Dibs

She earned nearly $2 million, partly from her book Mark of Voodoo, but now it’s thirty months in federal prison for “voodoo chief” and “shaman psychologist” and convicted tax fraudster Sharon Caulder. Having practiced a lucrative form of psychotherapy by which clients in Northern California paid $300 a pop to have Caulder perform exorcisms and identify supernatural creatures (rather than phobias, neuroses or personality disorders) that were plaguing them, the jailbound PhD claims to have been subjected to childhood ritual abuse (cats were killed!) in Brooklyn under the auspices of her Christian Scientist parents. When these allegedly repressed memories emerged out of the blue in middle age, Caulder decided that what was really going on in her family circle was voodoo, and that she should pursue this as a career. One thing led to another, and she became a shrink. Then she moved from Oakland to New Orleans and opened Chez Vodun, a “voodoo museum and temple” with its own bar and cafe on Rampart Street. But even a ferryboatload of Beninese fetishes couldn’t keep the Feds from charging Caulder last year with two counts of bankruptcy fraud and five counts of failure to file income-tax returns. Prosecutors said they proved that Caulder received more than $1.7 million in gross income for providing alternative healing services and from royalties, according to Bay City News Wire. In her book, Caulder claims that an African Voodoo Pope thought she was smokin’ hot, and that she can levitate.