By Matt Bean
Court TV

Here's one reason television soothsayer Miss Cleo's Jamaican accent might seem a bit off: The shaman, real name Youree Dell Harris, is from California, not the Caribbean.

According to a birth certificate released Thursday by the Florida Attorney General's office, the purported shaman was born in the Los Angeles County Hospital on Aug. 13, 1962.

"The company made a special effort to tell people that she is a master shaman from Jamaica," said David Aronberg, an assistant attorney general in Florida. "We wanted her birth certificate from the beginning."

The certificate, which the Los Angeles clerk's office sent to Florida after authorities there filed a broad suit against Harris and the company that employs her, Fort Lauderdale-based Access Resource Services (ARS), shows that Harris' parents are a Californian woman, Alisa Hopis, and Texan David Harris.

The document released Thursday puts an end to what had become a crusade to unveil the origin of the television psychic, who claimed to be descended from a line of Jamaican shamans.

One rumor placed her in Seattle as a playwright before her Cleo gig. Another placed her in the cast of the 1980s crime drama, Miami Vice (Michael Paul Thomas, a star of the series, was a spokesperson for ARS until 1998 and is currently suing its owners, Larry Feder and Peter Stolz). But while rumors swirled, Harris and ARS remained tight-lipped about her origins.

As of Thursday evening, the company's website still claimed, "...she’s become a household name simply by the sheer force of her psychic gifts, which she’s honed since she was a little girl in the Caribbean. Born in the Trelawny section of Jamaica, Miss Cleo says she noticed at very young age that she had unique talents."

A lawyer representing the psychic could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Courttv.com's Investigation

Since a Courttv.com investigation in January found that many of the psychics who staff the psychic hotline, which charges just under $5 per minute, use scripts instead of performing actual tarot card readings, the troubles for the shaman and ARS have piled up.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission charged ARS with consumer violations ranging from misleading advertising to overly aggressive collection efforts.

Florida was the eighth state to move against Feder and Stolz, who launched the Mind and Spirit psychic network in 1999 but had been running other telephone psychic operations since 1993.

The state originally held ARS to a series of agreements in which the company agreed to a number of stipulations, including that it change its advertising to make it more clear that callers would not speak directly to Miss Cleo.

A study by the New York State Consumer Protection Board reported that Feder and Stolz's business brings in as much as $400 million annually.

Florida also obtained "most favored state" status, which means that ARS would be held to clauses resulting from lawsuits in other states as well.

But ARS did not abide by the deal, which was one reason the state sued, Aronberg said.

More answers about Miss Cleo's origins could emerge when the Florida attorney general's office talks to the psychic herself. Aronberg said his office is scheduled to depose the psychic on March 28, but that the date could change since both Harris and ARS received extensions to respond to the original suit.