'Foretold' podcast Episode 1: 'The G-Word'

By The Foretold team

April 11, 2023 4 AM PT

In the fall of 2019, reporter Faith Pinho received a tip from Paulina Stevens. Paulina said she had grown up in an insular Romani community in California, where she was raised to be a wife, mother and fortuneteller — until she decided to break away. This opens the door to a story spanning multiple continents, hundreds of years and complex realities.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript below.

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Faith E. Pinho: Where I live in Southern California, psychic shops are practically as plentiful as coffee shops. They’re a part of the landscape: the neon sign outlining the palm of a hand, promising to tell your fortune or prophesying a long life.

I know people who have regular appointments with their psychic. It’s the kind of thing you can drop in casual conversation and no one bats an eye. And I can understand why.

People want security. They want to know what the future will hold. And whether through tarot cards or a crystal ball, the fortuneteller will hint at how your story will play out.

Let me say up front that I don’t know how this tale will play out or how this will end. Because in this story, the fortuneteller came to me.

Paulina Stevens: I mean at the time, I felt like, yeah, like, I’m, you know, snitching, because — whatever. Like I was ashamed for reaching out to you.

Now I don’t really view it that way. I feel like I’m telling my story. But I never thought in a million years it would turn into what it is now.

Faith E. Pinho: My name is Faith Pinho, and I’m a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. But back in October 2019, I was working at a small community newspaper in Orange County called the Daily Pilot, and that’s where I first got a call from Paulina Stevens.

I don’t have a recording of that first call. I wish I’d known to record.

I tried to keep track in a messy Word doc, but she was going a mile a minute. A torrent of words and accusations. Arranged marriages. Being trained to manipulate people. Something about not being allowed to be American. But she emphasized over and over that that was all behind her now.

Paulina told me that from the time she was a child, she was told she would be a fortuneteller and that she came from a whole family of fortunetellers.

I’m not going to lie: I had never been inside a fortunetelling shop. So I did some Googling. And if you look for news about fortunetellers, a whole bunch of them go something like this:

WISN 12 News: A local woman is out $20,000 after falling for an elaborate psychic readings scam.

Associated Press: The fortunetellers would tell them that they had curses, and that was why these bad things were happening to them.

WPLG Local 10: Self-proclaimed psychic Gina Marks busted at Miami International Airport. She was arrested just minutes before she was set to board to Europe.

Faith E. Pinho: I thought maybe this was the kind of story Paulina was trying to tip me off to. But something in the franticness of her voice made me feel like there was something different going on here. And then Paulina mentioned something that made my ears perk up. It was a warning about a psychic shop in Orange County — a psychic shop she said she’d escaped.

I didn’t know what that meant. So I suggested we meet up in person at a local cafe.

Paulina Stevens: I’m a little nervous. I’m sorry for, like —

Faith E. Pinho: That’s OK.

Paulina Stevens: I don’t know, I’m like kind of nervous, but I’m OK.

Faith E. Pinho: Take your time. Whatever makes you comfortable.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina looked younger than I expected — around my age. At the time, she was 24 and I was almost 23. Paulina had a round face and black bangs. And she was short like me, too, around 5 feet tall. We ordered tea and sat down together. I put my phone on the table between us and hit record. And then, because I didn’t really know how to kick things off, I basically just asked her a terrible first-date question.

Faith E. Pinho: So, yeah. I think it’s probably easiest to just start all the way back. So like where did you grow up?

Paulina Stevens: That far?

Faith E. Pinho: Who’s your family? Literally, it sounds like this is really entrenched, right?

Paulina Stevens: It is, yeah.

Faith E. Pinho: So.

Paulina Stevens: All right. So all the way back. I was born in L.A.

Faith E. Pinho: Listen, people call reporters all the time with salacious tips. But when Paulina started talking, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose.

Paulina Stevens: My parents are also related, just so you know.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said it was common in her culture for cousins to marry. She said that she herself had been arranged to marry a distant cousin.

Paulina Stevens: At 12, it’s like you’re supposed to know who you’re getting married to. You know, that’s like, you’re going through puberty. I was getting too old.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said that her parents shielded her from outsiders.

Paulina Stevens: They hate outsiders. So any kind of outsiders was a big like no-no.

Faith E. Pinho: And then she was pulled out of school entirely at 12 years old.

Paulina Stevens: I was actually lucky. Like, I got to go to school up to sixth grade.

Faith E. Pinho: The main thrust of Paulina’s education, from what I was gathering, was how to become a fortuneteller.

Paulina Stevens: So basically the same times kids would read or write, they start learning like how to read tarot cards and...

Faith E. Pinho: And besides reading cards, she had to learn how to be a wife and mother.

Paulina Stevens: If girls turn 18 and they’re not married, it’s like, people look down on it. Like, “Oh, there’s something wrong with her.”

