about her birth certificate,
which shows her to have been born in Los Angeles
to American parents.
-But she tried to keep it purposely vague.
You may have this birth certificate, but is it accurate?
"Well, yeah, I mean, I can't dispute that.
But there are lots of reasons
why I speak with a Jamaican accent,
and I'm really from Jamaica."
But doesn't this document prove otherwise?
I mean, that's how the deposition went.
-It's -- It's a fairly straightforward question.
Is she or is she not from Jamaica?
-She is -- She is from Jamaica in as much as anyone
who has Jamaican ties to that country
or to any other country that they claim they speak --
she speaks with the Jamaican accent,
and is as much as Jamaican
as anyone that claims that country or their culture.
-The Western perspective of papers
and legal documents being the basis for who you are
ended up becoming very central, because in our American culture,
legal documents indicate identity.
And I think that here there is, "What is the evidence?
What is the paperwork? What is the legal document?"
But across the African diaspora, the question of identity,
it just -- just takes some intriguing turns.
-The more obvious explanation is that she was born Los Angeles,
she created this Miss Cleo character,
which had a Jamaican accent,
and she lived the gimmick for much of her life.
I don't know if it's true or not,
but all I know is I had the birth certificate,
and to explain that there are 10 kids
and all this whole elaborate story,
and that's why she has this Jamaican accent,
maybe I'm just a little skeptical
based on the investigation,
but this is the mythology of Miss Cleo.
-She was a character on that show,
but the real Cleo was spiritual.
She was a guide. She was gifted.
Sometimes people with extreme gifts
have a hard time handling those gifts.
-She -- She did have certain spirits that she called on.
Max was a personality that she had when she needed to rest.
She would get so exhausted by the spirits
giving her work to do, so Cleo would become Max,
who was a male figure.
Max would come in, introduce himself as Max, you know.
"Cleo's resting right now."
Her gait would be different.
Her speech, the sound of her voice,
the expressions on her face all changed.
-There's Gra-mere. So Gra-mere was very formal.
So I was Patricia to Gra-mere.
She was like a wise, old woman
who's speaking partly in metaphor,
like in a multi-layered kind of speak.
I found myself wanting to kind of understand
every word she was saying and still having a hard time.
-Kind of scary stuff -- it's kind of scary.
In my house now, this is another person in the same body,
because seriously, I didn't know who that person was.
-There were always things being communicated to her, it seemed,
like, almost like a continuous stream.
-She goes, "This is not just a suggestion that I'm making.
I am following what is told to me.
That's my job, that I hear the spirits,
and now I have to convey a message.
And if I don't get that message across,
they get very disappointed in me."
-We have disagreements, perhaps, over the mechanism
of her spirituality, if that --
but, like, it was still very real for her.
-There are some who may insist
that this is classic mental health,
split personality, whatever you want to call it.
-I think that Cleo, as the character
that you saw on TV or the character in my life,
may have been a character
to cope with whatever was going on in her life.
A lot of people do that.
We create personas of the people we want to be
and in some ways, like, fulfill them by trying to act them out.
-I can't see someone choosing to do that
unless they were just trying to deal with some things
that they were not equipped to deal with.
Maybe she had a really nice childhood with loving parents
and nothing but stability and apple pie every day.
I don't know, but that's -- I don't think that was the case.
-I remember her telling me that she first considered suicide
at the age of 7.
So, yeah, her -- her childhood was...
was really, really challenging.
[ Wind chimes tinkling ]
-She had a family member. It was a regular visit to the house.
She was 11, alone in her bedroom,
and I guess that he had made attempts at her before.
And she would run away, you know.
But this one time, he had her trapped,
and she was in there.
♪♪
She had no safe place in that upbringing.
There was no one to trust,
and there was no love, understanding.
♪♪
-When you're all about, like, "How can I get past this?
How can I make it to the next thing?"
you're not maybe thinking clearly.
You're thinking from the point of a --
perspective of a person who is traumatized,
who might not have a tremendous amount
of self-worth and confidence.
You don't think that the person who you really are
is worth knowing.
So you do the thing that you think
is gonna help you survive
and get to the next -- to the next day.
-And if you split a part of you off in order to do that,
you'll keep going.
So whatever part that was that enabled her to live
in that household, it grew,
and it became part of who the world got to know as Cleo.
-All right. This is a very important story.
The future for Miss Cleo's psychic hotline --
not looking good today.
-The U.S. government came in through the FTC,
and they really brought the hammer down.
