Part Two: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

She's moved to California. She has started a psychic foundation where she is working to create her own new religion. So by nineteen seventy five, things are really starting to come together for Sylvia. She's getting more and more famous. She's getting paid to speak at events by local organizations

in southern California. And usually what this means is like an Elks club or something well like entertainment, and they'll channel her right, or she'll channel Francine right, so she'll she'll bring in and they'll get to ask Francine questions about aliens or the other side or whatnot. Right, Like it's a game pick, you know, yeah, it could be fun.

anyone to come to me first. I'm always only brought in if they've already consulted a medical professional or already talked to the police and that didn't work. I'm just there to help if they've already tried traditional methods. Never go to a psychic before you go to a doctor, which is like a responsible thing to say, and she would absolutely not be saying if she were like doing this grift today. Right like today you can just do

away with doctors altogether. It's just interesting to me how even back in her day, you had to be like, obviously, go to a doctor first. It's kind of a even the psychics just doctors less than they used to.

so much now. But you're right, like, if she's a real psychic, you would want to go to her before a doctor, because doctors fuck up all the time, and God doesn't, right, Like the spirit will know where your humor? Yeah, right, So yeah, she's she's consulting and whatnot with all sorts of agencies. So she claims and she also starts to

show up on television. Right this is when the beginning of her TV career starts, and she gets asked to come to San Francisco, where she will for the next decade, like almost twenty years, will be a semi regular guest on the local TV show People Are Talking. This is like a San Francisco like local access show or something like that. And finding episodes of local TV shows from

the seventies is very hard. There's a ton of lost media for that era, which is actually really unfortunate, Like there's it's a there are efforts to archive a lot of that stuff that I'm very supportive of because it's a serious problem. That's so much of very important America like culture has been lost from that era. So I can't show you her appearances on People Are Talking from

the seventies. I just haven't found any. But I did find a nineteen ninety one episode of People Are Talking with Sylvia Brown, and I think it's fair to assume that this is similar to the stuff she would have been doing in the seventies. In the eighties, so we're still in the seventies. I'm going to play this clip from the nineties because I want you guys to get an understanding of like what her TV appearances are like in the early stage of her career, right, I hope that makes some sense.

buy the apartment. It's a horrible idea. And then sometime later that guy's wife calls in and leaves a voice message thanking Sylvia for telling them not to buy the apartment because of what had happened in it. And here's that voicemail. And by the way, I do think the person leaving the voicemail is intoxicated, but you can make your own opinions up on that.

in your psychic. Can you believe that anyway? I thought you'd want to know.

that anything was wrong with his apartment. He wasn't buying Eric Clapton's apartment, and the child didn't die because the apartment was bad. The window was left open while it was being cleaned, and the kid hadn't realized and he like ran towards what he thought was a closed plateglass window to like put his face against it or something, and he fell over the side. Like it's a really sad story. But again, there's nothing wrong with the apartment,

Like they wouldn't have died falling out of the apartment window. Right, It's like again, whatever, it's just there's this And I have no idea at this point how much of this is even manufactured, Like if that was like an completely faked story because Eric Clapton's son dying was so in the news. Oh, it's kind of unclear to me the producers.

ghosts mess with the equipment. The recording in the video looks pretty clear to me from recording from nineteen ninety one, but who knows. Next, they take questions from the audience, so she's being asked, now, this is a series of questions about celebrity marriages and celebrities trying to have kids and whether or not their relationships work out, and she

gets a couple right. She's first asked if Maury Povich and Connie Chung are going to have a child together, and she says no, which we will call partially correct. The couple had fertility issues and we're not able to conceive together, But they did adopt a child not long after this broadcast, so partially we'll give her like a half score on that one. Right after that, they ask

about Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's second child. Now, she does correctly predict that their second child will be a daughter, which is like a fifty to fifty guess, but okay, we'll give her that one, right, she's right about this. The next one she's asked about is Roseanne bar and Tom Arnold, and they were at the time attempting to have a child through artificial insemination, and she goes on a real rant here. Her whole mood changes because she

thinks God hates artificial insemination. I can't think of anything worse. She is so angry at the fact that they are getting having artificial incemination. And there's also some weird like fat shaving parts of it too, because when they talk about do you think they'll have a kid? Like, the audience starts to laugh as they show pictures of Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr, and I think they're just like laughing at the fact that they're like heavier people, right,