Faith E. Pinho: Keep in mind, I was a rookie journalist. And I was having a hard time keeping up.

Faith E. Pinho: Yeah. What happens? What does it mean to be engaged at 13? Is there a proposal? Is it someone tells you you’re engaged? Or what is the actual process?

Faith E. Pinho: At the time, I was used to writing stories on city council meetings and town art shows. So Paulina’s story — it was totally out of my wheelhouse. This seemed like a massive story with numerous claims to investigate. I couldn’t quite tell how I’d begin to write about them. It seemed too big. Because ultimately Paulina kept blaming her culture, her culture, her culture.

Paulina Stevens: And if you disobey us, then you disobey your culture. You disobey your father. You bring shame.

Faith E. Pinho: You only marry within the culture, you only socialize within the culture, and you certainly only trust people within the culture.

And Paulina’s culture is Romani. I don’t think I had ever heard the word “Romani” before. And that’s because Romani people are often known by another name.

Paulina Stevens: You know, a Gypsy.

Faith E. Pinho: You’re not going to hear me throwing around the G-word on this podcast because, for many in the community, it’s a slur — not for outsiders like me to use. But at the time I had no idea. Because even a pop star like Shakira casually throws around the G-word.

It’s set against this catchy, poppy backdrop, like something you’d instinctively hum along to. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d never notice the lyrics are actually overtly offensive.

Shakira song: ‘Cause I’m a Gypsy. Are you coming with me? I might steal your clothes and wear them if they fit me.

Faith E. Pinho: Once I started noticing it, I couldn’t stop seeing the G-word everywhere. Almost like a conspiracy.

In pop culture, Paulina’s people are usually seen as thieves. Like in the 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Andy Taylor is a picture-perfect example of morality and justice, and when his son has a question—

Opie: Can Gypsies do any magic at all?

Andy: Yes, they can. They can take out a pair of worthless earrings, show them to your Aunt Bee and make 12 dollars and a half disappear like nothing.

Faith E. Pinho: The tone of Andy’s voice is so reasonable, even while casting an entire ethnic group as swindlers.

And the G-word is actually the root of the word “gypped.” Like, ripping someone off. And that pejorative is so mainstream, that even Michelle Obama said it.

Michelle Obama: But what I realized was that I got gypped on that front.

Faith E. Pinho: It is so wild to me that the general population knows an entire ethnic group by what is, for outsiders, a slur. I had seen it on clothing brands and restaurant menus, surfboards and teabags. It’s become a shorthand for something nomadic, wild, deceitful, romantic. Something exotic. A style anyone could put on and wear like a costume.

And there’s one stereotype that always comes up: that Romani people are fortunetellers.

Zoltar machine: I am Zoltar, the great Gypsy, and I can see your fortune.

Faith E. Pinho: I was walking along the Venice Beach boardwalk recently, when I found a Zoltar machine. Which is, basically, an animatronic fortuneteller in a box.

Faith E. Pinho: And he’s wearing a turban. It’s kind of like all of the stereotypes you would expect to see, all wrapped into one. He’s even got, I think, like a crystal ball that’s glowing. And then there’s just all kinds of tarot cards scattered around his table.

Faith E. Pinho: But the thing was, Paulina and her family were actually fortunetellers. Her mom ran a psychic shop and gave daily readings to locals and tourists. Paulina and her sisters helped too. And while Paulina told me about her family and their history, she also seemed to be fitting into those very stereotypes.

Paulina Stevens: Like the rule is no stealing, only scamming, because people give you stuff. So it’s not considered stealing.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina seemed to be telling me, “Yes, everything you Googled was true. Fortunetelling is a scam.”

Paulina Stevens: And I am a scam artist. You know, born and bred. That’s what I’m telling you.

Faith E. Pinho: I remember the exact moment she said that in the cafe. “A scam artist, born and bred.” Paulina kept plowing ahead, talking away, while I just looked at her, like, “What? You know you’re sitting here with a reporter. Are you turning yourself in?”

I didn’t know what to think, and honestly, it didn’t seem like Paulina did either.

Paulina Stevens: Gypsies have a bad rep. And they should. I think. I don’t know. Not all of them, but—

Faith E. Pinho: Even though the specifics of Paulina’s story were foreign to me, I have to admit, I found myself relating to her. Because I grew up in a restrictive evangelical community on the East Coast. So things like having to wear certain clothes or filling certain gender norms, distrusting outsiders — those were things I could wrap my head around and why I could understand when Paulina told me she had chosen to leave.

Paulina Stevens: When I left, I had no education. I had two kids. No driver’s license, OK, no car. You know what I’m saying? I had nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Faith E. Pinho: The franticness in Paulina’s voice suddenly made sense. It was the sound of someone stepping out of one world and into another, questioning everything she’s ever learned and feeling out who she might like to become apart from it all.