-My name was proposed by the Federal Trade Commission
when they brought an enforcement action
against these -- the entities
that were promoting these psychic networks,
basically as an arm of the court to investigate
and then report back to the court my findings.
-It was just a normal day, and the federal agency came in
and took all the computers,
I mean, a lot of boxes.
There was a lot of TV stations and so forth, too.
-I had an opportunity to spend a good deal of time
with Miss Cleo herself.
I asked if I could interview her,
and she invited me over to her house in Fort Lauderdale.
She showed me her contract, which she complained about.
She said, "I signed a really bad contract
because they're using my name.
I'm bringing in all this business,
but I'm getting a salary, basically, and no benefits.
I'm an independent contractor."
-Even our current attorney general at the time
thought I was making far more money
until I submitted my tax returns.
And he -- I'll never forget it. He was stunned.
He was absolutely stunned at what I was being paid
and how little I was being paid.
-Yo, Cleo never had a bag?
I mean, the thing that's going through my head right now
is the work that she does spiritually,
if it's real, never makes a lot of money.
If it's fake, it makes a lot of money.
-That first commercial that I did for them,
they paid me $1,750.
And that commercial made them millions.
-She didn't even have the right to her own image.
-At one point in time, it was real clear to me
that the persona that they wanted to create
was quite different from the person that was Youree Cleomili.
It's all about the illusion.
-And what happened to the accident, man?
It sort of comes and it goes, doesn't it?
You know what I mean? -They said, "No, no, no, no, no.
You know, it's all right. You can use a little patois.
Let's see how..." And they would -- they would tell me,
"Dial it up. You know, dial it up.
You're -- You're getting too passive.
We want you more animated."
You know, and I'm -- I'm animated enough. Trust this.
"You're -- You're -- You're trying to create a character."
I'm not a character. I'm a -- I'm a -- I'm a real person.
-Her persona as Miss Cleo became an asset of the company's.
They basically owned her -- her image and her persona.
-Not having the money to go up
against big corporations is very scary.
And there was no hashtag camaraderie back then.
-So when your name becomes a brand,
you really have to have the savvy or the legal counsel.
There were collection letters that went out with a forgery.
My name was found to be forged on a number of documents,
which I didn't find out about until I was deposed.
-She was a paid employee
that was a spokesperson for a company,
and she seemed pretty upset with the company
the more she learned about it.
She was part of the marketing.
I mean, she was in the tarot cards the company sold,
the game boards they would sell, the ads.
She was everywhere, but as far as getting a cut
of the company profits,
it didn't appear she was getting any of that.
We could not tie her to the decisions made by the company
other than being the spokesperson
for a fraudulent enterprise.
-Who's running the company?
Who's collecting the $4.99 a minute?
That's the person who's running the scam, not Miss Cleo.
-Does anybody know that there's two guys in Fort Lauderdale
that were the brains in the operation behind this?
-She is merely the face of a company
that I found was owned by two individuals.
-And so we dropped her from the lawsuit
and continued the action against the owners of the company
and the company itself.
-The two principals were Mr. Feder and Mr. Stolz.
-A lot of people feared them,
and not necessarily in a physical threatening way,
but, you know, they were wealthy
and powerful in the business world.
-They weren't the smartest people.
They weren't the brightest people.
They weren't the best-looking people.
The only thing they were interested in was making money.
-This was a company to try to milk
as much money from your pocket as possible through deception.
People who were calling largely were poor, desperate, lonely.
The company was charging $5 a minute.
-Living the life of luxury, I'm sure, and hiding behind it.
It's just...bottom feeders, really.
It's disgusting.
♪♪
-The scale was enormous.
What we found was they had a nationwide network
of these psychic readers in various cities and towns,
and they would hire individuals to do gig work.
But it was very, very widespread.
They had hundreds and hundreds of these psychic readers.
People were calling Miss Cleo,
but they're not getting Miss Cleo.
They're getting some paid employee
who was given incentives to take advantage of individuals.
-They're disgusting human beings.
-The defendants realized that they were in
for some real difficulty, and so they cut a deal.
-Maybe she saw it coming, but Miss Cleo is going to
have to use her powers to find a new job.
The companies behind her psychic hotline
have reached a settlement with the federal government
that puts her crystal ball in mothballs.
-The companies agreed to shut down their pay-per-call business
and make an expensive settlement.
-The company will cancel half a billion dollars
it billed to consumers and pay a $5 million fine.
-But it was estimated that, over a period of years,
they had billed about $1,000,000,000.
