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Credit: Instagram
Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah finally broke her silence in a new interview for the first time since getting out of prison in December 2025.
In the interview, she completely took responsibility for the crimes that led to her incarceration in the first place.
“I was wrong,” Jen admitted to PEOPLE. “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.”
Jen was arrested in March 2021 and ended up pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was sentenced to prison for the role she played in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded people across the country by selling them alleged business services tied to online ventures. The services that were sold ended up delivering little or no value, and many of the victims who were preyed upon were elderly or financially vulnerable.
A major part of the operation involved “lead lists,” which had information on potential customers. These were purchased, sold, and reused, and prosecutors alleged that Jen helped to generate and sell these leads. The leads were used to contact individuals repeatedly and to try to get them to purchase more services.
She served two years and nine months before she was released, and now, she is continuing to serve the remainder of her sentence under home confinement.
“It’s a long and a very complex journey that brought me to this point,” Jen claimed. “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.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing for the majority of the time,” she added. “I was working under people who were running these companies.”
Jen stated that she thought the companies she worked with were doing legitimate things, especially when it came to fulfilling services to customers they sold them to.
“What happened was down the line, people that I worked with were working with a lot of other people,” she explained. “Once that initial fulfillment was happening, things were happening beyond the point of sale with that customer that I didn’t know about.”
Regardless, Jen copped to being responsible for what went down. “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 said. “But you have a responsibility once you’re in that position to make sure it doesn’t.”
She also noted external factors at the time were clouding her 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,” Jen divulged. “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.”
“And the reason I say all that is not as an excuse,” she elaborated. “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 added.
While Jen initially maintained her innocence after her arrest, in July 2022, her legal team got a ton of evidence from prosecutors weeks before the trial that didn’t fare well for Jen.
“It was like a train hit,” Jen said. “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. 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.”
“I’m sorry,” Jen told PEOPLE, clearly showing she’s remorseful for what went down. “I’m accepting responsibility, and I’ve made it my mission to make sure that people are paid back.”
“I understand that people have their opinions based on what they saw,” she added. “But I would hope they would give me the grace to at least hear me and understand that I’m more than just the headline.”