I know from experience that the initial transition from one world to another can make you resent everything you came from, and how hard it is to leave it all behind.

Paulina Stevens: I figured out my exit plan for one year. You know, back and forth. One year. “Should I go? Should I stay? Should I go? How am I going to do this?” I constantly, like didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to execute it. And I want to be the person to be like, “If you are thinking about leaving, you can. Like, it’s possible.”

Faith E. Pinho: And this was certainly part of why Paulina said she had come to me. But it wasn’t just to tell her life story. The real reason Paulina reached out to me was: She needed help.

I’m Faith Pinho. From the Los Angeles Times, this is “Foretold.”

After that first meeting with Paulina in the cafe in 2019, I had a feeling we’d just scratched the surface of her story. She had given me the highlight reel of all the most salacious things that would intrigue a journalist.

And, like, OK, I’ll admit I took the bait. Clearly there was something to cover here, among all of Paulina’s various claims about arranged marriages and scamming and child labor.

But as we finished our cups of tea, it finally emerged: the real reason Paulina had decided to get in touch with me.

Paulina has two little girls, and when she left her community, she was at risk of losing them. She was terrified her family would leave with the kids, which had happened once before.

Paulina Stevens: Like I’m not losing my kids again.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said she didn’t know where her girls were for a whole month.

Paulina Stevens: It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through in my life. The most scariest.

Faith E. Pinho: And now she was terrified that her kids would get whisked away somewhere. Paulina told me she was so concerned, she was teaching her daughters how to say “I’ve been kidnapped” in Spanish, in case they were taken over the border to Mexico — which, I know now, never actually happened.

Paulina Stevens: I have to teach my 5-year-old, you know, that you come back on Sundays at 5, and if anything changes and Mom doesn’t tell you, then you need to tell somebody that you’ve been kidnapped.

Faith E. Pinho: To fight to keep her daughters, Paulina did the No. 1 thing people in her culture were taught not to do: She turned to the outside world. She took her case to the American legal system, and her custody hearing was coming soon.

Faith E. Pinho: What are the dates in January?

Paulina Stevens: Sixth and seventh. Yeah. Room 813, if you want to be there.

Faith E. Pinho: I do want to be there.

Paulina Stevens: Yeah. Can you testify for me? No, I’m just kidding.

Faith E. Pinho: No, I can’t.

Paulina Stevens: I know.

Faith E. Pinho: I was intrigued. So three months later, I followed her to court.

It was January 2020 at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach. Paulina had been waiting for this hearing for over six months. It was meant to decide, once and for all, if Paulina would be legally entitled to her children. I wasn’t allowed to bring a recorder into the courtroom, but as it turns out, I didn’t really need to. Most of the action happened just outside the courtroom anyway. While the lawyers conferenced inside, everyone else waited in the hallway.

Paulina Stevens: Well, hopefully this gets done quick and we can do something.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was dressed up in heels and a blazer, and I remember her being really jittery. I waited with her on one side of a giant staircase that split the hallway in half.

On the other side of the staircase were a few members of the community Paulina had left behind. The staircase was large enough to mostly block them, but from what I could see, it was a small group of men. Fathers, brothers, uncles. No women.

Paulina Stevens: Yeah, there’s no women at all. It’s just the women are not allowed in the courtroom.

Faith E. Pinho: Why are women not allowed in court? It’s a whole group of them.

Paulina Stevens: Those men aren’t — because men are like the king. You understand? If a woman ends up in the courtroom, it’s too — the woman who has too much power and it’s, like, embarrassing.

Faith E. Pinho: From what I could see while peering at them around the staircase, the men were standing in a tight huddle by the building’s north entrance with their backs turned toward us. One or two of them were dressed in tracksuits. There was just this nervous energy hanging in the air around them.

Gina Merino: It’s a bunch of men against three women.

Faith E. Pinho: The three women were on my side of the staircase. Paulina, her quiet younger sister, Nicole, and a woman in her 40s with bright teal hair. Her name was Gina.

Gina Merino: They’re using everything. They have nothing against her, and we have everything against them. So they might —

Faith E. Pinho: Right away, I could see Gina is a character. And not just because of the teal hair. It was in the way she boldly walked over to the other side of the staircase to size up the huddle of men before coming back to Paulina and standing over her like some sort of mother hen. Gina was amping her up as they ran through Paulina’s case.

Gina Merino: Just so you know.

Paulina Stevens: I filed the emergency court order. I got physical, temporary sole custody.

Gina Merino: Oh, so you filed emergency and they gave it to you.

Paulina Stevens: Yeah.

Gina Merino: That’s why they keep filing emergency. They keep thinking, “Well, she filed, so I can file too.”

Faith E. Pinho: Gina and Paulina talked like they’d known each other for years, but it turned out this was only the second time they’d ever met in person.