They were being slapped on the wrist.
-And those guys -- are they in jail yet?
They're not gonna be in jail.
They own a jail in Florida? Probably.
-The owners of the company were arrested
in the state of Missouri.
They were arrested in the morning time,
and they had a bail hearing,
and they were back in Florida for dinner.
-I think they may have tried to survive after that, but they couldn't.
The negative publicity from these actions
had to scare a lot of callers away.
Miss Cleo had become estranged from the company
at some point in all this, and the company just --
I don't think could really survive without her.
-Did you not hear the news? I've been dismissed.
But nobody wanted to talk about that.
Nobody wanted to talk about that.
And that makes you angry.
-Hearing that these two random white men
took advantage of Miss Cleo and millions of people
around the country, I'm like..."America.
That just -- there you go, America."
-Once it was off the front page, if you will,
people just -- I don't know --
they either misremember or they don't know
and they kind of guess or they listen to...
what somebody told them some time.
That's why Cleo always used the word "exonerated,"
which, by that time, nobody was paying attention.
-I've been called everything from a demon
by some church shows
to straight out a fraud.
Oh, and a thief on top of everything else.
-A what? -A thief.
You know, and I am none of those things.
-I do think she bears some moral and ethical responsibility here.
You can't put your head in the sand,
say you don't know what was going on,
when all these people are being scammed
and people are being hurt.
The company thrived because they had a spokesperson
that was engaging and charismatic and likable,
and without her,
would so many people out there have been scammed?
Would so many people out there have been hurt?
I-I don't think so.
-Did you feel at all like you were misleading
those who trusted you? -No, I did not,
because everything that I said on the television
that were my words was real.
-It's so easy to point the finger at her
as opposed to the people who were the masterminds
of the business and who made, you know,
tremendous amounts of money off of her expertise, really.
-"Miss Cleo Bilks American Consumer out of $356 Million."
And I had a nephew that showed up a little bit later
and said, "Auntie, you've been holding out on me."
I said, "Look, I want them to tell me where the money is,
so I can go get it. I'm happy to pay my taxes."
-If Cleo has a buttload of money stashed somewhere,
I would probably know it, right?
She was a roommate at my house.
-The industry/the media knows what people are gonna watch,
and it's not a beautiful, kind-hearted conversation
of positivity.
It is the rise and fall of a pop star
and the sex scandal of the high-end media mogul.
-How they portrayed Cleo destroyed her.
They took her identity. They took her name.
They sensationalized her. They villainized her.
Of course that had an effect on her. How could it not?
-I surely did believe that, if the truth was there
in black and white, that, um...
I'm sorry.
-It's alright.
...that surely people would have sense.
People would understand.
[ Sniffles ]
But that's not the way it goes.
♪♪
-It's hard to imagine your very identity being questioned.
"You're not real. That's fake."
-I stand before you today and proudly proclaim,
I am a voodoo woman,
and Y. Cleomili is my name.
-So that every single time you open your mouth...
-So you're probably a little bit tired,
a little bit worn out,
but I don't want you to be faint of heart.
-...everywhere you go, as soon as you begin speaking,
people automatically think you're a fraud.
-You been to Jamaica? [ Chuckles ]
No, she wasn't Jamaican.
-In the Jamaican community. It was just sort of comical
that there was this person on television
pretending to be Jamaican.
And it was obvious to every Jamaican that she was not.
-Not one time did she not speak with a Jamaican accent
the whole time I knew her.
-It's easier for Black people to convince non-Black people
of their exoticism.
Whereas, Black folks -- we're gonna be like, "Mm-kay."
Like, there's a bit more vetting that comes from within.
What it sounds like is that where she was,
she wasn't in a Black community.
It wasn't a whole lot of Black people.
It was majority white folks.
It was easy for her to go into the community that she was in,
that she lived the rest of her life in,
and convince people of who she wanted to be.
-So now we're getting a chance to see the cracks in the facade,
to see the human being.
-"She wasn't from here. She wasn't from there.
She didn't do this. We don't know."
Who cares? I don't care.
-Love doesn't have an accent.
Compassion doesn't have an accent.
-She created this powerful, comfortable character and being.
I get her. I get it.
This is her way to be in the world
and say, "I am worthy. I am valid."
-When you think about the question of identity
and who we are and how we become who we are,
maybe we don't all arrive at it the same way.
-She was not wanting to come out of her house,
not wanting anyone to see her.
