Jen Shah BEGS Judge For Lenient Prison Sentence
Jen Shah BEGS Judge For Lenient Prison Sentence
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City fraudster, Jen Shah, is pleading with the court for leniency when she’s sentenced in January 2023.
Jen Shah’s legal team submitted a sentencing request to the judge presiding over her case, asking for a three year prison sentence. She faces up to 14 years in prison for stealing from hundreds of victims – many of them elderly – in a long-running telemarketing scheme.
The former Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star is scheduled to be sentenced on January 6, 2023. She pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
“The terrible business decisions I made and professional relationships I developed stemmed from some personal painful experiences that I was going through in my life,” Shah wrote to the judge in a four-page letter titled, “How I got involved in the situation?”
Under the plea agreement Jen accepted in July, the sentencing range is between 11 and 14 years in prison under advisory guidelines. The Probation Department recommended a six-year prison term, and prosecutors will submit their own recommended sentence to the judge next week.
According to court documents on Shah’s behalf during the sentencing process, her attorneys claim she wasn’t a “kingpin” of the telemarketing scheme and that her sentence should be lower than some of the other co-conspirators. Shah never had direct contact with the victims, her lawyers say, although prosecutors alleged that she came up with leads to target for the scheme.
According to the feds, since 2012, Jen Shah and others sold questionable “business services” to the victims, including website design services to some elderly individuals who didn’t own computers.
Jen was arrested last year while Bravo was filming the second season of the Bravo reality series, with episodes of the show featuring Shah and her castmates speculating – and sparring – over her culpability.
Her attorneys asked the judge to ignore her wild behavior on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, where her tagline for promos is, “the only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”
“Just as Jen Shah has never been a ‘housewife,’ little else is real about her persona and caricature as portrayed by the editors of RHOSLC,” her attorneys say.
Jen submitted 30 letters of support from family and friends – none were written by her fellow Housewives.
The mom of two asked the judge to serve her time at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas.
Jen was ordered to forfeit $6.5 million and pay up to $9.5 million in restitution to the victims.
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Avigail is an Entertainment blogger at All About The Tea, who specializes in The Real Housewives of Atlanta and The Real Housewives of Potomac. Avigail has a background in marketing. She’s a Brooklynite living in the Bahamas, with a passion for travel, writing, reality TV watching, pop culture and spoken word.