Foretold · Los Angeles Times

The G-Word

April 11, 2023·47 min·4 clips

Paulina confesses she's a 'scam artist born and bred,' trained to manipulate people through fortune-telling.

Reporter Faith Pino opens the episode by describing Southern California's abundance of psychic shops and explaining that the story came to her when a source called her rather than the other way around. In October 2019, when Pino was working at a small community paper in Orange County, she received a call from Paulina Stephens — a torrent of words about arranged marriages, manipulation, and an escape from a fortune-telling shop. Pino met Paulina at a local cafe, where Paulina, then 24, described being raised in a Romany family that operated a psychic shop. Paulina was pulled out of school at age 12 and trained to be both a fortune teller and a wife. She described the central rule of her culture as marrying within the community, trusting no outsiders, and engaging in fortune-telling, which she characterized as a form of scamming. Pino had never heard the word Romany before, and realized that the G-word — the pejorative used for Romani people — appears casually throughout pop culture, brand names, a Shakira song, and everyday American speech, with even Michelle Obama using the derivative term 'gypped.' She explains the word originated from European misidentification of Romani migrants as Egyptians. Pino followed Paulina to a custody hearing at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach in January 2020, where Paulina was fighting to retain legal custody of her two daughters. On the courthouse steps, Pino observed a gendered split: a huddle of men from the Romany community on one side, and Paulina with her sister and a woman named Gina on the other. Gina had left the Romany community in the early 1990s after becoming pregnant with a non-Romany man, and had flown from San Jose to support Paulina. In a hotel lobby, Gina demonstrated a typical psychic reading from memory, noting all readings follow the same template, and argued that practitioners genuinely believe in what they do. Professor Ian Hancock, a linguist at UT Austin and leading Romani historian, explains that Romani people originated in India around 1000 AD and were persecuted as people of color upon arriving in Europe. In the region now called Romania, Romani people were enslaved for over 500 years, with the regional penal code declaring them 'born slaves' as late as the 1800s. The Nazis tested poison gas on 250 Romani children, and approximately 1.5 million Roma were killed in the Holocaust — a largely unknown history. Fortune-telling developed as a practical, portable livelihood because it required no fixed location and no formal literacy. Paulina's family, part of the Matuaya subgroup of Romani people, ran a psychic shop and attended the annual Renaissance Fair in San Luis Obispo. Paulina began doing paid readings at age 12, sometimes earning enough in a single day to cover her family's food and utilities. She was trained in psychological observation — reading body language, masking desperation, sustaining eye contact — and described the practice as both intuitive healing and strategic performance. As she grew older, Paulina began to question whether she was deceiving clients, questions that grew louder until they led her to call a reporter.

As heard by us

A courthouse and culture story where identity, schooling, and old assumptions keep pushing against each other.

The episode starts with California's most notorious unsolved case and an amateur sleuth's claim about a shared killer, then turns to a courthouse story about Paulina, Gina, and Romany life.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a custody story shaped by language, schooling, and the weight of being named.

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