We let her know that she wasn't alone,
that she didn't have to try to tell us who she was
because we knew who she was, and it was important for us
to try to get her out of that house
and start to breathe again.
Tim, being, so many ways, the big brother --
he just wouldn't take no for an answer.
-We found where she lived and knocked on her door
and asked her to come to our house one Sunday.
It took every -- practically wrestling that woman into a car
to get her to our house.
The first Sunday she came,
it was very quiet and very peaceful.
And we ate and we drank and we talk and we laughed.
-♪ There's nothing to it ♪
♪ 'Cause I believe I can fly ♪ -Whoo!
-We started having these Sunday barbecues at our house.
Cleo showed up one day, and it was almost instantaneous.
She just -- there was just a connection.
From that point on, I mean, I saw her every Sunday
for the next 5 to 6, 7 years, something like that.
Sunday barbecues were really big at our house,
and she was the cornerstone to all of that.
♪♪
-When I met her, she was just coming out of seclusion.
So she had lived for several years as a recluse,
hidden away from society.
She was completely silenced.
And Cleo -- that's not her natural way of living.
And then she found my coffee house, and there she was.
It was kind of a-a safe place for her.
-♪ Left a good job in the city ♪
-When I had my coffee house,
it was quite a quirky, weird little place.
-Cleo latched onto that place.
-♪ For the answers for all them ♪
-Mother Earth was our local LGBT-friendly coffee shop.
♪♪
I was organizing in Palm Beach County
with a small group of activists for LGBT equality,
and I wanted to go south and do the same in Broward County.
So I asked, "Who out there can help me organize Broward County
to fight for equal rights?"
Cleo said she would do it.
She was one of the few people that raised her hand
and said, "I'll -- I'll help."
I quickly figured out that Cleo was the activist type.
-At the time, 2005-2006,
different bills were being passed
and introduced in the state of Florida.
She was sick of it and was like, "I need to do something."
-She wanted to go "catch a fire,"
which I think is Jamaican for when they wanted to raise hell.
-I was very active in the state of Florida,
standing up for things that I perceive are -- are right
and correct and -- and good.
-She wanted to make a difference,
and she knew how to move people.
She felt like she needed to use what her gift was
to help the community, to help move people
in the right direction.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
-What's up, mofos? -Hi.
-What, Mom? -Hi, sweetheart.
-Remind me to tell you the balance of it.
-So I'm cooking some tilapia.
And she introduced me to the community,
and she took me to my first Pride March,
working for Equality Florida,
trying to collect signatures to stop an Amendment 2
to from appearing on the ballot,
which was basically an anti-gay-marriage bill
that existed before the Supreme Court decision.
Really, that was my first exposure to the gay community.
She would call me her godson.
It was like she is my guardian, and I am her son,
but, like, in a spiritual sense.
I was already a nerdy kid.
I didn't want to add more kind of like --
be identifying with something
that would make me more ostracized.
But, you know, I already knew by the time I was, you know,
figuring out who I liked to look at, I was looking at boys.
I actually knew probably for a few years
before I actually came out, and I came out at 16.
-When Cleo helped him,
ultimately, they helped each other.
-And it was Matt's coming out that was her impetus
to -- to come out, because she -- she couldn't live
the lie any longer.
-She says, "If Matt can do it, I can do it."
-She told me that she was going to publicly come out
and that she had actually mentioned me
in this article for "The Advocate."
I remember her being really excited about it
and feeling like she had the space
to actually tell her story.
It felt absolutely amazing. People were appreciative.
People were lovely, very, very supportive.
-But, like, she kind of, like, whispered it to me
and I was like, "Wait, what?" -I heard she was family.
Then I heard she was a part of the LGBTQ plus XYZ community.
Yes, go ahead, Miss Cleo.
-It's -- It's hard to -- to try to imagine
what things must've been like for Cleo,
because we were so different.
I'm a white, gay dude.
That's, like, a very different space to grow up
than -- in the -- in the 2000's --
than a Black lesbian woman in the '70s, right?
♪♪
-Well, my name now is Matt Sheridan,
but when I was with Cleo, my name was MaryAnn Sheridan,
because I was a lesbian when I was with Cleo,
and I am a transgender man now. [ Laughs ]
I felt just as secure with her, really, as she did with me,
'cause I needed that, too, you know?
I mean, I needed that, and she was there.
She was very supportive of anything
I wanted to do in my life or what I was doing,
my dreams, my aspirations, whatever.
We bounced stuff off of each other all the time.
You know, we did the Pride Festival.