I learned that Gina had left the Romani community herself, back in the early ’90s, before Paulina was even born. Gina had gotten pregnant with a non-Romani man and fled before her family found out. So for Gina, it was simple. There was no custody battle. No question of what it meant to leave the culture. Gina had severed ties entirely.

Gina Merino: What assholes.

Paulina: Yeah, and so then they turned over the kids and—

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina had asked Gina for help. That’s why Gina was here. She had flown in from San Jose to show Paulina she had someone in her corner. That it was possible to leave.

Todd Coulston: We’ll just wait on the order, then.

Gina Merino: We’re waiting on the order.

Faith E. Pinho: It turns out, this trial had been a bit of a dud. Or at least it was very anticlimactic. It was mostly for the lawyers to convene about when to reschedule and have the next hearing.

Todd Coulston: Right. You guys are free to go.

Faith E. Pinho: But I still didn’t understand what was so complicated about the whole situation. Like how much different could this be from most normal custody cases?

Faith E. Pinho: OK. So today was going to be a trial, but then it was continued because why?

Todd Coulston: Right. It’s continued primarily because…

Faith E. Pinho: That’s Paulina’s lawyer. When I asked him what was up, he basically said that the opposing lawyer was new to the case and she needed more time to prepare. Especially because she was representing people who didn’t want to go to court in the first place.

Todd Coulston: When she first hired me, they came in and the elders were just very, very loud and very much in animated voices saying, “Take this out of court. We’re a loving family. We’ll agree to anything. Just no court. No court.”

And so it got to the point where it was very tense and I had to basically say, “Look, I can’t help you guys here.”

Faith E. Pinho: Yeah. Wow, that sounds — OK. Cool. Um, OK I think those are all the questions I have up to this point.

Faith E. Pinho: Those were not all the questions I had. But I felt like I was in a whirlwind in the middle of that courthouse hallway. Just sort of dazed and confused. Like what kind of story was this, and did I even know how to write it? I still didn’t know where to start.

So I decided to turn next to the person who seemed most accessible, most fired-up and ready to talk about this world: Gina.

Gina Merino: Look, I lived in the culture all my life. You don’t need any more “expert” than that. Paulina and I are the expert witnesses. We lived the culture. We both didn’t go to school.

Faith E. Pinho: Away from the courthouse, in her noisy hotel lobby, Gina told me that at the crux of Paulina’s custody case was education.

Gina Merino: The girls won’t go to school if they live with their father. That’s a guarantee.

Faith E. Pinho: I just want to make a small note here: Gina had never met their father. But anyway.

Gina said she herself had been taken out of school around 11 or 12. She said she worried the judge wouldn’t understand just how common it is for Romani kids to leave school early. That for girls like her and Paulina, it wasn’t so much a choice as an inevitability. Gina was ready to testify.

Gina Merino: In the Gypsy culture, girls don’t go to school for very long. Because their primary existence is learning how to take care of a husband and get married at a very young age. Schooling, education, is not even on the last thing on the list; it’s not on the list.

Faith E. Pinho: As I talked to Gina, she seemed to be confirming so much. Like the lack of schooling. But also this expectation to get married young and keep outsiders at a distance.

Gina Merino: We’re taught non-Gypsies are beneath us, and so you separate yourself. So when you get older, you believe they’re beneath you, so it’s easier to scam and steal from them.

Faith E. Pinho: And then there it was. The scamming again. Granted, Gina was the second of two Romani people I had spoken to for this story so far. But here she was repeating almost exactly what Paulina had told me in the cafe.

But Gina wasn’t exactly like Paulina. While Paulina was all over the place, I could tell Gina was more confident, like she had always thought this.

Gina Merino: So that’s why I’m unique and different. I’m not one of those people who believed it and then all of a sudden was like, “Oh my gosh, I was brainwashed all this time.” I was one of those people that was, “I don’t understand any of this.”

Faith E. Pinho: Gina said that ever since she was a little girl, she believed that, yes, fortunetelling was 100% a sham. And now, on the record with a reporter, she was relishing the opportunity to prove it.

Gina Merino: The readings, first of all, most readings are all the same. I could probably recite it.

Faith E. Pinho: Let’s hear it. I want to hear what a typical reading is.

Gina Merino: Hold on. Hold on. OK, I will. So if I’m looking at your palm, I would say, “First thing I see for you is you’re going to live a long life. You have many years ahead of you. You have a good, strong head on your shoulders. You usually know what you’re doing at all times. You’re a very sensitive person. You feel deeply for the feelings of others.”

So then the next thing I would say is, “Not too long ago—” God, this is coming back. Wow. “Not too long ago, you had a misunderstanding with someone. This person is sorry and wants to be forgiven.”

And then I think I would probably say, “Looks like you’re going to be going on a trip pretty soon. And you have questions about the trip, but I’m going to tell you you should go on the trip because it’s really good for you. Go.”