Like it's shitty, it's kind of gross. But I guess TV in nineteen ninety one. So the last questions he asks about and it is weird to me that she's so negative about IVF. But the next question we get to is my favorite, because she's asked about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who had recently gotten together in nineteen ninety one. And she's asked, like, is this relationship going to last? And here's what she says.

and your accuracy is pretty good. First off, if you're being asked, will these celebrities who are already famous for having a tumultuous relationship, which was the case with a lot of these relationships, she's asked her, they're going to stay together? It's a pretty good bet to be like, well, probably not right because like they're already having a bunch of problems. Also the same thing with like they've had one daughter, do you think their next child will be

a daughter? Fifty to fifty shot, pretty easy guess to get it right. But in nineteen ninety one, Krus and Kidman had just gotten married. They had not had any sort there wasn't anything in the media about the relationship having like problems yet right every all the press about them was positive. So Sylvia guessed that they were going to last, like she's not. It just really makes the

case of what she's doing here. She can get it right when it's kind of a thing anyone could guess, well, but when there's less to go on, she's going to be wrong because she's just she's just blindly guessing.

the job she's being brought on to do. Uh, And the hosts of the show know what they're getting out of her, right, and they're they're pretty smart about tailoring because she likes to talk about metaphysics and aliens and dead people. That's more heavy than you want on like a daily time you about celebrity marriages and babies. Right, Yeah, So this is kind of her at her most public facing like media like like this is like the most digestible Sylvia tends to get. She is a hit though.

She starts doing fairly well enough that she's able to rent a larger office and start hiring employees to handle her correspondence. She brings in two full time researchers for the Neirvada Foundation and even an early computer system because they're trying to map out all of the realities of the other side, and you know, how they're ranking angels and how angels work and trying to figure out the

science of all of this stuff that she believes. Sylvia starts hosting regular hypnosis sessions and psychic readings and begins advertising that she can help clients quit smoking, lose weight, or fix their life in any number of ways. Sylvia says that at first these sessions were just a way for her to fund her foundation for psychic research. Quote it never occurred to me that these hypnosis sessions would contribute far more than money to the foundation and its

efforts to prove that the spirit survives death. So the way these sessions prove that life exists after death is that she starts having clients who start telling her about their past lives. This begins with a guy named Frank, who just he comes in because he wants to lose weight. But when you know it, when she puts some down and hypnotizes him, he starts talking about quote his life

in Egypt as a pyramid builder. We're gonna talk about Frank the pyramids in a second, but before we continue with Frank, we need to make a quick detour to the history of past life aggression therapy. This starts like the origins of this kind of shit, or in like the end of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, you get these occultists and scientists in London who are kind of like like Sylvia says she's doing, they're trying to they set up foundations to try to find evidence of

life after death. And it'll be a mix at this point of like spiritualists and scientists, because they're not that different in eighteen ninety, you know, like there's not a real strong reason to be like, well, ghosts don't exist

based on the science of eighteen ninety. It's like an arguable point really to a lot of scientists at that time, as opposed to I mean, it's still an I guess you could say an arguable point now, but a lot of mainstream scientists are willing to explore the idea that the maybe their spirits right, and maybe there's a way that we can like like figure out science typically how spirits work. That's very much in vogue at the time.

In the nineteen thirties, a researcher at Duke University tries to systematically study the experiences of people with past lives and start documenting them. And then in the mid nineteen fifties, Maury Bernstein writes a book titled The Search for Britty Murphy. This is a fiction book inspired by a real story of a woman named Virginia Tie, an American lady who came to believe she was the reincarnation of a nineteenth

century irishwoman. The book was made into a movie that was fairly popular and this Obviously reincarnation is like a major aspect of a number of world religions, but this book helps popularize the idea in a secular sense for Westerners, reincarnation not as part of an existent belief system, but as something you can take all a caart and if you're a Christian, you can stick it in your Christianity.

If you believe in psychic powers and something you know weirder than that, if you're an occultist or a pagan or a Wiccan, you can stick some Like Americans start seeing reincarnation of something, I can just grab this, take this out of the grab bag of world believes and stick it into whatever I already believe.

