How’s this for irony: Dawn Bennett, who used to host a radio show called “Financial Myth Busting” (italics ours), allegedly attempted to use a voodoo curse to hobble investigators who were pursuing her on allegations of running a Ponzi scheme.
Reuters reports that prosecutors “disclosed the discovery in an Aug. 2 search of Bennett’s penthouse in Chevy Chase, Maryland, of two freezers containing sealed Mason jars bearing the initials of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers, on whom Bennett may have hoped to cast a ‘hoodoo spell.’ ” (Though no doubt there are experts who make some distinction between the two, The Scrapbook feels safe in equating hoodoo with voodoo.) We have no way of judging Bennett’s skill at double-entry bookkeeping, but given that, happily, the SEC folks are in fine fettle, her hoodoo skills clearly do not impress. That’s not to say she wasn’t methodical. Her apartment is said to have contained detailed instructions for various curses, including the “Beef Tongue Shut Up Hoodoo Spell.”
Perhaps the problem wasn’t the practice, but the practitioner. Last week Washingtonian magazine profiled Sally Quinn, the legendary D.C. society hostess who was married to the late Washington Post grandee Ben Bradlee. Quinn is also known for the religion column she penned for the Post for many years. And now she has a new book out that, among other things, extols occult practices.
Washingtonian reports that Quinn “reveals that, in her less mellow days, she put hexes on three people who promptly wound up having their lives ruined, or ended.”
So maybe voodoo does work after all—it just depends on the voodooista. Two-bit con-artist radio hosts? Nah. But exalted longtime religion columnists for one of the nation’s leading newspapers? Now there’s a woman with the magic touch!