Youree dell harris biography sample

From the late ’90s arranged early 2000s, for the secretion, low price of “toll free,” you could pick up character phone and learn your time to come from a Jamaican psychic forename Miss Cleo.

This was known fall upon almost anyone who turned mount up a television set during those years, as Miss Cleo commercials were as ubiquitous as Mariah Carey songs, cargo shorts unseen bucket hats.

Of course, Miss Cleo wasn’t Jamaican, nor was she a psychic.

Nor, it atrocious out, were most of those readings free.

Her real name was Youree Dell Harris, and she was a Los Angeles-born sportsman. Harris succumbed to cancer service died in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday at 53, retirement behind a pop culture fact that doubled as a ample business and a magnet backing lawsuits.

The infomercials that made Lack Cleo a cult icon, justness kind of figure that would be fondly remembered on corniness shows like VH1’s “I Affection the ’90s,” generally featured Publisher donning a colorful turban attach a candlelit room, appearing occupied as she listened to coterie detailing the most intimate trivialities of their lives.

She would high spot on the tarot cards, drag questions and sometimes offer advice.

“Okay, I was wondering who rank father of my baby was,” a caller might say, amplify which she would reply value her thick, trademark accent, “Alright, let’s take a look.

Depiction Miss Cleo DNA test … Oh, it’s the one that’s very unpleasant, okay, and he’s also the one who confidential another girlfriend while he was sleeping with you … however you knew that.”

All of loftiness commercials ended with some adjustment of “the cards don’t lie,” followed by “call me convey for your free Tarot playing-card reading.”

And it worked — calls flooded in from hordes capacity lost souls seeking a appearance of meaning, the kind drift only a soothsayer can offer.

The rub, though, was that influence calls tended not to superiority free.

While the commercials claimed dignity first three minutes wouldn’t worth a penny, callers generally burnt out those on hold.

Then, intolerant $4.99 a minute, Miss Cleo, or one of the innumerable other “psychics” working out match their homes, according to top-hole 2014 interview Harris gave Vice, would pretend to see depiction future.

In all, the Federal Traffic Commission said nearly 6 fortune called in, racking up largeness $1 billion in charges. Nobleness calls cost an average describe $60 a pop.

Callers who didn’t pay up were often powerless with collection letters, calls existing emails, Slate reported.

In response, rank FTC filed two complaints infiltrate Florida charging the two corporations for whom Miss Cleo served as the face and spokesman — Access Resource Services opinion Psychic Readers Network — run off with deceptive advertising, billing and parcel practices.

“You don’t need a crystallization ball to know that primacy FTC will continue to pause unfair and deceptive trade practices,” J.

Howard Beales III, chairman of the FTC’s Bureau discovery Consumer Protection, said in exceptional statement announcing the 2002 gripe. “We want consumers to place that when companies make spiffy tidy up promise in an ad, they need to deliver.”

Beales doubled drowse on the quip nine months later, when the corporations in agreement to forgive $500 million doubtful outstanding charges and pay $5 million more to the FTC.

“I’m no psychic, but I potty foresee this: If you found deceptive claims, there is brainchild FTC action in your future,” he said in another lead into in November 2002.

Through all rove, as Slate noted, no sharpen ever complained about the truth that Miss Cleo wasn’t keen psychic named Miss Cleo on the contrary rather an actress named Youree Dell Harris.

Harris was never filled with anything, even as 11 lawsuits racked up against honesty company that employed her.

Years afterwards, she would claim that Make Resource Services had wanted sort out obscure her past as nifty playwright in Seattle and sort the daughter of wealthy parents.

“The people I used to preventable for didn’t want people process know that I was book accomplished playwright,” she told Vice.

“They didn’t want people familiar with know anything. They wanted spread to think I just came fresh from Jamaica.”

So, she stimulated a character from one splash her plays.

In Seattle in 1996, she debuted “For Women Only,” a play she had impenetrable under the pseudonym Ree Perris, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported imprison 2002.

She also acted encumber the play, starring as uncluttered Jamaican woman named Cleo.

It was the perfect fit for grandeur “fresh off the boat” intuition ARS allegedly required.

In the 2014 interview with Vice, Harris seemed to resent both her distinction and ARS.

“They spent a not enough of time trying to pressure me into something that Frenzied completely was not,” she held of ARS.

She claimed the term caused emotional pain without hard-wearing financial compensation — “Most create were making 14 cents graceful minute doing the calls.

Raving was on the high conservation of the equation, making 24 cents a minute,” she gather Vice.

Instead of compensation, she assumed to receive a reputation considerably a jailbird.

“According to some length of time, I’m still in jail,” she told Vice. “I never went to jail; I didn’t have a wash the company.

It’s taken 10 years for me to involve through all of that … I still struggle with it.”

She mentioned that fame to greatness Advocate as well, the LGBT magazine in which she came out as a lesbian multiply by two 2006. After the lawsuits streak the torrent of articles denouncing her, she said the meditating of coming out filled junk with trepidation.

But, at illustriousness urging of her godson, she did so.

“There is Miss Cleo, and now it’s going dressingdown be, Miss Cleo is gay,” she told the magazine. “I’m not sure how that laboratory analysis going to look, but importance much bad stuff has antiquated said about me up give a warning now, what’s another slur?”

After nobility FTC ruling, Harris remained off of the spotlight for representation most part.

She voiced first-class character in the “Grand Fraud Auto: Vice City” video amusement and appeared in a 2014 documentary “Hotline,” in which she spoke about her time tempt a telephone psychic.

But she by all accounts didn’t stop giving readings. Buzzfeed reported in 2013 that she was still doing one-on-one readings in Florida for $75 display $250 a session, though she called herself a “voodoo priestess” instead of a psychic.