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With Psychic Friends Like These... The lawsuits pile up for Miss Cleo
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
(2:17 PM PT)
By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate Senior Editor

Image Credit: Keith Seidel.

More than a few newspaper accounts of the various legal actions against Miss Cleo's company claim that whether or not she or her minions are psychic is legally irrelevant because Access Resource Services is immunized by the microscopic disclaimer in their promotional ads claiming that all this is for "entertainment purposes." But David Aronberg, the assistant attorney general in Florida, correctly points out that such a disclaimer "doesn't insulate you from deception." He even suggests a more legally appropriate disclaimer: "How about, 'We Are Not Psychics'?"

I'm looking at a "collection letter" addressed to my husband for $119.76 in unpaid "psychic services." The bill is for a 24-minute phone call that we allegedly made to the "Jamaican" "master shaman" "Miss Cleo." This Miss Cleo may be a heck of a fortuneteller, but she's not much of a record-keeper. We disconnected this phone number six months prior to the time of the alleged phone call, and our phone company has rightly refused to pay her. So, she's sent a "personal" letter, urging us to "take responsibility" for our "spiritual journey."

Miss Cleo loves to take responsibility for contacting you personally, on her late-night infomercials, with prerecorded calls to your home and with direct e-mail solicitations spreading the joyful news that Miss Cleo has: "been authorized to issue you a Special Tarot Reading! ... it is vital that you call immediately! ... we know more about you then [sic] you may think. ... our elite team of psychic predictors and Tarot readers can be extremely accurate and should not be underestimated." Amid thousands of such e-mails, and "collection letters," and after callers racked up hundreds of dollars in purportedly free psychic calls, I am one of the many who have been hounded, stalked, and hectored by Miss Cleo and the nutty flying monkeys who work for her. Actually they work for Access Resources Services Inc. and Psychic Readers Network—the companies that pay Miss Cleo—and as a result, these companies are defending at least 11 lawsuits alleging all sorts of fraud and harassment. Since Miss Cleo is hectoring and hounding me, I thought I'd try to get in on the action. I'm mad about these psychic calls I didn't make. But while the claims against these companies range from false advertising to customer harassment, no lawsuit is charging her with the real scam: She's not a psychic.

Miss Cleo's meteoric rise, from alleged Seattle theater-scene deadbeat to television's most recognized telephone psychic, is one of those uniquely depressing American rags-to-riches stories. After the fashion of Jay Gatsby, Miss Cleo—whose real name is Youree Dell Harris but whose aliases allegedly include such creative variants as Youree Cleomili, Youree Perris, Rae Dell Harris, Cleomili Perris Youree, Cleomili Harris, and Ree Perris—transformed herself from an L.A.-born actress/playwright into a Jamaican-born shaman with unrivaled psychic abilities. Plastering herself across late-night TV screens and slithering down your phone lines, Miss Cleo is the turbaned face of an empire that allegedly nets $400 million a year.

The lawsuits started in 1999 in North Carolina, and subsequent suits have
been filed in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Indiana joined in two weeks ago. Most accuse Access Resources of fraud and false advertising, saying they misrepresent their services with promises of a "free" three-minute reading in which most of those free minutes are spent on hold, spelling and repeating unnecessary information, scurrying for pens, and engaging in other non-psychic busywork. As the three minutes end, the meter starts running at $4.99/minute, and callers are often deceived as to when those minutes begin. Then there are the bills, like mine, for calls never placed. And then there is the harassment. Miss Cleo likes to call back and tell you she's had an important dream about you; that you must call her back—or at least call back some paid telemarketer at $4.99 a minute. Some lapsed Cleo-ites report up to 10 calls a day. (A report from the New York Consumer Protection Board last October called "Dialing for Dollars" lays out these practices in gruesome detail.) And Miss Cleo's Access Resources has also evidently set up a rather elaborate game in which phone psychics are hired as subcontractors, with their alleged misdeeds often disavowed by the company itself.
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Dan