So by the seventies you get a number of psychologists and psychiatrists offering what they call past life regression services, where they'll hypnotize or otherwise like put people down and to try to bring up their past lives with the idea that a lot of psychosomatic illnesses and ailments are really caused by If your foot hurts a lot and the scientists can't figure out why, the doctor can't figure out why, it's probably because in the past life, you like lost your leg to a mortar in World War

One or something like that, or got hit by a horse, you know, back on the prairie in the cowboy days, and so you got to if you can access that past life, and that past life can explain what happened to it, you can fix the ailment. That's the idea that a lot of these people are going into in the seventies, and in nineteen ninety one, the practice is pretty close to it's the peak of its popularity in

the late eighties. So Sylvia is heading down very well trod ground when she starts doing this question.

because King Tut was not buried in a pyramid. King Tut is buried underground simply simply not in a pyramid, not at all in a pyramid, the opposite of a pyramid. He's in kind of a basement.

pretty steep decline in Egypt. One of the last significant pyramids was built for the pharaoh Kinder somewhere around seventeen sixty by the time King Tut died. Because of how all of the pyramids keep getting burgled, Egyptian woryald here being buried underground. So Frank's recollections of pyramid building don't bear a lot of resemblance to what we know of

the practice. For one thing, When she asks him, how did you build the pyramids, he says that we had anti gravitational devices that we used in their construction, which is not how pyramids were built. So he's definitely on the we had like alien technology things. And at one point when she's down, Sylvia says that Frank lapses into what she first describes as a steady stream of fluent Martian.

She thinks it's Martian, and she records him talking. She says, she does this with his permission, I hope so, and she sends the tape to a psychology friend at Stanford who calls her back and it's like, where did you get this tape? And she's like, what do you mean? This was just one of my patients. And he's like, those nonsense syllables you said you heard that was a fluent monologue in an obscure seventh century BC, a Syrian dialect that would have been common among pyramid builders. So

now I got to look into this. First off, the.

not like a dialect of Assyrian. I found no evidence that there was like a dialect that pyramid builders would have used, because these were generally like public projects and also like you would have a lot of like artisans who get brought into the work on these projects, but they had other skills. There's not like a language that the pyramid guys use.

you just like normal pastime jobs. Sylvia, however, does not have normal past lives, because she starts interrogating her own and she comes to the conclusion that quote, I'd once been the most beautiful high priestess in all of Africa, and that in a later life, I'd been the first Eskimo to use shoelaces. Now, I don't know how much debunking I need to do, Like Africa has never been one political entity, like a priestess of what. There's a bunch of religions that have exist on that continent, so

many of them over history, high priestess of what, most beautiful? Who, who decided that, who voted on it? Like, and then the whole thing about fucking shit. First off, Eskimo is like a slur. It's a colonial slur that generally refers to There's a couple of different groups of people that it refers to, like the Inuit and the upiic, but it's not a term that you would have used for yourself. If that was your past life, you wouldn't call yourself

in the nineties. Even in the nineties, we knew that uh I did look in to win these like those different peoples had shoelace developed shoelaces just to.

a lot for a long time. I don't think there was a first girl who was like, I've invented shoelaces.

but she doesn't give any detail. She doesn't talk about cases solved, she doesn't say that I talk about specific interactions. She just says that she'd been helping and you know, the police valued her. But she gives us nothing else to go on, and so we don't really get any details about how she used her so called psychic powers to help solve crimes. Until one day in nineteen ninety three, her friend Ted Gunderson, who she describes as an FBI agent.

Keep that in mind, cal she calls Ted Gunderson, an FBI agent, gives her a call. A rider truck filled with explosives had just been detonated under the World Trade Center, killing six people. And you know what happens a few years later as a result of that, it's that attack is the three World Trade Center bombing. And so Ted Gunderson FBI called Sylvia and is like, we got we need your help tracking down the terrorists who did this. You know, the FBI can't do this without Sylvia. She writes, quote.

