She saw into her bank account.
A single mom from Florida was duped into handing tens of thousands of dollars to a notorious West Village psychic who told her she was an Egyptian princess in a past life who didn’t need to be so attached to money, the victim testified Thursday in Manhattan.
“She told me I was part of a ruling city, a good doer, but I had a problem,” Debra Saalfield told rapt jurors on the first day of fortune-teller Sylvia Mitchell’s trial in Manhattan Supreme Court. “And that in order to get my life back in order there was something I needed to do.”
The gullible ballroom dancer coughed up a $27,000 check drawn from the equity on her home and spent the next five years trying to get it back.
The pretty clairvoyant is on trial for scheming to steal approximately $150,000 from two desperate victims between 2007 and 2009.
The vulnerable mother of three had lost her dream job a marketing gig with a Times Square dance company and got dumped by the boyfriend she’d planned to marry before seeing the crystal gazer in July of 2008.
“I had a meltdown, I lost it, I was unable to keep myself together,” the thin blond confessed.
She was intrigued by the tale Mitchell spun about how she had once been the leader of an Egyptian tribe. The psychic assured her it was only an exercise and that her money would be returned.
Saalfield flew to Florida the same day and realized she had made an expensive lapse in judgement.
“I called her immediately and told her I made a mistake and needed my money back and she said that’s not possible. The money is no longer available,” she said.
At one point, Saalfield even showed up at the fortunetelling shop and buzzed 15 times over the course of one day but no one answered.
Over the next two years Mitchell paid back $13.500 of the money.
“I feel like as an intelligent educated woman it ‘s one of the most humiliating things that has ever happened to me,” she lamented.
Mitchell is also accused of swindling $120,000 from a second victim to cleanse her of her bad spirits. Lee Choong, who has an MBA from NYU, developed a crush on a female co-worker and was struggling with her sexual identity when she sought out guidance from Mitchell, prosecutors said.
“The defendant has a knack for spotting people’s insecurities and using them to reach right into their bank accounts,” said Manhattan Assistant District Attorney James Bergamo. “She doesn’t use violence to accomplish her crimes. She’s far more cunning. She uses trickery and deception to steal.”
The soothsayer’s defense lawyer William Aronwald argued that the two women knew what they were doing when they hired his client. “It is not against the law to be a psychic,” he said.