She was the master of ceremonies, so that was fun.
We didn't -- We didn't do a whole bunch of stuff,
but we didn't need to.
When she cooked, too, she was an awesome cook.
I mean, she's the one that got me hooked on sweet potato pie.
And I said to her, "This is my first interracial relationship."
She didn't believe me. She said, "I don't believe you."
I said, "I'm telling you." I said, "Wait, no.
Technically, it is, but I had this really vivid,
realistic dream with Janet Jackson,"
so after I told her that, she got jealous --
jealous of Janet.
I was like, "It was a dream, but it was realistic."
-Cleo, Come on, girl, You can't be mad at that.
It's Janet. I'm -- I'm -- She got a baby at about 65,
and I'm still like, "Hey, honey, I'll be right back."
Like, come on, it's Janet.
-We had a great time. We did.
The only reason we parted ways
is because we just had a little difference.
She was more want to be out and about,
of course, probably because of her newfound freedom.
"I want to be out and about. I'm out of the cage."
-You know, she wanted to kind of come out of seclusion
and start living, you know?
-I was being entertained to do a reality TV dating show...
[ Laughs ]
...where they were gonna find Miss Cleo a girlfriend,
'cause at the time, I didn't have one.
Before I got much more into setting up the pilot,
I met my -- my present partner, so...
[ Laughs ]
...she saved me from weeks of kissing, you know, strangers.
I don't know. -I think if Cleo had
a love of her life,
the one who came closest to that was Lou.
-I went for a walk to the coffee shop.
Patti was outside, talking to this amazing-looking woman
that I didn't recognize, but just beaming smile.
I was immediately attracted to her.
Patti introduced her to me as Miss Cleo.
I never put two and two together,
but Patti then went inside and let us alone to chat,
and we just ended up laughing together and having some fun.
When I met her, I had just come out, and I was 61.
Then I met Miss Cleo, my first relationship.
I was just so thrilled because she was so interesting,
and I was thinking, "What in the world would she see in me,
this white woman from Wisconsin?"
I couldn't put that together,
but she thought that I was funny.
She loved me.
-I just kind of watched it unfold, and it was beautiful.
I think that there were so many things on Cleo's list
that she could check off with Lou.
-I do believe that, when you are ready,
that those things do come to you.
It wasn't a coincidence,
and I don't necessarily believe in fate either.
-Time is manmade. Time is elusive.
People say, "Can you fall in love at first sight?"
Absolutely, you can.
-They kind of moved around each other very, very smoothly.
They appeared to kind of enjoy being in each other's presence.
-So was she ready for me? Apparently so.
And I was most certainly ready for her.
The story about Cleo was she was a deeply feeling person,
felt pain, emotional pain, like everybody else.
I loved all of those things about her,
but the gift that she had was a gift and a burden.
It was difficult.
-I could see where people would judge her.
But, you know, if we're going with the assumption
that the reason that she cultivated Miss Cleo
was to deal with the wound of that deep trauma
that she had experienced, like, she found an outlet.
And that's what we do as human beings.
-She made something of herself,
and you have to as a Black woman.
She said, "I am not about to sit here and...
not do something about this."
-I've sympathized with her over the years as well,
because I imagine that she moved through life
with a certain level of heaviness
that she couldn't lift.
If I can balance my recollections of her
with acknowledging that there are ways
in which she caused people pain,
but there are also ways in which she brought people joy,
then I'm okay with that.
I think, for me as an adult now,
I understand a little bit better, perhaps,
what it must have been like to be her.
-So there's all the wounds, right?
All the damage, and then on the flip side of that,
is this heart that loves fiercely.
-But I think her trauma was driven.
Her trauma was truly driven to become who she was.
If she were here today, I think she would say
it wasn't her intention to hurt people.
-How our relationship ended is not fully known to me.
We had a great relationship.
But, you know, I probably would say, the last couple years,
it was closer to roommate than a romantic relationship.
We were starting to get distanced now.
She was starting to be away from the house more.
She was going over to a friend's house,
and before I knew it, she said, "I'm moving out."
♪♪
-She told me about this dream,
and there would be an elderly woman sitting in a chair
that's off in a distance, like in a cloudy, hazy...
And she would started to walk up to this woman
and the woman yelled back at her, "What are you doing here?
You're not supposed to be here yet."
And that's when she woke up,
and she really felt that she was gone at that point.
You know, she had no fear of it happening.
♪♪
-This is your godmother.
I'm gonna try and see if you're gonna be home.
