Bravo Jen Shah
Jen Shah just got sentenced to 6.5 years in prison on January 6, 2023, but viewers are only now seeing the reaction of the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” to her guilty plea, which happened in July 2022 just days before she was set to go to trial, and aired in the show’s season 3 finale.
The guilty plea hit her friends and co-stars hard, as the episode finished with Lisa Barlow and Heather Gay meeting up for lunch to share their reactions to the news. The segment starts with Gay and Barlow sitting down for lunch a couple of days after Gay’s return from New York City, where she went to support Shah ahead of her trial.
Barlow tells Gay that the whole situation “feels so surreal.” She says she felt anger, sadness and confusion as she realized, “Wow, this is who she is. This is a bad, awful thing she’s done.” Gay tells Barlow, “I am overwhelmed with grief. Grief that we are in this situation, that there’s victims, that our friend is going away for a decade, and she has a 16-year-old.”
Barlow agrees that thinking about it made her “bawl [her] eyes out.” Gay says, “What she pled guilty to is so bad. And the fact that she’s taken it this far and gone for this long and proclaimed her innocence, and now, I can only think she did it and she thought she was gonna get away with it, and then when she realized she didn’t get away with it, her story changed.”
Barlow tells her co-star that she just didn’t want to believe that Shah was “capable” of the crime as Gay says the guilty plea was “the last thing [she] expected.”
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Heather Gay Also Shared Her Theory About Why Jen Shah Decided to Plead Guilty
Jen pleads guilty in her case, & Heather meets up with Lisa to discuss what happened. #RHOSLC
During the same conversation with Barlow, Gay shares her theory about why Shah pleaded guilty after proclaiming her innocence for so long. She tells her co-star that she thinks Shah’s husband Sharrieff Shah “discovered what Jen was doing and that it was impossible to explain away.”
She tells Barlow that she thinks they found something like a “smoking gun.” There has been no confirmation about whether Sharrieff Shah did in fact play a role in the RHOSLC star’s guilty plea. However, he did write a letter to the sentencing judge asking for leniency in Shah’s sentence. The letter stated that Shah felt “genuine remorse,” Page Six reported.
Gay tells Barlow that she now believes that Shah is guilty. “I think she did it and I think she’s choking on the words that she doesn’t wanna say it,” she says as Barlow gets emotional. “It’s too big and the penalties are too big. It’s a lot.”
The RHOSLC Cast Will Be Discussing the Case at the Season 3 Reunion, Although Jen Shah Wasn’t Present at the Filming
#RHOSLC Season 3 Reunion Sneak Peek! It starts January 25th at 8/7c on Bravo!
The RHOSLC season 3 reunion is set to premiere on January 25 and the trailer for the reunion included a clip of host Andy Cohen asking Gay why she thinks that Coach Shah encouraged Jen Shah to plead guilty.
“I don’t know the first thing about their relationship,” Gay shared in the preview. “I think it’s pulling on a thread.”
Shah wasn’t at the reunion after she said she had a conversation with Bravo and made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss her legal situation but they told her it was a storyline they expected to talk about. The embattled RHOSLC star issued a statement saying she wouldn’t be attending under legal advice.
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