Heavy/Peacock Heather Gay in a scene from 'The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City' finale.
Jen Shah sent a message to Bravo and Andy Cohen following the explosive “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” 4 finale on January 2, 2024. And Cohen responded right back.
Hours after the finale, titled “Mysteries, Revealed?,” aired on Bravo, a statement posted to Shah’s Instagram story. In a message posted by whomever is running her Instagram account, Shah denied her former friend Heather Gay’s allegation that she gave her a black eye shortly before her prison sentencing took place in early 2023.
“Bravo, if I punched Heather Gay in the eye you would have footage to prove it,” Shah’s message read. “It’s clear the show can’t live without me since I was brought up at the beginning, middle and end of season 4. Andy is still butt hurt that I turned down his 1:1 interview. Why would you sit down with someone who ‘gave’ another cast member a black eye? Next story.”
On January 3, 2023, Cohen responded to Shah’s message on his Siriux XM show, “Andy Cohen Live.” “I don’t want to be Captain Obvious here but if we had footage don’t you think we would have aired it?” Cohen said on his show. “Do you think we wouldn’t have said, ‘Heather!’ Heather’s saying ‘I don’t know how I got the black eye.’ And then don’t you think we would have cut to the footage with a chyron that said ‘4 Hours Earlier.’ Pop!”
“First of all, that’s quite obvious,” Cohen continued. “Second of all, I had forgotten about the one-on-one with Jen. She is right, I did want to do a one-on-one with her. I don’t care about it anymore, I’m over it. Her stipulations were insane. She wanted, in exchange for this, I’m trying to remember the specifics. I know she wanted us to do a docuseries of her days leading up to jail. She wanted a lot of money. And she was still professing her innocence so it would have been another interview of her sitting across from me lying to my face which we got at two reunions from her. So that’s my response to that.”
In January 2022, Shah revealed she turned down an interview with Andy Cohen ahead of her prison stay. “I will not be doing the 1:1 with Andy Cohen and Bravo because of their unwillingness to remove contractual provisions that would allow the network to legally make misrepresentations of me and my story,” she wrote in a statement. “This specific 1:1 was not part of my RHOSLC reality tv contract. I promised myself and my loving family that I would not allow this portion of my life to be sensationalized and inaccurately conveyed.”
Cohen disputed Shah’s claims in an interview on the “Chicks in the Office” podcast. “She released a statement that was not really true about what our negotiations were,” Cohen alleged in May 2023. “What she wanted was, I believe, for us to do a series. She wouldn’t do the interview unless we did a series leading up to her going to jail and following her, which we kinda felt like we had seen.”
“Also, what I wanted was answers,” the Bravo host added. “She had lied to me. She had lied to all of her friends, she had lied to everyone. So I wanted to talk to her about what really happened, and she didn’t want to.”
According to her prison bio, Shah’s expected release date from Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas is May 2, 2028.
Heather Gay Claimed She Covered For Jen Shah
BravoHeather Gay and Jen Shah.
On “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” season 4 finale, Gay dropped a bomb about the black eye she got while filming during a season 3 cast trip to San Diego in 2022.
While calling out co-star Monica Garcia for her shocking role in Reality Von Tease, a troll Instagram account that targeted Shah and the RHOSLC cast, Gay declared, “I don’t think you understand something about this group. There’s something that you missed out on. We are friends, and we have been through this bulls*** before with Jen. For years, we were afraid.”
“We are the type of girls that ride or die,“ she added of her past loyalty to Shah. “I ate s*** every day for her.”
Gay then alleged, “I felt like I had to lie to protect her, I did whatever it took. I went on a book tour and defended her and took s**** for the fact that she gave me a black eye.”
As Gay made the allegation about Shah, co-star Lisa Barlow gasped and said, “Whoa. Whoa.”
Fans Have Been Waiting for More Than 1 Year For the True Story About the Black Eye
Bravo/YouTubeHeather Gay.
It has been more than a year since Gay left viewers hanging with the mysterious black eye storyline. In the December 2022 RHOSLC episode “White Lies and Black Eyes,” Gay dodged questions about how she got the black eye. Shah sat beside her as she unveiled her swollen eye to Meredith Marks. Both women claimed they had no idea why Gay woke up like that.
In another scene, Gay told Shah she didn’t “want to get anyone in trouble.” She later told producers she was simply trying to protect “herself” by keeping the secret.
For more than a year, Gay also teased the ongoing story in interviews. She told Us Weekly she was “waiting with the rest of America” to see the black eye mystery would play out.
“I don’t know what happened,” she stated during the RHOSLC reunion, per People magazine. “I cannot speak to anything other than I walked to my room and I blacked out and I woke up with a black eye. When production came in my room, I told them, I said, ‘I had no idea.’”
Gay claimed she confided in Shah because she “trusted her the most” to help come up with “a cover story.” She also joked about Shah giving her the shiner. “If I knew Jen did that, I would cover it up. But that was not my intention,” she said. “Anything could’ve happened. I still don’t know how it happened.”
There was always plenty of speculation that Shah was behind the black eye. Some fans thought Gay covered for Shah to protect her ahead of her prison sentencing for her role in a nationwide telemarketing scheme that targeted the elderly.
On “Watch What Happens Live,” Andy Cohen promised viewers would find out how Gay got the black eye. When asked if Jen Shah had anything to do with it, Cohen told guest Danny Pellegrino last fall, “Well, we think so and we’re gonna find out later this season.”
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