Florida psychic Rosa Marks will be behind bars for ten years for scamming her clients out of millions of dollars, The Daily Mail reported in March.
Marks, 62, was sentenced in a court in Fort Lauderdale after bilking $17.8 million from customers in her home state and in New York City. Prosecutors tried to put the scam artist psychic behind bars for 22 years.
Multimillionaire romance novelist Jude Deveraux was among Marks' victims and testified at the trial in September after being swindled out of $12 million over 20 years. The author first sought out the help of Marks during a painful divorce and following the death of her 8-year-old son in a motorcycle accident in the 1990s.
According to Marks, she was unable to connect to Deveraux's dead son through a "soul-swapping" treatment and led Deveraux to believe that Brad Pitt was in love with her. The supposed psychic also stole jewelry from her clients, saying she had to rid the items of curses, while telling others she would be able to protect them from the IRS, according to the Daily Mail.
During her sentencing, Marks referred to her victims as "dear friends" and said she didn't realize she had done anything wrong. Deveraux claimed she met Marks, who she knew as Joyce Michaels, during a horrible divorce that was leaving her feeling suicidal, according to the Sun-Sentinel.
The first time the two met was in a studio in midtown Manhattan where Marks claimed to work from a special room in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Deveraux told the court she didn't really believe in psychic powers, but wanted someone to talk to about her problems.
Marks told the novelist she would help her achieve a peaceful divorce if she paid her $1,200. Deveraux started to believe Marks after several of her predictions appeared to come to fruition, and paid the fee. She accurately told Deveraux the exact hour when her husband would file for divorce and told the woman to leave her apartment for a few days because her husband would show up. This did end up coming true, according to apartment staff members, Deveraux told the court.
Police rounded up Marks and a group of other psychics, all related by blood or marriage in August 2011. Customers, like a person in Japan who paid $496,000 to the psychic readers, were promised they would get their money back once it was cleansed of evil spirits, but instead it was kept for personal use, according to the indictment.
