Montel Williams slammed for defending ‘world’s worst psychic’

Talk show host Montel Williams has come under fire from fans for defending controversial psychic Sylvia Browne.

Browne was a regular guest on The Montel Williams Show throughout its 17-year run. 

Although Browne was popular with the show’s loyal viewers, she was eventually dubbed by some as ‘the world’s worst psychic’ following her death in 2013 after videos of her botched predictions went viral on YouTube.

Now Williams has come out to defend Browne’s psychic track record, telling fellow talk show host Maury Povich that the chain-smoking soothsayer had an ’83 percent’ accuracy rate with her predictions.

‘I believe in the fact that Sylvia Browne has some sort of … I don’t know what you want to call it,’ he said on Povich’s On Par podcast. 

‘She just has this ability to read people, and when you really look back at her life, you understand why,’ he continued. 

Talk show host Montel Williams has come under fire from fans for defending controversial psychic Sylvia Browne on Maury Povich’s On Par podcast

Browne was a regular guest on The Montel Williams Show throughout its 17-year run, despite going viral multiple times for her botched predictions

Williams then shared a story of how Browne was told that she had psychic abilities at the age of five and that as a child her mother would bring dozens of people to their home each day for readings. 

‘A lot of people can knock her all they want these days, but the truth of the matter is police departments reached out to her. Lawyers reached out to her. Other people reached out to her, just to ask her her opinion, and she gave it, freely,’ he said.

‘Was she right? Let me tell you something. On my show, with questions from the audience, Sylvia ran about 82 percent, 83 percent correct.’

Despite defending the self-proclaimed psychic, Williams stressed that he himself does not believe in psychics and that he believed Browne was actually an expert in ‘reading’ people by studying their appearance and mannerisms, rather than having a spiritual gift.

Fans were unimpressed by Williams for standing up for Browne, who was accused of being a ‘fraud’ many times throughout her career.

‘Oh, please… She was a con artist,’ wrote one, while another commented, ‘That math ain’t mathing.’

‘I feel like Montel is gaslighting us,’ another joked, followed by a laughing emoji. 

‘She was not 82% accurate lol. but she was 100% fun,’ a fourth wrote.

Fans were unimpressed by Williams for standing up for Browne, who was accused of being a ‘fraud’ many times throughout her career

‘World’s worst psychic’ from 90s talk show goes viral for SHOCKING predictions that she got wrong

Daily Mail has contacted Williams’ representative for comment.

During her tenure on Williams’ talk show, Browne became infamous for a number of disastrous predictions. 

In 1999, she told the mother of missing six-year-old Opal Jo Jennings that her daughter was alive but had been sold into ‘white slavery’ in a place called ‘Kukouro’ in Japan.

Five years after the child’s disappearance, the partial skeletal remains of Jennings were discovered buried in woodland in Fort Worth, some 10 miles from where she had been taken.

A local man, who was also a known Sєx-offender, was later convicted of the killing, having murdered the child the night she went missing. There is also no such place in Japan as Kukouro.

She bungled another prediction in 2003 when she told the parents of missing 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck that he had been kidnapped and killed by a hispanic man with dreadlocks. 

Hornbeck was found alive in 2007 after having been kidnapped by Michael J. Devlin, who was Caucasian.

During a 2004 appearance on the show, Browne told the distraught mother of missing teenager Amanda Berry that her daughter was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and ‘in heaven, on the other side’.

Berry was later found alive in 2013 after escaping a decade of captivity at the hands of Ariel Castro. But at this point, Berry’s mother had already pᴀssed away in 2006, believing Browne’s prediction that her daughter was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.

Browne later issued a statement on Facebook following backlash over the Berry prediction, claiming that she had been ‘more right than wrong’ during her career and that ‘only God is right all the time’.

Browne published more than 40 best-selling books about spirituality, which made her a millionaire

One of her worst predictions included telling a mother that her daughter had been sold into slavery in Japan 

Despite her questionable predictions, Browne became a multimillionaire and one of America’s most successful psychics. 

She published more than 40 best-selling books, hosted Mediterranean cruises in which fans would pay thousands of dollars to hear her speak, and could charge customers up to $850 to ask her questions over the phone for 30 minutes. 

In 1986, she set up her own church. The Society of Novus Spiritus was a Gnostic Christian organization which believed in reincarnation and the idea of a dual Mother and Father god.  

The society was another of Browne’s money-making vehicles. In 2011, when Browne suffered a heart attack while in Hawaii, it put out an urgent request for donations on her behalf, despite the fact that she was, by then, a millionaire many times over.

In 2010, The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which debunks pseudoscience and paranormal claims, conducted a study of 115 of her predictions about murder and missing persons cases. 

They published a comprehensive report enтιтled, ‘Psychic Detective: Sylvia Browne’s History of Failure,’ in which they found not a single instance in which her predictions had proved correct in the 25 cases when the truth was discovered. 

Occasionally, she would get something right. In 2020, seven years after her death, Browne went viral during the Covid pandemic after Kim Kardashian posted a pᴀssage from a book the psychic wrote in 2008 in which she predicted: ‘In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.’ 

Browne died on November 20, 2013, at the age of 77. Her cause of death was not disclosed.