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A prediction, free-of-charge: Miss Cleo’s back

Posted by Jose Lambiet | Cash, Scandals |
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| Tuesday 2 December 2008 4:50 pm Print This Post

Any amateur fortune-teller could have seen this one coming.

Miss Cleo’s itching to get back into television.

And the psychic, who now lives in Lake Worth, recently e-mailed her expansive list of friends to ask for their support.

“Hello My Dears,” she writes, “First and foremost, HUGS AND KISSES!!!! I need a favor from each and everyone of you. My publicist is currently conducting an email campaign to gauge how the ‘public’ would receive my return to television. The show would focus on relationships. Your emails will be so VERY IMPORTANT to moving forward . . .

So, Page2Live called Miss Cleo to find out more.

“Yes, dear, we’re shopping around a new vehicle,” she said. “It’s a cross between reality and talk shows. It’s The Surreal Life meets The Tyra Banks Show.”

Miss Cleo says she once was offered a gig on The Surreal Life, the VH1 cable fare that chronicles life in a home inhabited by C-list celebs like Verne Troyer and Vanilla Ice.

“But even for me, that was too surreal and I declined,” Miss Cleo commented. “My new show will be both helpful and fun.”

Sorta like Oprah?

“Oh no, dear, much more fun than Oprah.”

Claiming to be a Jamaican voodoo-trained psychic, Miss Cleo made as much as $10,000-a-day hawking the 1990s fortune-telling hotlines on the tube in the wee hours.

Spurred by her clever come-ons and phony Caribbean accent, viewers went to the $4.99-per-minute hotlines hoping to talk to a real psychic. Instead, telemarketers holed up in an anonymous Fort Lauderdale office took their calls.

In 2001, Florida and federal authorities sued the hotlines and Miss Cleo for false advertising, effectively shutting them down.

And while the hotlines paid more than $500 million in fines and restitutions to millions of callers, Miss Cleo’s credibility took a serious hit.

State Sen. Dave Aronberg, then an assistant attorney general, grilled Miss Cleo about her pedigree. He made her admit she was really from East Los Angeles, not Jamaica. And her real name isn’t Cleo, but the much less interesting Youree Harris.

She vanished from public life, occasionally re-emerging to announce she’s gay or to put out a music CD.

So Aronberg wasn’t all that surprised to hear that Miss Cleo may be on the comeback trail.

“Everybody has the right to make a living and she’s still famous,” Aronberg said. “I wish her well. But she should be careful whom she associates with. She was the spokeswoman of a company accused of deceptive activities.”

Whether there’d be anything psychic involved with the new, untitled show, Miss Cleo said: “No, but I’ll use some of my gifts and abilities.”

3 Comments »

  1. Comment by TooCuteForRadio — December 2, 2008 @ 6:21 pm

    If she is such a good psychic, she should be able to PREDICT how her show would do instead of emailing pals for their opinions.

  2. Pingback by COMEBACK OF THE YEAR « Graney and The Pig’s Blog — December 3, 2008 @ 3:44 pm

    [...] Miss Cleo recently announced that she is making a television comeback. She’s developing another tv show. Miss Cleo says it will be part talk show, part reality tv [...]

  3. Comment by Brian — December 14, 2008 @ 6:32 am

    the only redeeming contribution this alleged psychic provided to society is selling her voice to RockStar Games.

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