I'd worked with Ted on other cases, and my respect for him wasn't as unparalleled. Whatever I could do to help him, if I could help it all, no matter what. All he had to do was ask By the time he called me, I had read that three of the Islamic terrorist bombers had been arrested, and Ted one of my psychic input on any others who might be involved. I told her there were five, maybe six men involved,

including the three in custody. Now I got to dig into this cal because since and we'll talk about Ted in a second, but since a total of six terrorists were arrested, Sylvia Clem's victory. Right, I knew they were going to be five or six. They arrested six. I'm right. Look at how psychic I am. But that's not quite accurate. That's not quite an accurate picture of how many people were involved in making that bomb. Right, there were six

guys arrested, but there was a seventh person involved. One of the government's key witnesses and they bring these guys to trial was an FBI informant, former Egyptian Army officer, Emad Salem. With the FBI's help and directions, Salem infiltrated the group that bombed the World Trade Center, and he built bombs for them and taught them how to build bombs using bomb building techniques the FBI gave him. We don't talk about this a lot, we probably should. It's a pretty big fuck up.

are not really making me happy. I wanted something big. I said, I need a detonator, and then I gave him some demands. So they switched gears from twelve small pipe bombs and a big, massive bomb similar to the Oklahoma City bomb. So first, that's a mad the guy the FBI sent in to this group saying, well, they got the idea to do one big bomb because I told them it would work better than twelve pipe bombs, which already I would say if I'm a psychic, that

makes him involved in the creation of this bomb. Now what happens next is a little unclear to me, but per a nineteen ninety three New York Times article by Ralph Blumenthal, it looks like the FBI found out that there was a cell of terrorists in New York who were working to build a bomb to attack the World Trade Center. So they come up with an initial plan to infiltrate a mad into the group and have him

get basically provide them with fake ingredients. So they're going to build a real bomb, but the explosives inside it are fake. So the mechanics of the bomb would be real, but there'd be fake stuff inside of it, so the bomb doesn't work when they set it off, and then they arrest everybody. Right, that's how you'd think something like

this should go, right, if you're gonna do this. However, that plan was called off at the last minute by an FBI supervisor who had a different plan about how to use mister Salem, and it's it's unclear what his plans were. A lot of this is very murky because it's the FBI. Lamb may have had a feud with his supervisor. Ultimately he's pulled off the case, and when he's not in the group, they succeed in finishing the bomb that he'd helped them start building, and they detonated

in the World Trade Center. It is unclear how much Silim actually helped them and how much of the how much of what the bomb they used he had had a hand and we really don't know, but the evidence we have does suggest that he helped them figure out some aspects of bomb making. Either way, Sylvia's psychic powers

gave her no hint that this guy existed whatsoever. For her part, Sylvia takes a lot of pride in the fact that during her recorded interview, which is a real interview, she told her friend agent Gunderson, quote, one of the men you need to and I'm doing the psychic hand thing here. If you can't see one of the men you need to look for has a short build, wiry black hair, black eyebrows. There's an M on there, an S, S, A l Z E M something, salzeon, Salzemon Mon, okay, Salzemon,

And she predicts one of the men is named Salzamon. Now, one of the men who had already been arrested at that point was named Mohammed A Salama, which isn't really all that similar to Salzemon. They start with an S, otherwise very different names. I would say, you got it wrong. It's like I'm going to have a guest for a podcast. I'm reading a K. Kevin Calvin, Oh cow, I got it right, perfect, Like, no, I didn't. I didn't foresee anything.

And this is cold reading, right, that's the technique she's using, right, This is that's where it's a very old psychic frat. You start with I'm hearing a and you start going through a couple of different and someone of the adults would be like, oh, I had an aunt who was if you said m was Mary or my cousin Mike, you know, and then you kind of you you zero in from there and you kind of refine the grift a little bit. This is cold reading. That's what she's doing.

In this interview, she writes about getting this wrong, no doubt about it. I was off by a few letters. But when Ted told me they had arrested someone named Saloma, it was this close enough that I screamed, you got him. Obviously she accomplished nothing at all, but she carts this around as a he was they had him in custody. When she's interviewed, she doesn't do shit. Oh that said, I need to point out here it's not accurate for her to say you got him to Ted Gunderson because

and here's the fun part. Ted Gunderson wasn't an FBI agent in nineteen ninety three, and had nothing to do with arresting the men who bombed the World Trades It.

