Jen Shah: An American Scam Story
An avid Housewives viewer and a Bravo novice dig into the arrest and indictment of the RHOSLC star.
E: There are actual Big Important Horrifying news things happening this week: A spate of anti-trans legislation, much of it targeting kids. The Derek Chauvin trial. Another disturbing attack on an Asian woman in New York City. The world continues to be a fundamentally depressing place in so many ways.
But, if I’m being honest, there’s one story that has consumed my thoughts and obsessions this week: Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Jen Shah being indicted and arrested for her alleged involvement in a long-running fraud scheme. It combines all of my favorite things! Reality television! Scams! Faux girl bosses! The ultimate fraud of late-stage capitalism! Claire, have you been as into this story as I have?
C: Yeah, I have no idea who Jen Shah is or what any of this means. This is one of those news stories that bubbles up on my Twitter feed (with lots of “!!!” and “holy shit” and “lmaooooo” comments attached), leaving me feeling completely out of touch because what? whomst? I do not watch “Real Housewives of Anything City/County” and this is the risk I run.
Let’s start with “Salt Lake City”: I did not know they had Real Housewives there! When? What?
E: I always forget that you are a Bravo novice! So let’s start with the basics, because they are crucial to understanding why this story is making people so expressive on the internet. “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” has only had one season, which premiered in November 2020 and finished airing at the end of February.
C: Oh, so this happened mere weeks after the peak of RHOSLC fever (I imagine).
E: Yes, exactly. The premiere season is still fresh in people’s minds, and Jen Shah was one of the most central and polarizing characters. Whenever there was a big fight, Jen was pretty much always in the center of it. The first major conflict of the season centered on Jen exploding because one of the other women, Mary Cosby, had apparently said that she “smelled like hospital.”
C: Sorry, what??? I think I’m on Jen’s side here??
E: Yes, to be fair to Jen, she wasn’t always in the wrong. It’s rude to say that someone smells like hospital! But Jen also did things like regularly get into screaming matches and smash glasses and once low-key said she would drown fellow castmate Whitney Wild Rose in the lake behind her house? (The threat was empty, but… still.)
C: This is a ludicrously un-self-aware thing for a professional “Bachelor” viewer to say, but this has always been my hesitancy about the Real Housewives -- do I want to watch a show exclusively driven by women being abrasive to each other? Then again, in other (childfree) circumstances, the pandemic year would probably have been my year of getting into the franchise; it just wasn’t meant to be.
So putting that aside, and accepting that the whole show concept is kind of an endless ESH situation, please say more about Jen Shah. Who is she? What’s her whole deal?
E: So besides being a somewhat explosive character, one of Jen Shah’s main defining characteristics is that she is a Very Successful Businesswoman. So successful, that she can drive wildly flashy cars, throw lavish birthday parties at her home -- the “Shah Chalet”! which turned out to be a rental! -- and curate a private luxury shopping experience for her fellow housewife Heather Gay in Las Vegas.
This might make you wonder what kind of business allows for this kind of lifestyle, as well as employing a team of EIGHT assistants. (She calls them the “Shah Squad.”) Let’s let Jen explain her career in her own words, because anything I say really can’t do it justice:
“I own three different marketing companies and we do lead generation, data monetization, customer acquisition. The best way to describe it is, I’m the Wizard of Oz, I’m the one behind the curtain that no one knows exists but I’m the one making everything happen,” Shah told Access Hollywood in November 2020. “So, ads are popping to you guys and they’re like, ‘How the hell do they know I’m shopping at Neiman Marcus?’ That’s me. If you think about it, you know how much traffic is on the internet every second, all the people clicking. I’m making money on every click, anytime you click on anything I’m getting some money.”
C: Ok so if I’m reading this correctly, Jen Shah is claiming here that she is the singular mastermind behind… cookies and programmatic ads? And no one knows about this except for her and her eight (8) assistants?
Sorry, I’m speechless.
E: Claire, don’t even worry about it. She’s very successful! She’s a business woman! She’s a girl boss! She NEEDS eight assistants! Just go with it. Don’t think too hard. It’s marketing. And fashion. And… business... which... needs assisting. Or something.
C: I sort of love the idea of a company structured entirely as assistants. Jeff Bezos and his 500,000 assistants. Everyone’s just helping Jeff make Amazon, just like Jen’s eight assistants are helping her make all programmatic ads on the entire internet. Sheryl Sandberg… that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s assistant, to me.
So I’m a little afraid to ask but uhhh what did her business actually do?
E: *Takes a deep breath.* Outwardly, Jen’s companies included the three aforementioned “marketing” companies, as well as a couture dress line called JXA Fashion (from the website, this brand mostly seems to consist of face masks and Shah Squad merch?), a subscription eyelash line called Shah Lashes (unclear how you even purchase the lashes because the website just asks for your email?), and a skincare line, Shah Beauty (the site is currently down).
But according to an indictment from the Southern District of New York, Jen and her first assistant, Stuart Smith, were allegedly engaged in a long-running telemarketing scheme to defraud vulnerable adults over the age of 55. This scam, which Jen and Stuart were allegedly involved in as early as 2012, involved selling fraudulent products and services to older people, and then putting together “lead lists” of said vulnerable adults to sell to others who were conducting similar schemes. Jen and Stuart would then -- again, allegedly -- get a cut from those scams. (The actual charges are conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.)
