I made a post about stopping Sylvia Browne last year, but I wanted to touch on it again. It does seem that more and more people are realizing she is a giant fraud, and with the cancellation of the Montel Williams Show she will be getting less and less of the spotlight.
When Sylvia does go on the Montel Show she usually meets up with a couple families who are looking for missing people. StopSylviaBrowne.com webmaster, Robert Landcaster, has compiled many of Sylvia Browne's predictions. It's amazing how many times she has flubbed, and people still think she is a psychic... they buy her books, go to her lectures and cruises, and pay tons of money for personal or phone readings. Sylvia also has a jewelry line, charging from $70.00 to $475.00 for spiritual jewels.
Robert Landcaster points out that it is nearly impossible for anyone to check up on most of the predictions she makes to members of Montel's show. Most people ask things about their love life, some ask if their dead relatives and friends continue to watch over them... these things are impossible to check out.
Fortunately, it *is* easy to check out her answers to grieving family members when in comes to missing persons' cases. Robert Landcaster had this to say on his website:
Many answers she gives to audience questions are either totally unverifiable (such as "Your spirit guide's name is Joe", "You have five guardian angels", "Your mother made it to the other side", "In a past life you were a Confederate soldier", etc.). Others are impossible to verify without following up with audience members years later ("You will marry a woman named Sally", "You will have three children," "You will meet your future spouse in a year", etc.). Since the audience members are generally anonymous, it is impossible to test these readings for accuracy.However, one type of reading she gives on the show which we are sometimes able to test are her readings regarding missing person cases and homicide cases. The details given by the person being "read" (such as the name of the missing/murdered person) can make it possible to research the case. And, if the case was later solved, we can see whether or not Browne's statements during the reading were found to be true.
I have yet to find a single, documented case where Browne was substantially correct - or of any use to law enforcement - in any of her readings regarding missing persons or homicide cases.
Williams: Sylvia, we just looked at this tape. Please welcome Audrey to the show. Audrey, come on up here. Come up here.
(Mrs. Sanderford enters from audience, sits by Sylvia Browne. There is a brief pause, after which Sylvia Browne speaks.)
Browne: She’s… not… dead. But what bothers me – now I’ve never heard of this before, but for some reason, she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro. Or Kukoura. I don’t know anything about it, but…
Williams: Kukouro?
Browne: Kukouro, Kukoura. There can’t be that many places…
Williams: There’s also a Kuro.
Browne: No, no. This is… This is…
Williams: No, but two…
Browne: This is many syllables. Kukouro.
Browne: So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery.
(A photo montage of Opal is shown over the following.)
Williams: You know what I can do for you, Audrey, we can put Detective Joe Culligan on this…
Browne: Yeah, do it.
Williams: … and see what we can find out anything on this.
Sanderford: All right. Thank you.
(End of photo montage.)
Williams: We… we’ll… you see Sylvia, she was playing… Opal was playing out in front of the house, within earshot of Grandma and Grandpa and gone.
Browne: It doesn’t… It can be that quick. I know.
Williams: What… what, did somebody drive by and pick her up? Who is it?
Browne: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-uhh. It… Yeah, it was a man. He wasn’t Asian. He was white. And then he sold her, like, on the Asian market of some kind.
Sanderford: Oh, gosh…
Browne: And Montel, you know, I’m so afraid. I’m getting more and more of this now.
Williams: But you know what? I’m going to tell you something. We… we have heard more and more about this.
Browne: I never used to hear about this.
Williams: Child… children are being… you look at milk cartons and you see missing children. Some of them have been taken other places on the planet.
Browne: Mmm-hmm. Exactly.
Williams: Okay. Maybe we… we’ll have to do a show about it. (To an audience member) Yes ma’am. You had a question.
From this point on, Montel and Sylvia take unrelated questions from the rest of the crowd. Mrs. Sanderford is still seated, on camera, and continues looking understandably distraught throughout.
According to friends of the family, despite Montel Willams’ promise of help, the family never again heard from Williams or Browne.
Typically, when Sylvia Browne does a reading on the Montel Williams show, we have no way of knowing whether she was right or wrong.
Not so this time.
In August of 1999, convicted child molester Richard Lee Franks was arrested and charged with Opal’s abduction. He admitted to having picked her up and given her a ride (the children who witnessed Opal’s abduction say that a man grabbed her, struck her when she screamed, threw her into his truck, and drove off with her).
Franks was convicted of Opal’s abduction in September of 2000, and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.
In late December of 2003, the skeletal remains of a small girl were found in a remote area near Fort Worth, Texas. The pink Barbie tennis shoes found with the remains matched those Opal Jo was wearing when she was abducted. A few days later, Tarrant County medical examiners announce that DNA extracted from a tooth confirmed that the remains were those of Opal Jo Jennings. The cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head.
Was Opal still alive when Sylvia talked with Mrs. Sanderford? Not according to a friend of Opal’s family, who says “It was determined that Opal was killed by trauma to the head with(in) several hours of her abduction.”
Was Opal in Japan? No. She was found 13 miles from where she was taken, in Texas.
It would seem that the only thing that Sylvia Browne got right in the case was the fact that Opal had been abducted by a white man. Not only is this not a very impressive “hit,” but it was already known thanks to eyewitnesses, and had been reported nationally. It would have been easy for Sylvia to find this information on the news or on the web, and to drop it into this reading to help convince the family she knew what she was talking about.
But no matter how wrong her reading was, Sylvia didn’t have to worry, since the Montel Show would not be doing any follow-up segment.
Sylvia Browne’s supporters like to talk about how much “comfort” she brings to people.
I wonder how comforted Mrs. Sanderford and the rest of her family felt.
It is bad enough that Sylvia Browne gave them the false hope that Opal was still alive. But she planted in their heads the image of their little girl in “white slavery” - which generally refers to forced prostitution - on the other side of the planet, where they would have had almost no chance of ever finding her. They had to live with that thought for the next four years, until Opal’s remains were finally found.
When confronted with failures of her predictions and readings, Sylvia Browne likes to say that she can’t be right all of the time. If that is the case, why on Earth would she ever say something as horrific as this to a family unless she was 100% certain it was correct?
But if Sylvia Browne is simply a cold reader – as I believe she is – then this is about the cruelest, most disturbing example of cold reading I have ever seen.
July 8, 2008 at 2:58 PM
I agree with you and Mr. Lancaster. I have read his sight for quite awhile and am a big fan of his. I don't understand why people continue to make excuses for her giant "blunders" she has done more harm than good to a lot of people. Hopefully one day people will see through her lecherous lies and outlandish "predictions" Until then stopsylvia.com is helping reach many of her supporters and giving them something to think about.