McMartin preschool trial. He's the guy like digging up stuff in the fucking yard of the McMartin preschool and making public statements about I can tell from that children were sacrificed here, babies were murdered. Right, He's that fucking lunaty right.

US government to slander the far right. Later in life, he wrote copiously about child slave labor in underground alien controlled facilities. He's like, there's a white A big part of QAnon is the belief that there's these underground like evil military bases where the aliens are like sucking adrenochrome out of kids heads. Ted Gunderson helped start all that, Like he is a foundational figure in American conspiracism. So

that's good. Yeah, good that he She's working on this guy, so whatever he thought.

with law enforcement. The Skeptical Inquirer actually filed a series of requests for FBI files because they wanted to know did she have any relationship with the bureau whatsoever did she do anything for them and the FBI. The short answer is no. The FBI has no record of her

ever helping any agent on any case. That doesn't mean they had no record of her, though quote recently obtained FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship with them law enforcement and showed that the only interest the agency had in Brown was investigating her for fraud. So she was involved with the FBI, but not in a good way.

unable to identify the main records responsive to FOYA. Ultimately, the Inquirer concluded there is no documentation released by the FBI to support the claim that Brown conducted any psychic readings for the FBI, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Gunderson's name appears nowhere in her FBI file, and the topics in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI. Thus, there is no evidence from the records that Brown was involved with the agency that said. She has a criminal

record herself. There's a criminal complaint that get filed against her in Santa Clara County, California, on May twenty sixth of nineteen ninety two, and it alleges that Sylvia and her husband at the time I think this is husband number three, had been selling securities under false pretenses. And this is really good. I want to quote from the

Santa Clair Chronicle here. Although telling a couple their twenty thousand dollars investment was to be used for immediate operating costs, the complaint stated the Browns transferred the money to an account for the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research. Just one month later, in April of the nineteen eighty eight, the

complaint stated, they declared bankruptcy in the venture. So the idea is this is like a gold mine that they're selling shares in basically, so it's like a securities fraud scam and they're just taking the money and instead of investing it into this mine, they're putting it directly into the foundation and just robbing people per during the like the pair's arraignment San Francisco or the chronical note in quote, Sylvia Brown claimed to have strong psychic feelings that the

mind would pay off, but it doesn't. And she and her husband Kinzil Dalzel Brown, and that's where she gets the last name Brown, plead no contest to a felony charge and are made to pay back their victims, right, so they each get a year of probation and now they're felons. So that's good. We got a little gold con in here. You know, this is kind of a law.

She does a lot of conning of people in banks to fund her foundation, which kind of I had just said she was starting to see success, and that's how she writes it. And most of the articles on her will say that, like, yeah, in the seventies and eighties, she builds a larger and larger business. The Skeptical Inquirer's reporting makes it look like she probably wasn't ever very successful prior to the late nineties. She's just stealing money to fund her foundation. People aren't paying her for her

psychic She's a total fraud in that regard. Right, we'll talk a little bit more that. I do want to note Sylvia and Kensel are estranged at the time that they get charged with felonies, but she keeps his name and adds an E to it. I don't know why. I just kind of think that's.

fake loans for her business. They know, well the loans are real, but she's lying on her loan paperwork. They note that her fraudulent advice also caused multiple businesses sustained losses, So she's also getting money for the foundation by giving business advice that's fraudulent. Most of what she's doing is falsifying financial statements to enhance her net worth and lie that she's worth two or three million dollars when she's

not worth anything close to that. To get these hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually well over a million dollars in loans. The FBI notes that her loan proceeds went to so an extravagant lifestyle, and they have her dead to rights and don't prosecute because the US attorney decides there's insufficient evidence of criminal intent. Basically, we know she got all this money, and we know she lied on our loan applications, but she may have believed the business could work.

about Kermit's life caused nine to eleven? No, why it's fucking crazy?

