Remember the beloved Miss Cleo from those psychic hotline commercials and her famous line “Call Me Now?” She sadly passed away on July 26, 2016 in 2016, but her legacy and hype surrounding her brand was quite an interesting one. In life she eventually moved past it but we can all learn something from her story and how much she earned from her work.
The multi-million dollar Psychic Readers Networks hotline blew up like a spontaneous combustion, after accusations started flying that not only was Miss Cleo and her Jamaican accent faker than a $3 bill, but that the whole organization was scamming folks. Then the lawsuits piled up, with the most significant one coming from the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a lawsuit against Cleo and The Psychic Readers Network for “unfair and deceptive trade practices.”
I’m sure Miss Cleo wished she could have used her tarot cards to predict THAT was coming, but the stars just didn’t line up that way for her at the time. However, shortly before her 2016 passing, she had a WHOLE lot to say about how much money she REALLY made, on what she’s doing now (which is interesting), and on her allegedly fake Jamaican accent….
MISS CLEO SAYS PSYCHIC READERS NETWORK PAID HER VERY LITTLE
Miss Cleo revealed that although The Psychic Readers Network made millions, she DID NOT, because she was just an EMPLOYEE who signed a bad contract. It wasn’t until she learned, from an FBI investigation, just how much the psychic company was actually earning, while she was earning crumbs in comparison:
“I’m going to quote you a number from the FBI, [says Cleo]. They [The Psychic Readers Network] were pulling down—[using] my face, my talent—$24 MILLION a month, for two years straight. For the first 30-minute infomercial I did for them, I MADE $1,750 for the two and a half days on set. I had a bad contract. But everybody else thought I had more money than God, and my response to that usually was, ‘Well, God is a poor son of a b-tch.’”
Dang…just $1,750, while the company was getting $24million monthly?!!! Why they stuck Miss Cleo for her papers?!! CLEO SPEAKS ON HER ALLEGED FAKE ACCENT>>>
MISS CLEO ON HER “FAKE” ACCENT
Miss Cleo wanted everybody to stop calling her accent fake. On the Psychic commercials back in the day, she was branded as a ‘Jamaican mystic,’ but in 2002, after court documents exposed that her birth name is Youree Dell Harris and that she was born in Florida to American parents, Miss Cleo caught hell over it from the public. But in her 2014 Vice interview, Miss Cleo said that she did grow up in America, but that her parents are of Caribbean decent and that her mother made her speak with an American dialect. But up until the last days of her life (including within that 2014 interview), Miss Cleo was still speaking in the same Jamaican accent that she had in the Psychic commercials. So we still don’t know if that means her accent was fake or not, but hey, at least she gave us something.
At any rate, we salute Miss Cleo for adding nostalgic memories to the 90’s soundtrack of our lives. She was most definitely entertaining and continues to be sorely missed. Rest on queen.
