The unofficial first edition of OFF-TRACK with A-TRAIN was a piece I wrote in August of 2016 about former WWE Divas Champion Kelly Kelly, who was a regular on an E! Network reality show called WAGS—which stands for Wives And Girlfriends, apparently—and who appeared on a different E! Network reality show called Hollywood Medium.
The Hollywood Medium isn’t a medium, of course. He doesn’t commune with the spirit world or whatever; he’s a con man.
You remember in the Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy has run away from home and she comes across this weird old guy roasting weenies over an open flame by the side of the road and he’s got a covered wagon that says this?:
He’s a fortune teller, but of course, he’s not.
When Dorothy asks him to read her “past present and future,” he tells her to close her eyes, then he rifles through her basket and finds a picture of her with her Auntie Em.
But of course, he doesn’t know it’s Dorothy’s Auntie Em. He just sees that she’s an older woman, and in the picture, she’s wearing a polka dot dress.
So when he tells Dorothy to open her eyes and they both look into his crystal ball, he says he sees a woman wearing a polka dot dress—“her face is care-worn”, he says. “That’s Aunt Em,” offers Dorothy. “Her name is Emily,” he says. “That’s right,” Dorothy replies, because of course Em is short for Emily. It usually is. He is given a quick bit of information by his subject, his “mark”, and he makes an educated guess. It turns out to be true, and he builds trust with the mark, who thinks he must be able to read her mind.
He cold reads her.
It’s a tactic used by hucksters and flim flammers for centuries, even to this day.
You can draw a direct line from the snake oil salesmen of the old west to modern day catfishers and online con-artists, but there's a few major differences between Professor Marvel and the Hollywood Medium.
The first major difference is that Hollywood Medium doesn’t have to use cold reading. Because his marks—excuse me, “CLIENTS”—are all celebrities, and because Google is a thing that exists.
And the second is that Professor Marvel is a kindly old kook who bilks Kansas rubes out of a few nickels here and there, and the Hollywood Medium is a goddamn sociopath who long ago lost the ability to feel shame or remorse.
I didn't always feel this way about the Hollywood Medium.
Last time, when we saw him talking to Kelly Kelly, he said that he was getting messages from "a man who feels that he passed away from his perspective, before the prime of his life."
That would be WWE wrestler Test, Kelly Kelly's former boyfriend, who died from a drug overdose in 2009. The Hollywood Medium would know this because again, Google.
So this is what he did after he did 5 minutes of research on Kelly Kelly.
He Googled: "Wrestler Test death"
33 years old. Before the prime of his life. Checks out.
"He's talking about how he knew what happened in February."
He Googled: "Kelly Kelly wedding"
She got married in February to some hockey player.
And then he tells Kelly Barbie Kelly Blank that "this man" is very excited for her and "he's acknowledging joy that you moved on."
And Kelly Kelly bought it, hook, line and sinker.
And it was funny, because Kelly Kelly is stupid enough to believe that this guy talked to the ghost of Test, and that the ghost of Test gave her his blessing for her wedding FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.
And it was also funny because of the reaction of her friends, who were apparently not stupid to believe ANY of this shit.
But this time, with Ronda Rousey, it’s not funny anymore.
It’s not funny, because this time, he’s talking to Ronda Rousey, and he decides the best way to ingratiate himself to her is to lie about how he’s received a message from Ronda’s dead father, who committed suicide when she was eight.
That’s low, even for you, Hollywood Medium.
Not only because of the subject matter. But also because she wrote about his suicide in her 2015 book “My Fight/Your Fight.” It’s a subject in her life that she’s talked about in several interviews and videos in the past.
It's not a secret.
When he heard he would be speaking to Ronda Rousey, he Googled “Ronda Rousey” and did 30 seconds of research. He found the story of her father’s death, and he shamelessly exploited it to gain her confidence and trust.
That goes beyond fraud, or con-man or charlatan, or flim-flammer or quack, or any of the other words I jokingly used to describe him in the Kelly Kelly article. No, there are no jokes for this one.
You’re not just a con artist, Hollywood Medium. You’re a fucking GHOUL.
Only a man with no soul would do this to people.
I don’t feel any derision for Ronda the way I felt it for Kelly Kelly. I feel pity. I feel sorry for her. If you haven’t heard the story of her father’s death, watch the video at the top of the page. It’s fucking HEARTBREAKING. Ronda's father was told that his broken back would never heal, and due to a blood disease, he would get worse and worse until he was a quadriplegic. Rather than be a burden to his family, he drove off to a secluded place and put a hose in the exhaust.
Again, Ronda was eight when this happened. She recounts in the video how she'd cope with the grief by making believe he was just gone on a business trip.
Like I said. HEARTBREAKING.
And this shameless little fuck decided it was the best way to cold read this woman on a national basic cable “reality” show.
Watch just the first seconds of the video where he says "It's not a car accident, but they're talking about a vehicle, but putting around someone's last moments of life. It feels weird."
Ronda makes this face.
And the Hollywood Medium makes this face.
That's the face of someone without a soul, people. (Love your little Halloween decoration there, too, you fucking asshole. Really ties the room together. Also really signifies that you're someone to take seriously and not a total fucking fraud.)
He makes that face, THIS face right here, when he asks: "Does that mean anything?"
What a dick. He KNOWS that means something, because he read her damn Wikipedia page.
But he's also waiting for the one day when someone says "yeah, it means something. It's a horrible fucking memory from my childhood that I've talked about on several platforms which you could have seen or read about anywhere and it doesn't mean you can commune with the beyond. It means you know how to use Google." And then that someone breaks his fucking nose--or in this case, rips his arm out of its socket.
So just in case today was that day, he makes this face in preparation:
But then, as she's telling him the story of what happened (A STORY HE ALREADY KNOWS, MIND YOU), he fakes empathy. He closes his eyes and nods slowly, averting his gaze and whispering gently "I'm sorry."
You know who fakes empathy in these kinds of situations? Fucking serial killers. Sociopaths.
Someone do an exposé on this asshole. Take away his internet and his phone, then spring a regular non-celebrity person on him with no prep time and tell him to talk to that person’s dead relatives and watch him fail miserably.
Shame on you, Hollywood Medium. And also, shame on you, "Hollywood Medium." The entire show--hell, the entire E! Network--needs to be taken to task for this one. You have employed a con-man, E! Network. A con-man at best, and a fucking sociopathic GHOUL at worst.
Get him off the airwaves, and do it now.
(SRS Editor's Note: Unless he portrays his lookalike Maculay Culkin in a re-boot of Home Alone where Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern actually catch him. What an errand boy)