does continue. It's also weird to me. After her fraud conviction, she keeps working with police departments. There are some who hire her. In nineteen ninety seven, the Thibodau, Louisiana police department pays her four hundred dollars to consult on the murder of a priest. So this priest has been killed and Sylvia is brought in. She tells the authorities the priest was killed by a young mulatto homosexual who was

enraged by the priest's rejection of his advances. So basically she blames it on a non white person who was gay who hit on this priest and then murdered him out of rage. And she said that someone with a street name of King had had gang people do the murder, which I'm sure is also more racism right now, this murder is eventually solved ten years later, the culprit, Derek Adomes, had murdered the priest and a robbery gone bad. Nothing no gay stuff, no gangs, just a guy who killed

another dude in a robbery. Happens all the time.

appearances on the Montel Williams Show. As best as I can tell, the relationship starts in nineteen ninety because Montell wants to do a Halloween episode about the Haunting of the Queen Mary, which is like this, Sophie, it's like a boat you can tour that's like off the Long Beach, right, yeah, right, and you know it's an older boats there's I think supposed to be ghost on it. So she gets brought in there like we need a psychic. Montell's people like,

we want a psychic for this episode. They bring in Sylvia. She does a really good job on the episode because she knows how to entertain an audience, and Montell's like, you're great. They hit it off and he keeps having her on. Right, It's just a good match. Montel provides her with instant fame and legitimacy, treating her with casual deference and opening her up to a whole world of major entertainment figures. She does a whole series about angels

on Montell's show that so successful. Larry King wrings her on his show to do the same thing, to talk about how and to have callers tell stories about how angels save their lives, and she'll explain how angels really work. Right, it's very nineties, but like she is, you know, by the time you're on Montela and Larry King you're pretty prominent, right. It doesn't get a lot bigger than.

was always the same. During a crisis, a stranger arrived seemingly out of nowhere, had a profound impact on the crisis, carrying a drowning woman out of the sea and delivering her safely to the beach, removing a trapped driver from a badly damaged car moments before it caught fire, laying hands on the forehead of a feverish child on the hospital seconds before the fever coincidentally broke, and then disappearing before anyone could find out who they were and thank them.

And these are the angel stories people tell. And I get why people believe in this, as someone has had like loved ones just like die tragically and not had an angel, it does kind of render like, well, why why don't the angels help everybody?

sell very well, she makes a shitload of money. And this is all after the Montel stuff. Yep, all after the Montell stuff. This is all in the late nineties, right. In nineteen ninety eight, she co writes the book Adventures of a Psychic with Antoinatte May, in which she blames her nineteen eighty eight bankruptcy on her husband Kensel's attempts to hide his criminal behavior. She does not acknowledge being

convicted of a felony for gold mine fraud. Per the Chronicle, she laments that while ignorant, people say, well, if you're so psychic, why didn't you blank? The answer, she says, is that I'm not psychic about myself. So she is consistent about that, But like, that doesn't answer the question of why did you defraud people for a fake gold mine? Now, despite all these very obvious lies and his history of failed predictions. She's really good on TV, so she keeps

getting invited on Montell's show. All Sylvia has to do is make sure that every word out of her mouth is a lie per the skeptical inquirer. In her November two thousand and four appearance on The Montell william Show, Brown said, I remember when I was working on the Bundy case talking about Ted Bundy. Outside of this offhand comment, there's no evidence to affirm that Brown worked on a Bundy case, much less the case of serial killer Ted Bundy,

whose capture was not connected to a psychic. So she should just start dropping this whenever a famous murder or crime or terrorist act's say, oh I helped on that I consulted. I can't talk about it, but.

But what's interesting to me about this is that Amandaberry's mom is actually responsible for the only verified contact with the FBI that Sylvia ever had, per the Cleveland Plaine dealer. At me Allier's request. FBI agents investigating Amanda's disappearance met with Miller after the show to discuss Brown's other psychic views on the case. Special agent Kelly Liberty said Brown said she envisioned Amanda's jacket and a dumpster with DNA

on it. So she tells them the psychic told me that my daughter's jacket was in a dumpster, it was covered in blood, and the FBI is like, okay, we'll look into it. That's her only real connection to the FBI. Wow, that's the only one that there actually is. Now, when the real abductor was caught, most people would be ashamed. Brown took a victory lap, even as the media rightly lambasted her for wrongly declaring a woman dead, because well,

here's the thing. Sylvia had gotten the fact that she was dead wrong obviously, but she was right about who did the crime, because she predicted that Amanda was abducted by a sort of Cuban looking man. Oh maybe twenty one or twenty two. Now, the actual culprit was first off born in Puerto Rico, and second was in his forties. Yeah, just wrong. She also described him as short, and he

was of average height. She's wrong about everything. In a statement posted to her Facebook page following Barry's dramatic escape, Brown acknowledged that she'd been wrong about her death. Writing for more than fifty years as a spiritual guide in psychic when called upon to either help authorities with missing persons cases or to help families with questions about their loved ones, I have been more right than wrong. If there was ever a time to be grateful and relieve

for being mistaken, this is that time. Only God is right all the time.

