Jen Shah is breaking her silence.
The 52-year-old Real Housewives of Salt Lake City alum is speaking out for the first time since being released from prison, after being sentenced to 6.5 years in federal prison in January 2023 for her role in a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme.
She was released from prison early in December of last year, and is speaking out now about the experience.
Keep reading to find out more…
“I was wrong. I made wrong decisions. I should have done things differently. I should have been more diligent. And I’m deeply remorseful and sorry for my actions and for my part. I take full responsibility,” she said to People of being found guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Jen will be serving the remainder of her sentence under home confinement after allegedly targeting thousands of victims, many of whom were older, and selling business services of little or no value. The prosecution argued that Jen helped generate a list of leads for these sales, and how the customers were to be sold.
“It’s a long and a very complex journey that brought me to this point. And without re-litigating it, I became involved in the case because I made horrible business decisions and I disregarded huge red flags. 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,” Jen went on to say.
“I thought I was doing the right thing for the majority of the time. I was working under people who were running these companies.”
“What happened was down the line, people that I worked with were working with a lot of other people. Once that initial fulfillment was happening, things were happening beyond the point of sale with that customer that I didn’t know about,” Jen also claimed.
“It can happen if you’re not careful, if you’re not being diligent and you’re not paying attention to the red flags. But you have a responsibility once you’re in that position to make sure it doesn’t.”
“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. My husband [Sharrieff “Coach” Shah] and I were separated. 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,” she noted of her headspace at the time.
“And the reason 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.’ 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…I trusted the wrong people at a very vulnerable time in my life,” she went on to say.
Head to People.com to see more, and watch the interview above.
She recently returned to social media for the first time since her release.