Faith E. Pinho: At this point, I tried to hide my laugh. But Gina noticed anyway.

Gina Merino: Are you remembering this from a reading that you had before?

Faith E. Pinho: No, this is just really funny. I am going on a trip soon.

Gina Merino: Who’s not going on a trip soon?

Faith E. Pinho: That’s true.

Faith E. Pinho: I can’t say this rocked my world. I didn’t really believe anyone could literally tell your future. But what did I know? Plenty of other people believe in it. Or at least they pay for it. And even Gina, the ultimate skeptic, seemed to hint that fortunetelling is more than just a hustle. That there is this element of belief.

Faith E. Pinho: How much of people who are within it are actually believing in what they’re doing?

Gina Merino: All of them.

Faith E. Pinho: All of them, said Gina, and this includes Paulina. And if you really, deeply believe fortunes can be told and your fate sealed, it makes it all the more difficult to break away.

Ever since that anticlimactic afternoon in court, I was consumed with what Paulina and Gina had told me.

I don’t know if Paulina had really thought that I’d come, cover the trial, write something up about it and then we’d never see each other again. Perhaps that I’d totally forget she’d implicated herself in widespread, long-running fortunetelling scams. But it seemed obvious that there was something more there than a story about a psychic shop.

I felt like a door had been cracked open, and now I wanted to see the whole world behind it. A rare peek, that Paulina had given me, into a culture that’s been intentionally hidden from outsiders.

Paulina Stevens: People are telling me we’ve survived so long by staying out of the media, like we’ve survived in America this way, by keeping things hidden. And honestly, I feel like we can survive, you know, not being hidden.

And so I knew I had to do some digging. I needed to understand Romani culture, get some perspective here. But getting firsthand accounts from Romani people isn’t that easy.

Ian Hancock: Romani culture is a closed culture.

Faith E. Pinho: You won’t find a lot of Romani tell-alls. Talking to the media is seen as pretty taboo.

Ian Hancock: You have to be exclusionist in order to preserve identity. You have to close ranks to prevent infiltration from outside. Which doesn’t encourage people getting too close, knowing too much. And this also does not make you friends.

Faith E. Pinho: OK, yeah. But I would like to consider myself friends with Professor Ian Hancock.

Professor Hancock is generally seen in the U.S. as the preeminent source on Romani history. He recently retired after more than 30 years as a professor of linguistics at UT Austin. And at 80 years old, he’s still traveling the world, educating audiences on Romani heritage and culture.

Ian Hancock: I mean the Gypsy identity is rife with stereotypes. We all hate stereotypes. But stereotypes have an origin somewhere.

Faith E. Pinho: Like the fact that Paulina had grown up fortunetelling for as long as she could remember.

Paulina Stevens: When I was little, I didn’t have much thought about it because it was just all around. Everybody was reading palms and reading cards. Every aunt. Every grandmother. Like even the guys. My grandfather read palms too.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina told me she learned the art of fortunetelling almost by osmosis.

Paulina Stevens: It’s like, I wake up in the morning and we’re cooking coffee and playing some music and my aunt is like, “OK, let’s practice your reading. Here, lay the cards out and tell me, what do they mean?”

Faith E. Pinho: They would practice together for hours, tracing each other’s palms and memorizing the meaning of different tarot cards.

Paulina Stevens: As a kid, I didn’t really think that it was anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t really think about it because it’s like telling people, “What do you think about cereal?” Like, “Well, we always had cereal.” You know, it was just natural.

Faith E. Pinho: When Paulina was a girl, committing these symbols to memory felt sort of like a family game or a hobby.

Paulina Stevens: When I was just starting out, it was for fun. Like, it was kind of like, you know, if you have ever had like a Magic 8 Ball.

Faith E. Pinho: But it was also something more. Because in so many ways, fortunetelling can be about health and healing.

Ian Hancock: We don’t call it fortunetelling. We call it reading and advising.

Faith E. Pinho: According to our resident linguist, Professor Hancock, there are actually two words for “fortunetelling” in the Romani language.

Ian Hancock: There is another verb, which is “durikeripé,” which actually means “divination, fortunetelling, predicting the future.” But that’s not the word that’s used by professional readers and advisors, which is ““drabarimós.” And “drabarní,” which Paulina is a drabarní, strictly means “healer.” So the actual translation of the Romani word is “healing,” not “fortunetelling.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was very much raised as a healer. Someone who could help people turn their lives around, who could provide comfort and counseling. And her primary teacher was her mother.

Paulina Stevens: I do remember clients would come up to me and be like, “Hey, you know, your mom is really special.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said clients were dazzled by her mom’s presence — but most importantly, her uncanny ability to make them feel better.

Paulina Stevens: A lot of the times, clients would be friends. Like, we had good relationships, like, with our clients.