Call me back, though, eh? Bye-bye.
-I didn't even know that she had cancer.
From what I heard, she had gone on a trip to the Bahamas
as kind of a last trip of her life.
And they didn't -- they didn't make it.
She had to come back.
-She called me just before she went into hospice,
and she just wanted to say goodbye.
I just said, "I so appreciate
everything that you've done for me.
I am so grateful."
My life was forever changed.
-We all went up to the hospital.
-I was like, "Fuck, like, that's --
I'm -- I'll meet you right there."
I just started heading south.
-I was wondering, like, you know, "Should I go out there?
Can I go out there?"
-I probably got to Jacksonville,
and my mom called me and she said....
-"Don't come. Turn around.
This can not be your last memory.
Turn around."
-'Cause she's so far gone at this point
that she's not even really able to recognize us.
-I kissed Cleo's cheek.
I told her we loved her,
and I know that she could hear us and feel us.
♪♪
Till the next time.
-Well-known TV psychic Miss Cleo died today in Palm Beach County.
Terry Parker joins us live from Lake Worth.
Terry, I know you spoke with a friend of Miss Cleo's.
-She was funny and boisterous and, um...
uh...
Was kind of a rebel at heart.
♪♪
-It was a being she took on personally, psychologically,
emotionally, and invested in.
That's why we were invested. Was it accurate?
Did it always come true? No.
But did she make you feel good in that moment?
Did she make you feel that
you can turn that into your own personal reality?
-Was it, you know, performative? Yes.
Was she actually, you know, trying to help people?
Yes, again.
-What she gave to the camera, she gave in real life.
-You got to see the vulnerable pieces of her.
-I want people to change their mind about Cleo.
I want people to see how -- how real this is.
I don't want her to be a cliché.
The real story from beginning of difficulty and heartbreak
and yet her ability to give and to help people.
-And whatever happened that allowed our union to be made,
what a gift.
What she gave us is better than anything in life
that you could desire to accumulate -- wisdom.
-In between all of the parodies, in between all of the lawsuits,
in between all of the scamming, there was a golden truth
that outweighed it all.
-I had someone say to me once, "Well, Miss Cleo,
it's not so much that you tell everybody what they do,
but you inspire them."
So perhaps it's nothing more than that for any of us.
Perhaps it's nothing more than that.
-Her desire and her want for herself
became her want for the world --
to be loved, to be validated,
and to find a place that was a safe haven within you
for your own success.
And I think that's greater than any psychic ability
on this fucking planet.
-Some call me the devil.
They wave their Bibles and curse the ground I walk.
My response? Never what they expect.
I travel with an entourage you cannot see.
Trips to the cemetery just before midnight
with offerings of music, drink, and lots of sweets,
making it possible for me to reach out and touch you,
no matter the country or city.
Can't care what you believe. It's all about what I believe.
But I thought you know -- warlocks, wizards,
masquerading as magicians and illusionists,
they're all real, too.
A most exquisite coup d'état, convincing people
that witches and warlocks and magic doesn't really exist.
How is ignorance so bliss?
Got an itch, an upset stomach,
or a headache so bad you can hardly see?
Doctors can't find a reason. Sounds like voodoo to me.
Laugh if you want,
mock us if you dare, but don't come crying to me
when you start to lose all your hair.
And for the record, voodoo is not bad.
It can heal your body, protect your home,
quiet your soul, block your enemy,
keep you connected with loved ones on the other side
so you don't have to feel alone.
Rude bwoy, fass gyal, poor man, rich man,
my little black book holds more secrets than Heidi Fleiss
and the DC Madam.
What threat do I pose, and to who?
See here, my dears, I've got nothing to prove.
Be slow to criticize what you don't understand,
lest the hair you lost will start to grow back
in the palm of your hand.
Throughout Jah's land,
from continent to continent, we are spread.
Our task is great.
So even if you kill me, those who are left to carry on
have no problem chatting with the dead.
[ Laughs ]
I don't want you to cry.
I want to try and say something to make you stop crying.
I want you to feel stronger.
I want you to feel more empowered.
It's okay if you feel a little bit lost right now,
because later, you're gonna find yourself
and you can take back your power.
Do not feel like a victim to any situation or to any one.
I am what you see today,
and I will probably be that way until I'm ready to cross over,
and will probably stay that same way, even on crossover.
Because that's what I do. I take care of people.
I don't work for the living. I work for the dead.
The living can't tell me anything.
You know, the dead -- they always have good intent.
[ Laughs ]
♪♪