PCMR C*nt of the Month for October 2011: Psychic Pscumbag Theresa Caputo

At the beginning of each episode of the reprehensible new TLC program "Long Island Medium," the c*nt Theresa Caputo voice overs,

"I'm Theresa Caputo. I like to think of myself as a typical Long Island mom. But, I have a very special gift. I talk to the dead. No matter where I go, spirits come to me and I am compelled to help. This not just my job. This is my life."

During this voice over we see images of Ms. Caputo hilariously struggling with walking a dog, and images of her manipulating crying women. She is allegedly a complicated woman. Multifaceted. Most charlatans are; what's so unique about this particular c*nt? Well, for one thing, that annoying Long Island accent I won't even begin to try to ape in this post.

The episode to which I subjected myself began with Ms. Caputo and her friend Donna (Ms. Caputo calls her "Donnar," Long Island style) going to a gym called Kettlebell Fitness, for a kettlebell work out. Ms. Caputo, with her orange skin and bleach blond hair, is like a parody of the Long Island/New Jersey housewife that is so popular on "reality television" right now; she is a lumpy sausage compressed into an unflattering black leotard. Donna, it turns out, is "always on [Ms. Caputo's] back about working out."

Why she isn't on Ms. Caputo's back about manipulating people and taking their money when they're at their most vulnerable is something that Donna must work out with her own conscience.

Ms. Caputo interviews that "I don't know what to expect today." She is going into this workout session totally blind! No, really, she's never heard of this place, or kettlebells; nor has she done any pre-workout research about the owner.

The viewers are mistreated with the sight of lumpy Ms. Caputo squatting and swinging her kettlebell. "Between my boobs and the bell, I can't find my balance!" she shrieks, a voice the equivalent of bigfoot's fingernails on a slate-writing tablet. You see, Ms. Caputo has no filter. You don't know what she's going to say next. It could be anything! Whatever happens to come to mind! She is brassy and sassy. And, of course, honest. This is a guileless woman. How else could you reasonably describe the person who would articulate something so potentially embarrassing and self-deprecating?

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Ms. Caputo asks the trainer/owner Mike, "Listen, are you a fireman?" "Yes," Mike replies, slightly taken aback. How could she have known that? Could it be that the clearly-visible firefighting equipment hanging in the back of the gym might have tipped her off? Or is it even simpler than that? Maybe she knew that Mike the owner had actually written a book called The Firefighter's Workout Book? Maybe she went to his YouTube channel and saw all the FDNY training information? Maybe she found all of this information on his kettlebell workout website. Maybe she remembered him from his appearances on News 12 Long Island?

"Oh my gawd!" Ms. Caputo exclaims, encouraged by her seemingly inexplicable knowledge of Mike, a man she's allegedly never met before. "Donnar! I'm gonna do it!" By "it," she means she's going to manipulate people the way she does. Remember, this is a woman who just can't help herself.

"Who's Tommy?" she asks. That was Mike's father in law. How did she know that? Well, "Long Island Medium" is only a half hour show, so they don't have time to show the entirety of her hot reading fishing expedition, but maybe she was able to find out that Mike's wife is Kim Stefano (she seems to have actually written two positive reviews of Mike's book on amazon.com!), and just go from there. Who knows?

"Did you mom pass?" Ms. Caputo asks. Given Mike's age, that's a reasonable assumption. She then asks, "Did something happen to you, I'm gonna say like ten years ago, where you were like 'Somebody was definitely watching over me that day.'?" Is there anyone who couldn't answer that completely vague and cynical question with anything other than a resounding "yeah, probably"? But most especially a New York firefighter, for crying out loud.

Mike says that he was supposed to be working on 9/11. "Please know that that was your mom. That was her protecting you," Ms. Caputo says. "It was almost as if you called in sick and she goes, 'My son never calls in sick...'"

"I broke my foot," Mike says, fighting back tears. "All the other units in the area were killed. Every last guy almost."

"Please know that your mom is validating that she protected you that day."

Apparently, there were about 3,000 people who didn't have dead relatives who cared enough to break their feet to force them to call in sick to work and save their lives. Or perhaps Mike's mother is the only psychic ghost in the world, who knew that the attacks of 9/11 were going to happen, so her spirit came back and pushed him over a curb, or whacked him with a hammer, or something, to break his foot so that he wouldn't have to go to work that day. Seriously, not only is Mike's mother a ghost, but she apparently has psychic abilities.