Faith E. Pinho: And there was no better place to practice healing and wellness than California in the early 2000s.

Paulina Stevens: This whole New Age thing was happening. There were other spiritual stores in town, and so my mom and aunts or whatever, they would work with them.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said her mom went beyond tarot cards and palm readings. She also did meditations and energy work like Reiki. It was more wellness-based, maybe a touch more alternative. Paulina got into it too.

Paulina Stevens: I was also allowed to do, like, Reiki, you know, classes and palmistry classes.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said that when she was old enough — starting around 10 years old — she would sit beside her mom and absorb how her mother read the cards, her use of eye contact, her bold, declarative statements. Paulina was hooked.

Paulina Stevens: I was totally looking into it, and my parents loved it. Like, it wasn’t something that they really forced upon me.

Faith E. Pinho: In the beginning, Paulina studied the art of fortunetelling whatever way she could.

Paulina Stevens: I originally took it very seriously, like as a kid. You know, as serious as a kid could take anything, I guess.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said she’d spend hours going through books on spells and astrology, like a giant dictionary of dream interpretation or “Psychology for Dummies.”

Paulina Stevens: And my mom had so many books. She really did. Like I believe she took it seriously too.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s mother learned fortunetelling from her mother. And her mother learned it from her mother and her mother and her mother, all the way back. Back to the very origins of the fortunetelling tradition. Back to the origins of the Romani diaspora.

Ian Hancock: Well, first of all, it comes from India. It was brought out of India, where it is a highly regarded, respected means of income. So it didn’t have a stigma from the very beginning.

Faith E. Pinho: Fortunetelling is also a mobile business.

Ian Hancock: Reading cards just requires a deck of cards, right? Crystal balls? Stick it in your backpack. So it was a transportable means of income.

Faith E. Pinho: This is important. Because from the very beginning of their recorded history, Romani people were forced to move from place to place.

Ian Hancock: It wasn’t a genetic wanderlust that we’re supposed to have. That’s bullshit.

Faith E. Pinho: Romani people were chased from the moment they first migrated from India around 1000 A.D. The exact reason for their leaving is unknown, but some historians think it was to escape militaries invading India around that time.

So Romani people left India and migrated across the Middle East and to Eastern Europe. When they reached Europe, Professor Hancock says, they stood out right away.

Ian Hancock: They were people of color. The church was clear in their belief that whiteness was purity and darkness was sin. So the church had a problem with the first people of color to show up in any numbers.

Faith E. Pinho: Many Europeans thought these newcomers had arrived from Egypt and were Egyptians. Hence the G-word, which came to be pejorative.

Ian Hancock: Romanis were not Christians. A lot said they were, to get by. They had no country. They dressed funny.

Faith E. Pinho: In the region that is now Romania, hundreds of thousands of Romani people were enslaved for over 500 years. As late as the 1800s, the penal code in the region declared that Romani people are “born slaves.” Many were sold off and traded around Europe and other parts of the world.

And Romani enslavement wasn’t abolished until the mid-1800s — around the same time of the Emancipation Proclamation in the U.S. But even in their freedom, Romani people were met with prejudice everywhere they went.

Ian Hancock: There were many, many laws against Romanis.

Faith E. Pinho: Including in the U.S. Laws in Oregon, Louisiana and even California have banned fortunetelling. We’ll talk more about that later. But there is a legacy of American laws that directly target Romani culture.

Ian Hancock: A lot of them, just like laws that were in this country, forbidding Romani people to stop, set up a place to live, to establish a business of some kind. People were being chased from pillar to post. If they weren’t being killed, they were being driven out across the closest foreign border.

Faith E. Pinho: The most horrific example of Romani persecution in recent history is, of course, the Holocaust. In Professor Hancock’s book “We Are the Romani People,” he says that in 1940, the Nazis tested out the poisonous gas they would use in their death camps — on 250 Romani children.

Ian Hancock: People simply do not know the details about the fate of Romanis in the Holocaust.

Faith E. Pinho: It’s impossible to know how many Romani people were killed in the Holocaust because of incomplete census data and undercounting. But I’ve seen a couple estimates that say approximately 1.5 million Roma were killed in the Holocaust. I had no idea.

Ian Hancock: Nobody knows about the slavery — five and a half centuries of slavery — that ended at the same time as slavery in this country. Nobody. That’s not taught in school.

Faith E. Pinho: And this history directly connects to Paulina. She’s from a subgroup of Romani people who were enslaved in Romania.

Ian Hancock: And Paulina’s ancestors were slaves. Six generations ago, maybe five generations ago, they were slaves.

Faith E. Pinho: Once they were freed, they moved to Serbia. Specifically, a place called Macva. That’s where the name of Paulina’s subgroup comes from: the Machvaya.

Ian Hancock: They regard themselves as the classier Gypsies.

