Jen Shah says she went to prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud because she made “wrong decisions” and “disregarded huge red flags” in an operation that prosecutors said ran from 2012 to 2021 and targeted thousands of victims.
After pleading guilty to one charge of fraud in July 2022 and being sentenced to six and a half years behind bars the following January, the former star of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” is serving the end of an apparently reduced sentence in a community confinement program. She was transferred out of Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, in December and is expected to be released from the program Aug. 30.
Prison was an eye opener for Shah, who told People in an interview published Wednesday that her first day in federal prison took her breath away “You hear people say it’s ‘Camp Cupcake’ — it’s not. It’s prison,” she said. “I just thought, ‘This cannot be where I’m going to be every day.’ ”
After sentencing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Damian Williams said Shah was the most culpable of the many defendants accused of participating in a nationwide fraud scheme. Bogus “business services” were sold as money-making opportunities to people who were elderly or otherwise vulnerable until the victims’ resources were tapped out.
Shah — who believed she was innocent for a year after her arrest — said she finally understood the scope of what she had been involved in when she and her legal team got a look at a big batch of prosecutors’ evidence.
“I saw for the first time that there were people who were hurt,” she said. “That there were actual victims as a result of this conspiracy. I had never seen anything with my own eyes. That changed things for me.” Her guilty plea came days later.
“Jen has faith in our justice system, understands that anyone who breaks the law will be punished, and accepts this sentence as just,” Shah’s attorney, Priya Chaudhry, said in a statement after sentencing. “Jen will pay her debt to society and when she is a free woman again, she vows to pay her debt to the victims harmed by her mistakes.”
Williams summed it up at the time as well: “These victims were sold false promises of financial security but instead Shah and her co-conspirators defrauded them out of their savings and left them with nothing to show for it,” he said in a news release.
In addition to 78 months in prison, Shah was ordered to forfeit $6,500,000, 30 luxury items and 78 counterfeit luxury items, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
“In essence, I trusted the wrong people at a very vulnerable time in my life,” Shah told People. Without shirking responsibility, the 52-year-old explained that her judgment had been clouded in part by other circumstances in her life.
“My husband [Sharrieff “Coach” Shah] and I were separated,” she said. “We were on the verge of a divorce. I was overwhelmed with immense grief from the death of my grandmother, my father and my aunt, all in a very short period of time. I was spiraling deeper into my previously diagnosed clinical depression.”
Shah said she tried to avoid it all at the time by numbing herself with booze. Now she’s trying to make amends, including paying more than $6.6 million in restitution and forfeiture.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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