Psychic’s Trial Offers Testimony of Being Lonely in New York
LatestUnless you’re an Immortal from the Highlander franchise, being alone can be pretty tough at times, and nowhere is one’s loneliness more acute than in a city teeming with busy, socializing people, a city like the mythical island of Manhattan. People cope with the isolation and loneliness of living in Manhattan in all kinds of ways, some (getting parakeets) better than others (dressing up as Chewbacca and looking for people who look like Harrison Ford circa 1980). The criminal trial of a Manhattan-based psychic, however, is a particularly harrowing glance into the lengths to which people will go just for a little metaphysical reassurance that life isn’t just one endless subway ride around a city whose smells always fall somewhere on the spectrum between peanut oil and stale urine.
Manhattan psychic Sylvia Mitchell is currently standing trial in Manhattan Criminal Court on charges of grand larceny for having allegedly “defrauded” two women out of a lot of money. It is right and just to sequester “defrauded” in quotation marks because the women who testified Friday against Mitchell didn’t really, truly believe that Mitchell had “the sight” — they were just looking for answers after particularly harrowing romantic escapades.