Ms. Caputo is such a c*nt that she doesn't try to get more information from Mike's dead mother-- maybe she has information about another impending attack, and she could unselfishly save a few more innocent lives?

This all occurs less than five minutes into the show.

C*nt.

Now for some mundane generational conflict. Ms. Caputo records her group sessions with an old cassette player. Her dull children (where is child protective services? why is it okay for a lying c*nt to raise children in New York?) tease her about how square she is. Her son says the old cassette recorder is like a dinosaur, or a dinosaur egg that hatches a cassette recorder, or something. The daughter claims to have "not a clue" as to what a Walkman is-- she is so challenged mentally that she is unable to figure out from the context of the conversation about cassette players that it must be some kind of, well, cassette player.

The show's secondary plot then involves the kids finding for their mother a more modern piece of recording technology, in order to more easily facilitate the cruel game she plays with her sad, vulnerable clients.

Ms. Caputo next drives her 2009 Mercedes SUV (which doesn't have a cassette player!) to her client Tara's house. She interviews, in that brassy yet earnest way of hers, that "I don't know any more or less going into a reading, whether if it's at my home, or going to somebody's house." This is meaningless, of course-- she's just as much a cheat in her own home as someone else's?-- but she the clarifies "The only thing that I know is their first name, their phone number, and if I'm going to their house, I obviously know their address." Remember, this is the woman who unabashedly announced to the entire Kettlebell Fitness that her boobs were throwing her off balance. She is obviously honest to a fault.

Unfortunately, what happens next offers little room for humor. Theresa Caputo is a manipulative, money-grubbing c*nt.

We meet her client, Tara. Tara wants to communicate with her dead sister. She is exceptionally emotional about it. Ms. Caputo goes fishing (again, the show is heavily edited, we don't know how long her fishing expeditions last before she starts getting "hits") and discovers that Tara feels guilt about her sister's death.

"Do you say you are responsible for your sister's passing?" we hear her say after we-don't-know-how-long. Tara nods. "Whatever happened was an accident... Was it actually a car accident?" Ms. Caputo fishes.

This is "hit," as far as Tara is concerned. It was a car accident that took her sister at a very young age. Tara, it turns out, fell asleep at the wheel, there was a crash, and her sister died. She can't talk about it even now, eleven years later, without getting emotional. She is wracked with guilt.

I cannot imagine what it would be like having to live with that. The pain would not go away easily, if in fact it ever went away. It would be an arduous process simply to learn to live with yourself, and to not be reminded of it every single day.

But not to worry-- Ms. Caputo has the easy answers: "Your sister wants me to say, 'If I could take back the moment of you trying to help me,' she says, 'I wish I could.'" I actually had to rewind the TiVo three times to catch that. What a devastating, nasty, cruel, vicious, painful, despicable, loathsome and downright subliterate thing to say to someone. Apparently, Tara's sister's spirit is telling Tara that she wishes Tara hadn't tried to help her-- after the accident? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, except as some psychotic attempt to absolve Tara of any guilt in the death of her sister. Tara's sister apparently wanted to die, and wants Tara to not feel bad about it.

Oh, boy.

Ms. Caputo presses on: "She says you are not responsible for her departure. Do you understand that?" Tara says she does. Then, Ms. Caputo really twists the knife: "Your sister leaned over and kissed you, and said, 'I've been able to finally give my sister the peace that she deserves.' And she says 'That's priceless.' She says, 'And I will continue to do that each and every day of your life.'"

How wonderful Ms. Caputo is! She and she alone was able to facilitate this great forgiving between sisters. It's priceless to the dead sister, but I wonder if Tara didn't end up actually paying for that particular session? And any future sessions in which Tara's sister will continue to give her the peace that she "deserves."

Ms. Caputo genuinely believes that this sorrowful, guilt-ridden woman deserves the manipulation being perpetrated upon her. Tara deserves this.

If Tara's sister were anything like Mike's mother, she would have broken Tara's foot before the session, to spare her this despicable injustice.

But Ms. Caputo isn't done with her reprehensible mistreatment of her client: "Does your daughter just come up to you and out of nowhere just say Mommy I love you? She [Tara's sister] says 'Please know that's me.'"

