i wouldnt call sylvia browne a top psychic. she was marketed well. but that is it. some said she was accurate way earlier in her career, but even her ex husband said she was an outright scam.
I had a reading with her, it must have been close to 25 years ago, I don't remember exactly, but this was back when AOL was new and it was hard to get online sometimes, Google didn't exist and information wasn't readily available. She knew things about me, personal things like my boyfriends name, from the second I answered the phone. That being said, not a single thing she told me came to fruition. I learned a hard lesson because I held onto a less than stellar relationship for too long because "Sylvia said ....".
I think she was a gifted woman who got caught up in her own hype and her brand became more important than the nature of her work and spirit left her high and dry a lot because of that.
Based upon the things she told me with no other source of information available to her, she couldn't have been a scam when she started out. I don't doubt the rest of the reading was completely made up though.
I think she ended up backed into a corner of her own making and kept the bullshit train going.