Faith E. Pinho: Classier because Romani subgroups formed around different regions or different traditional trades. Like, there’s a subgroup of Romani people who traditionally were coppersmiths. Experts say those skills eventually translated to doing metalwork on cars.

Ian Hancock: Yeah. There’s a street in Portland, Ore., where there are loads of used car lots, and most of those people down there are Romanis.

Faith E. Pinho: But Machvaya people, along with a few other Romani subgroups, became, by tradition, fortunetellers.

And not only is fortunetelling a mobile business, but it was also something that could be done without formal education in reading and writing. Romani people — and especially Machvaya girls like Paulina — became experts in reading something else: body language and social cues. So they knew how to give people what they wanted.

Paulina Stevens: We were also putting a performance on, too.

Faith E. Pinho: Especially at big events like the annual Renaissance fair in nearby San Luis Obispo. Paulina’s parents would run a booth, complete with a rickety wooden sign.

Paulina Stevens: It was so fun because family would come from either L.A. or sometimes New Mexico or Utah, like wherever they were living at the time. And we would dress up like old, you know, Gypsies.

Faith E. Pinho: They would dress in traditional headscarves and coin belts, their arms stacked with gold bangles.

Paulina Stevens: The Renaissance fair is interesting because it’s one of the only fairs where I felt like it was OK to dress like a Gypsy. But we still wouldn’t tell anyone we were Gypsies.

Faith E. Pinho: From the actual Renaissance period to modern-day Ren fairs, Romani people have survived by keeping this air of mysticism around their trade. It’s a double-edged sword: a stereotype that has exoticized them and protected them.

Paulina Stevens: You know, it’s not just this little entertaining, fake, “we’re going to put a spell on you,” hocus-pocus type of thing. Like this is really what we do for a living.

Faith E. Pinho: And Paulina says she actually did start doing this for a living — at around 12 years old. This was the point when fortunetelling went from just a fun pastime to a job.

Paulina Stevens: My mom was just like, “I think you’re ready.” I think I was practicing doing readings with her and she’s like, “I think you’re ready. You can go ahead and do it.”

Faith E. Pinho: So Paulina had this in mind one day when she was riding her bike around town and a beautiful young woman caught her eye.

Paulina Stevens: So I gave her a handbill. That’s what we call them, but they’re fliers, like tiny fliers. And I was like, “Why don’t you come back?”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina told the woman to meet her back at the family’s psychic shop.

Paulina Stevens: And then she came back and my mom was like, “Well, you can do the reading since you brought her to the store.”

Faith E. Pinho: Were you nervous then?

Paulina Stevens: Yeah, I was extremely nervous.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina sat down with the woman and pulled out a stack of tarot cards.

Paulina Stevens: And I was so nervous that I laid the cards out face down and my mom looked at me and she’s like … and I’m like, “What?” And she’s like, “You’ve got to flip the cards over.” And the customer was right there. And then, like, I read all the cards and the person ended up liking it.

Faith E. Pinho: Even with the fumble, it was clear Paulina possessed the same gift her mom had. The same natural, intuitive clairvoyance that put people at ease. In fact, the reading ended up going so well that Paulina said the woman became a repeat customer of hers.

Paulina was 12 at this point, and this woman was her first steady customer. But also, she was Paulina’s first peek into the inner workings of an outsider — someone from beyond her world.

Paulina Stevens: We were told that outsiders will never understand us. And to a certain extent, Faith, like, I do believe that.

And maybe this is just ingrained in me, but that’s what was told to us: Outsiders have bad intentions. They have diseases. They will never accept you. They will never be on your side.

And very early on, that mindset, you know, whittled away. I loved learning new things. And so I was very curious about their thoughts and curious about their life.

Faith E. Pinho: If you want to know about someone’s innermost life, fortunetelling is an effective way to do it.

Paulina Stevens: It’s kind of like a low-key version of — I guess not therapy, but you know — therapeutic sessions, I guess.

Faith E. Pinho: But Paulina’s sessions were way cheaper than any therapist I know.

Paulina Stevens: You know, 50 bucks, 30 bucks.

Faith E. Pinho: And that money was crucial. Because, Paulina said, it helped her family stay afloat.

Paulina Stevens: A lot of the times, especially when there wasn’t, like, any money and, like, if someone came for a reading and if I made, like, $50 or if I made a couple hundred dollars, like, just from grinding, that would be our food. Like that would be our light bill. That would be, um, our survival.

Faith E. Pinho: And so Paulina did whatever she could to keep clients coming back.

Paulina Stevens: I was taught that people can pick up on your desperation. We were taught that if we were desperate, even if we were, people would pick up on that and they would see something and that it would scare them away. That’s how, like, deep the psychological training was done, that I had to control myself even as a, you know, 15-year-old.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina became a master of her own words, what to say and how to conduct herself.

