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Well, this is complicated.
Following Jen Shah’s release from prison late last year, she’s been avoiding the spotlight.
Now, she’s opening up about everything.
Most importantly, she’s taking almost full responsibility for the crimes that put her away for three years.
‘I made wrong decisions’
The disgraced former The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star spoke to People following her release from prison.
She covered a lot of topics — including prison conditions and her own wrongdoings.
“I was wrong,” Shah admitted. “I made wrong decisions.”
She continued: “I should have done things differently. I should have been more diligent.”
Shah affirmed: “And I’m deeply remorseful and sorry for my actions and for my part. I take full responsibility.”
For a long time following her arrest, Shah insisted that she was innocent — before abruptly changing her plea.
“It’s a long and a very complex journey that brought me to this point,” she now explained.
“And without re-litigating it,” Shah admitted, “I became involved in the case because I made horrible business decisions and I disregarded huge red flags.”
Shah claimed: “I allowed the lines to be blurred between personal friendships and ethical business practices. And in essence, I trusted the wrong people at a very vulnerable time in my life.”
She also alleged: “I thought I was doing the right thing for the majority of the time. I was working under people who were running these companies.”
She says that she believed that the companies were legitimate
“What happened was down the line, people that I worked with were working with a lot of other people,” Shah described.
“Once that initial fulfillment was happening,” she claimed, “things were happening beyond the point of sale with that customer that I didn’t know about.”
Shah warned: “It can happen if you’re not careful, if you’re not being diligent and you’re not paying attention to the red flags.”
She then emphasized: “But you have a responsibility once you’re in that position to make sure it doesn’t.”
Even will all of this insistence that she didn’t know what she’d done, Shah admitted that events before her arrest had “clouded my judgment.”
“What’s important for me to say — and I need to let people know — was at the same time, my involvement in this conspiracy overlapped with my own personal pain,” Shah shared.
“My husband [Sharrieff “Coach” Shah] and I were separated,” she noted. “We were on the verge of a divorce.”
Shah continued: “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.
She at least emphasized: “I say all that is not as an excuse. Because it’s not like I was making good business decisions and then I woke up one morning and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, I made a bad business decision.’”
Shah added: “This is the totality of everything that was going on and the overlapping of what I was dealing with personally. And I tried to avoid and numb all of that with alcohol and just avoid it.”
‘There were people who were hurt’
” I trusted the wrong people at a very vulnerable time in my life,” Shah then characterized.
According to her, in July 2022, prosecution turned over discovery to her legal team — which is when she understood how many victims she had, allegedly unknowingly, accumulated.
“It was like a train hit,” Shah described. “That was the first time I saw all of it — the communications, the interviews, the witnesses.”
“I saw for the first time that there were people who were hurt,” Shah described. “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.”
Well, believe her or not, we’ve likely not heard the last of Shah. Many expect her to return to Bravo in some capacity. Among other things, she has about $6 million in restitution to pay.