in the case. In two thousand and five, she gave her reading on Montel to Tamara Ivy, the mother of a murder victim named Dustin. She blamed a teenage boy and a young dark haired woman, one of whom was a sexual predator and had used a rock to kill Ivy. Then she promised the case would be solved soon. There

is no evidence that Dustin was sexually abused. Police ultimately charged his brother for the murder, although his brother was found not guilty at trial, so the case is still unsolved, and she says it would be solved quickly, so again wrong. That same year, per the skeptical inquirer, Sylvia Brown's November thirtieth, two thousand and five reading for Samantha Materer, mother of

Christopher Mader, had a much clearer outcome. Brown gave the mother a name, which was again censored, and claimed Christopher's murder stemmed from the killer not liking the food at the bar he worked at. Then later the killer saw him passing by and shot him. Brown also told the mother to start looking where he ate breakfast. Matthew Coral and Sean Myers were charged with the murder, and Coral

was found guilty and Myers pled guilty. In twenty twelve, the two had attempted to rob Mader, again totally fucking wrong. Perhaps her most devastating fuck up was in two thousand and two, an eleven year old boy, Sean Hornbeck went missing while riding his bike. Shawn's parents went on the Montel Williams Show, and Sylvia told them their son was dead and that his body would be found buried beneath two boulders per an article on Grunge. Fortunately, not everyone

believed her. When a boy named ben Ohenby went missing. In two thousand and seven. Journalist Michelle McNamara, who would later be credited for helping to identify the Golden State Killer, connected Hornback and Owenby based on physical similarities and their ages when abducted. Sure enough, it was McNamara who was right. When Omby was found by law enforcement four days after his disappearance, they were shocked to find Hornbeck was still too.

He was still fucking alive. She did it again. She was wrong about another person that she declared dead to their families. It's great that he was alive, Thank fucking God.

wrong kid still. Her ex husband Gary Duffrayan condemned her, saying the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious. Yeah yeah, clearly, Yeah yeah, uh yeah. It's all pretty bleak. And there's a lot of these that we could go through, Like, there's there's so many of these different like cases. The skeptical inquirer has like

a whole list of them. And even in the cases where she's kind of right, where like she got the the murder, the fact that someone was murdered right, and more or less the cause, she's always wrong about where the body is, what happened to it, all that stuff. Now, Sylvia doesn't limit her predictions to crimes or the personal

lives of her clients either. In her two thousand and five book Prophecy, Sylvia wrote that after Pope John Paul the Second passes, there will only be one more elected pope, and wrote he will be succeeded by what is essentially a triumvirate of popes. That's not what happened. I don't have to bust that myth. We all live through it. We're several popes down now, we've been going through popes left and right. You know, still it sounds fun having

three popes, but not yet palooza yep. In two thousand and eight, she wrote a book called End of Days, in which she predicted there would be a manned mission to Mars in twenty twelve, and in twenty eleven she predicted Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in that next

year's presidential election. All wrong. In her later years, Sylvia attracted increasing criticism for being wrong about everything, but she stayed on tel v TV until late in her life and continued to give eight hundred and fifty dollars readings to thousands of customers who trusted her implicitly. On her website, she claimed an accuracy rate of between eighty seven and

ninety percent. A twenty ten analysis of one hundred and fifteen predictions she made on The Montel Williams Show, done by The Skeptical Inquirer rated her success as roughly zero percent. To really make that point for you, cal Sylvia predicts her own death in two thousand and three on The Larry King Show. She tells Larry that she would die on a peacefully at age eighty eight. She actually dies eleven years earlier, age seventy seven, on November twentieth, twenty thirteen.

Wrong right up to the end, barrel.

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