Not long after the successful freshman run of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, castmate Jen Shah was arrested in Utah on fraud and money laundering charges stemming from her telemarketing business. She was (miraculously) filming the second season at the time, and the events of which have now started airing on Bravo. (Shah has since pled not guilty in court and awaits trial for next year.) In the interim, though, Jen Shah’s legal issues are getting the Erika Jayne treatment – a bombshell streaming documentary, that is – and it sounds just as juicy as its predecessor.
Variety reports that ABC News has a new Hulu original documentary on the horizon that explores Jen Shah’s alleged crimes, entitled The Housewife & the Shah Shocker, in the same vein as Erika Jayne and Tom Girardi’s problems in The Housewife & the Hustler. It will apparently feature interviews with those who knew and were close to the reality star (including a childhood classmate and her aunt), as well as the former employee that was at the center of the controversial leaked audio about Shah earlier this year. Law enforcement officials will also be delving into “the inner workings” of the purported scam that affected elderly victims and vulnerable populations.
Some of the commentators in the trailer for the upcoming Hulu documentary, in fact, slammed the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star as being an “unpredictable rich woman” and “the witch of the West.” Yet another interviewee suggests that Jen Shah’s not guilty defense is based on the fact that she is “not the one selling these services” to victims – she only provided the “leads” for those services to seemingly do with what they will. However, the show will have two of Shah’s supposed victims share their own sides of the story. One of whom said in the trailer,
If I could talk to the people that scammed me, I would say, ‘Would you do this to your mother?’
The timeline of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s second season just caught up with Jen Shah being arrested. While some were in tears about the situation, co-star Meredith Marks was decidedly not crying. She even claimed that she herself saw fraudulent behavior from Shah in the past, which Shah has completely refuted. Supposedly, Marks will be tied somehow this season to tipping off Shah’s arresting officers back in March. The new documentary about the legal situation will also provide commentary, too, about the shocked and confused reaction to how the events unfolded. See the trailer here:
The Housewife & the Shah Shocker certainly sounds as dramatic as the one and only Jen Shah herself. Perhaps she will simply make light of the allegations, as she has in the past. Although her reported accomplice and former assistant, Stuart Smith, has since changed his own plea in the case to guilty (per Us Weekly), so things are getting pretty serious, regardless. To find out more, the documentary premieres on Hulu on November 29.
