Imagine being so good at the thing you do that you beat a criminal charge by just doing it in front of the judge. That's Evangeline Adams.
She was the biggest astrologer in America in the early 1900s. Huge clientele, the kind of name people whispered about. And in 1914 she got arrested for fortune-telling, which was illegal.
Her defense is the stuff of legend. The judge had her read a chart for an anonymous person, who turned out to be his own son, with no other information. She read it cold and apparently got it scarily right. The judge was convinced enough to rule that she had 'raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science' and threw the case out. That ruling basically made astrology legal in New York.
Then radio came along and she became a full-on celebrity, mailing out thousands of charts and reading the stars for the whole country during the Depression, exactly when people were desperate for some meaning and hope.
What gets me about her isn't even the astrology. It's that she was a woman in an era that handed women basically zero authority, and she built fame, independence and a fortune off the strength of her own mind and nerve. She bet everything on being taken seriously, and she won.