Welcome to Monday Brunch, the start-of-the-week round-up from EI, with a selection of stories about psychedelics and other forms of ecstatic experience. First bit is free, rest is for paid subscribers.
From Philadelphia, news of an unfortunate life-coach who handed over half a million dollars to a pair of ‘psychics’, who told her they could reunite her with her ‘twin flame’ and separate him from his wife, but they needed all her money to remove a curse the wife had placed on her.
The life-coach paid Steve Nicklas and Gina Marks of Jenkintown Psychic Visions to help her win back a man. She was
instructed to buy two white pillowcases, two black pillowcases, six magnets, 24 red roses and 24 white roses. She laid down and placed the magnets on her head, chest and abdomen for 25 minutes while visualizing the man calling her to tell her he misses her.
The victim was then told she had to give more money so they could remove the curse put on her. And they demanded some sexy photos, which they claimed would help the magical process. Needless to say, they then used the sexy photos to blackmail the victim.
The life-coach is suing the two psychics for ‘wire fraud, extortion, RICO violations, fraudulent misrepresentation, conversion, intentional infliction of emotional distress, unjust enrichment, consumer protection violations, theft by fortune-telling, financial exploitation, practicing medicine without a license and blackmail’.
This is not Gina Marks’ first rodeo. She has faced numerous convictions for exactly the same operation - taking tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible targets, in order to remove curses from them.
She even has a nemesis - a private investigator called Bob Nygaard, who specializes in ‘psychic fraud’. Nygaard, a former police officer who now wears a trench coat and fedora, says the police don’t often take ‘psychic fraud’ seriously, but that he’s helped clients get back around $3 million in money handed over to phony psychics. He’s tracked down Gina Marks and helped get her arrested on five separate occasions. She must hate him! I guess if she was a real bruja he’d be dead by now.
Cases of psychic fraud happen all the time. Here’s another case from 2023: 80-year-old Tampa resident Richard Rappaport was persuaded to hand over a million dollars to ‘psychic’ Jaysee Wasso, who said she needed it to ward off the evil spirits around Rappoport. She was convicted and sent to jail.
Unfortunately, New Age spirituality and alternative healing attracts some evil sociopaths who would rather destroy a few people’s lives and take everything they have than do an honest day’s work. There are people like that in this world.
And they can be really good at manipulating the weak and gullible. Gina Rita Russell was a New York psychic who persuaded a victim that she needed to pay more and more to remove a curse from her. She made the victim get thousands of dollars from her father, lying to him that it was for therapy and university classes. When the father wouldn’t cough up any more, Russell made the victim turn to prostitution. Eventually Russell persuaded the victim to get one of her sex work clients to embezzle four million dollars for her!
Maybe the biggest ‘psychic fraud’ of all time involved the secretary of Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the billionaire former prime minister of Qatar…
After the paywall, ketamine spray Spravato makes two billion a year; psychedelic stocks are on fire; is the AI bubble about to burst and take the stock market with it? How some American theologians are arguing that empathy is a sin. Plus a great paper on the risk of ‘guruism’ in psychedelic training courses; the father of a UCL scientist takes part in her daughter’s psilocybin trial; and Trump declares war on NGOs.
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