Trailer Gives Glimpse Of ‘Miss Cleo: Her Rise & Fall’

The Lifetime network shared the trailer for a new movie called Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall. It shows Lady of Rage, a former Death Row Records rapper, playing Miss Cleo, a tarot card reader who offered free calls to people in infomercials to tell their fortune in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many late-night TV viewers at that time may be familiar with Miss Cleo’s catchphrase “Call me now.”

Earlier this year, Deadline reported that actress Sanaa Lathan, known for her roles in the 1998 movie Blade and other films like The Best Man, Love & Basketball, Disappearing Acts, and Brown Sugar, was set to play Miss Cleo. Obviously, they've changed their plans.

Miss Cleo, who spoke with a very strong Jamaican accent, was actually from Los Angeles. In the film’s trailer, a relative of Miss Cleo calls her out for supposedly "mocking" her Jamaican heritage. The movie also shows how Miss Cleo's successful scam brought in $24 million for the Psychic Readers Network where she worked.

However, the movie trailer suggests that Miss Cleo, whose real name was Youree Dell Harris, didn’t mind her dishonesty because it allowed her, as a single mother, to pay her bills and take care of her kids. Her downfall came when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated her for fraud, which is also shown in the film.

In 2022, the documentary Call Me Miss Cleo, which started streaming on HBO Max, featured several people trying to uncover the mystery of Miss Cleo.

According to the Washington Post, the scheme behind the Psychic Readers Network involved the network offering a free reading to customers who called their toll-free line, but customers were then directed to a 900 number and were charged $4.99 per minute. The outlet also noted that about 6 million people who made calls were charged an average of $60.

In 2002, the FTC charged owners of Access Resource Services and Miss Cleo's promoters, Steven Fader and Peter Stotz, with deceptive advertising, billing, and collection practices. Miss Cleo was not indicted.

According to The New York Times, Miss Cleo died of cancer on July 26, 2016.

She expressed regret over taking money from innocent people who called into her network asking for spiritual guidance to the tune of several dollars a minute.

“If someone called me on the line and I knew that they didn’t have any money, I had no intention of keeping them on the line,” Harris said in the 2014 documentary Hotline. “That was more about me rather than them. It was more about my karma.”

Lifetime's Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall, starring The Lady of Rage, premieres on Aug. 10 at 8 p.m. EST. Take a look at the trailer for Miss Cleo’s biopic below.