Paulina Stevens: There were social cues that we had to follow. They were like, “Keep your eye on the client. Like, you need to be convincing.”

Faith E. Pinho: And not just convincing. Paulina wanted to be good, wanted to be helpful, to use her gift of intuition to genuinely help people.

Paulina Stevens: You know, you want to surprise them. Like you want to do the best that you can. Like you do want to connect with them in that first initial reading. And then there’s many different goals. Like you want their friends to come to you. You want them to talk good about you. You do want them to trust you.

Faith E. Pinho: And for clients to believe and trust her, she needed to believe and trust in her own skill.

Paulina Stevens: We needed to believe what we were saying. That was really important. Because if we were not confident in what we were saying, then the person could see.

Faith E. Pinho: But as she got older, her confidence started to waver. She was engaging in this ancient practice that’s been used for centuries as a way to help people, to heal them. And, of course, to make a living. And that’s where it can get complicated: when it’s commercialized and abused.

Ian Hancock: It’s the kind of occupation that lays itself wide open to abuse.

Faith E. Pinho: But, Professor Hancock argues, fortunetelling is just like any other industry in that way.

Ian Hancock: You could say the same about lawyers. There are excellent lawyers and there are shyster lawyers, right? And it’s the same with the readers.

If you are good, you will stay in business for years and years and years, and you will get comeback “khastomáya” — clients. If you are bad, if you are a ripoff artist, you won’t last long. You end up getting arrested. You will be chased out of the community.

Faith E. Pinho: I spoke to lots of other Romani Americans, including other fortunetellers, who agree with Professor Hancock: That, yes, there might be some bad actors, but they spoil the reputation and livelihood of all the other good and decent fortunetellers trying to make a living and help people.

And as Paulina started to question the ways she was raised — why she was taken out of school or why she had to dress a certain way — she started to fundamentally question the trade she had spent her whole life practicing.

Paulina Stevens: There were times where I would really question, of course, like as I got older, like is this real? Is it not?

Faith E. Pinho: Those questions just got louder and louder.

Paulina Stevens: Are we being deceptive? You know, are we not?

Faith E. Pinho: Until eventually, she sat down at a cafe and told a reporter that she’s a scam artist, born and bred.

Paulina Stevens: I think around the time that I met you, I just kind of woke up and I was like, “Whoa. I was being manipulated my whole entire life.”

Faith E. Pinho: But Paulina told me she still finds herself coming back to fortunetelling. Like a subliminal, supernatural pull to the cards — even if she’s not sure what she believes. Even if it changes day to day, year to year.

Paulina Stevens: Occasionally, once every, like, couple of years, I’ll just pull out one card just to, like, see what it says. Three out of four times that I’ve done this, it’s been like the Death card.

Faith E. Pinho: Don’t worry. No one’s getting murdered in this story.

Paulina Stevens: The Death card represents like an ending or the death of you and, ultimately, this blooming or manifestation of some new version of yourself, like being reborn. And so it’s this like Grim Reaper, and then there’s like this beautiful rose. And it represents like a new beginning.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was going through a new beginning when we first met in 2019. Leaving the Romani world for the non-Romani world.

Paulina Stevens: I don’t want to reinforce negative stereotypes about Gypsies, but there are bad things that do happen in this culture, and people need to know about it.

Faith E. Pinho: By leaving her community, going to the courts, and talking to the press, Paulina was opening up her life to a world of scrutiny and doubt.

Richard Sullivan: I think she used the Romani culture as, as a sword, so to speak. “Woe is me. I’m the victim. I need to get away. The bad guys are after me.” I didn’t buy that at all.

Barry Fisher: Lots of things are said in the heat of a fight to protect and to not lose your children.

Gina Merino: It’s hard for me to support you if I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.

Nick Wildwood: Paulina was a diamond. Now she’s just a stone.

Faith E. Pinho: Do you ever have doubts about sharing your story?

Paulina Stevens: I do. Like I totally do. And I really don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to be. I don’t know if once this is released, it’ll be a mistake. And I’m scared.

But in my mind, I’m speaking to a really small group of people. Like I’m speaking to my younger cousins; I’m speaking to the girls that I knew and my friends. And the reason why it makes me emotional is because I feel like the people that I want to speak to the most will probably never hear me.

Faith E. Pinho: But Paulina and I kept talking. For years. And although we started talking about the most shocking and bombastic parts of her story, as Paulina and I got to know each other, we peeled back layer after layer together, both of us trying to get to the actual truth beneath the surface. To the place beyond the resentment and the stereotypes.

Because it’s true of any community, of any identity, that there are stereotypes and there are truths. And while sometimes they can overlap in superficial ways, the whole and deep story is so much richer and more complicated than we could have ever predicted.

‘Foretold’ podcast Episode 1: ‘The G-Word’

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