A press release from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss does not mince words, calling Jen a person “who portrays herself as a wealthy and successful businessperson on ‘reality’ television,” but “in actual reality and as alleged, the so-called business opportunities pushed on the victims by Shah, Smith, and their co-conspirators were just fraudulent schemes, motivated by greed, to steal victims’ money. Now, these defendants face time in prison for their alleged crimes.”
C: Damn, if you’re going to scam some vulnerable elderly people out of their retirement savings, you should at least give them the experience of having a whirlwind virtual romance with a sexy young single from abroad first. That’s something I firmly believe.
If the allegations are accurate, that’s all extremely gross -- why am I especially squicked out by the idea of selling contact info for people you’ve scammed to other scammers? I guess it combines scamming with another exploitative tech-driven business practice of our time: selling your customers’ data without their knowledge or consent.
E: It’s extremely gross! And I agree. There’s something particularly icky feeling about the idea that you could make the lion’s share of your wealth simply by facilitating the scamming of others. No need to even do the labor of directly scamming!
C: And then to further monetize it by going on TV to flaunt your ill-gotten wealth -- an extremely bold move. Like, she made money from Bravo because she had all that (alleged) crime money! And then she invited people to contemplate her wealth, and to think, hmm, I wonder what a non-criminal explanation might be for a random person having eight (8!!!) assistants for businesses with no tangible products.
E: I feel like you’re starting to understand why this story really hit the spot. Pure schadenfreude -- especially because so many RHOSLC viewers already had a feeling that something sketchy was going on, but couldn’t quite put their fingers on what it was. There is nothing quite so delicious as a takedown tale.
C: It’s just the epitome of an American spectacle: a housewife who isn’t a housewife (just branded as one); a businesswoman who isn’t a businesswoman (just branded as one); a scammer leveraging each grift into a new, more lucrative grift; and of course, millions of us eager to watch and get to know this person simply because she has a ton of money and expensive shit. We find wealth and money-making so fascinating!
This brings to mind something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: We often talk about how we fetishize work and productivity in American, which is true, but the way this plays out in entertainment media often boils down to creating characters who are always described as working very hard and being very good at their jobs, but who are mostly depicted as simply having lots of money. Whenever we actually see them, they’re very well-groomed and impeccably dressed, their makeup is flawless, they’re on a glamorous vacation or having a boozy lunch or at a party. Maybe we sometimes see them casually killing it at a presentation. But being a successful businessman in American media culture often just looks like having the accoutrements of wealth and others’ admiration.
And then you see people, like Jen Shah (or, you know, many influencers) who are preoccupied with projecting that sense of success and competence and high earnings without necessarily producing anything. What do “business people” do all day??? Does anyone MAKE anything anymore? Please get off my lawn.
E: It really is so fundamentally American. The projection of wealth and success and capitalist productivity trumps anything else. (And now that I say the word Trump… I’m thinking about another very famous professional grifter that I have tried to scrub from my brain in 2021.)
The Jen Shah saga also exposes the cracks (gaping holes?) in corporate Girl Boss “feminism.” The core of corporate girl power is this idea that equality just means aping the worst, greediest behaviors so many “successful” men have displayed over the course of our nation’s history. Don’t worry lady, you too can hoard wealth and exploit the working class!
C: The American dream in action! Trump does share this quality of performing capitalist success (which is all actually a grift) by flaunting certain signifiers of success; it’s all display and aesthetics. Or maybe that’s just my takeaway from the eight assistants and the OTT parties -- again, I didn’t watch the show -- but there’s something so comical about this breathless performance of productivity and affluence. It reminds me of Sianne Ngai’s theory of the zany as an aesthetic rooted in late capitalist production norms (which, to be fully transparent, I am in the process of reading about but have not yet finished) -- the collapsing of work and play into each other, the demand for endless flexibility and spontaneity in employment, the frenetic pace. I’ve heard Trump compared to a sort of terrifying clown, and I think this gets at something similar. There’s a buffoonery in the failure to actually be good at everything (or anything) that’s being attempted, and in the ongoing bombardment of those attempts to be outstandingly good at everything.
Now that I’ve reminded myself of some reading I want to do, maybe it’s time to wrap up. Anything else I need to know about Jen Shah?
E: I think we’ve covered most of it. Though I almost forgot to mention one key detail: “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” was actually in the middle of filming when the arrest occurred. Jen apparently left the cast en route to Vail, and soon after, the feds showed up! Unclear how much of this “zaniness” was actually caught on camera, but it seems likely that the storyline will feature heavily on season two.
And isn’t that really the most delicious scam of all? Whatever happens to Jen Shah, Bravo will be right there, filming it, packaging it, and serving it up to the rest of us suckers to consume.
How Depressed Does This Make Us Feel About The Capitalist Hellscape We Live In
5 out of 5 underpaid assistants
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Now I understand!! Been wondering what all the excitement was about this woman Jen Knew I could depend on you both to educate me!