Is there ever a child, ever in the history of the world, that didn't occasionally and seemingly for no reason rush to their parental figure and look for affirmation? Ms. Caputo is taking something that happens to everyone and exploiting it for her own cynical ends. Moreover, she's suggesting that Tara's dead sister can take control of her daughter's body:

"That's your sister's soul, her energy, getting your daughter to do that," she continues. Do you really want your dead relative to take control of your living child's body and use it for its own purposes? What kind of sick psychotic bulls hit is this woman perpetrating?

Heartbreakingly, Tara interviews that "I think today was very healthy for me. As upset as I got, I think that in the long run it's definitely helped me." In fact just the opposite has occurred. Tara has been given a false sense of absolution from a manipulative c*nt who is using her for her own self aggrandizement, and as an income source. She has merely put off the time in which she must actually deal with what happened, and her feelings about it. Moreover, simple acts of affection between her and her daughter are now tainted-- is it really the daughter that hugged and kissed me, and told me she loves me, or is it my dead sister using her body to tell me she loves me?

The shamelessness of this rotten c*nt is boundless.

But, back to the comic relief! The kids have gotten her a digital recorder, and Ms. Caputo seems charmingly clueless about how to use it. "What's this button do?" "Oh, I found the volume!" "What's with all these folders?" The children, displaying the patience of Job, attempt to explain the use of the recorder. Will this simple woman actually figure it out? (Isn't it ironic that she can communicate with the dead, but she can't even figure out how to work a digital recorder??? Oh, the things that mediums must give up sometimes, am I right?)

Ms. Caputo takes the digital recorder to a group reading-- apparently these people couldn't afford one of the one-on-one sessions-- where she gets to practice her cold or warm or hot reading, I don't know on several women. Most of what we see of the session focused on an older woman named Roberta whose husband had recently died. "Did your husband pass?" Ms. Caputo asks, singling out the oldest woman in the group, and therefore making the safest guess in the history of cold reading. Yes. Okay, Roberta brought deviled eggs to the group reading (apparently, a group reading isn't just a chance for these people to swindled-- it's also a pot luck!); "Did he like deviled eggs?" she asks. Yes, he did! (I am actually the only person I know who doesn't like deviled eggs; another easy guess.) "Did he like to dance?" Another hit! She then fishes about the man dying of some illness. Yes, he did die of an illness. Again, he was an old man-- this is the least impressive bit of cold reading I've ever seen in my life, and I watched at least three episodes of John Edward's old show.

Ms. Caputo exuberantly exclaims that Roberta's husband is telling her, "I don't want nobody to remember me sick!" Given the fact that we later learn that Roberta's husband died of Alzheimer's disease, this comes across as a spectacularly insensitive joke.

Roberta later interviews that she needed proof before she would believe in mediums, and she got that proof tonight. "I think skepticism is diminished," she says. But there never was any skepticism, at least on Roberta's part, because earlier in the episode she also interviewed (presumably before the amazing group reading) that "I can't say that I totally believe mediums, but I didn't not believe in it." In other words, she believed in mediums before the session. That's not skepticism diminished, that's credulity affirmed.

That is you, Roberta, being manipulated by a hack.

But, back to that digital recorder that Ms. Caputo found so vexing: Did it work? Maybe; she couldn't find the file she recorded! She plugged it into the computer and went through all the files, but couldn't find anything. Not even those modern, sophisticated kids of hers could find the file, either! Ms. Caputo doesn't have time to download files anyway-- she has a year long waiting list (!) of people who want to be rooked! Before she would just leave the tapes and scram out. But now, she's getting calls from people who want the tapes they were promised. (Aside: Could you imagine listening to a tape of four hours of "Does the letter 'M' mean anything to anyone here?")

"Long Island Medium" is exactly what you expect from such a program-- selectively edited to show the "psychic" in the best light possible. Theresa Caputo is a psychic pscumbag (and not even a very good one) and a c*nt (and annoying as hell), but TLC is bulls hit for airing it. And I'm a fool for watching it.

Special UPDATE, 4:43 PM PST: My biggest fan, KayBeeRN, offered her own rebuttal to this post. In the interest of being fair and showing both sides of this important issue, I snapped a pic and offer that rebuttal in full here:

Of course I appreciate when anyone takes the time to respond to something I've written.