The Unreal Housewife: Ep. 1, I Couldn't Take My Eyes Off Her

If you look up the word narcissist in a.

Dictionary, narcissist an extremely self centered person who has an exaggerated sense of self importancesist.

You'll find a lengthy definition describing someone who always makes themselves the focus of everyone's attention. A person who makes whatever situation you're going through about them. A person who can commit serious crimes then later turn around and claim to be the victim.

Narcissists may play the victim if they believe they gain something from it well.

In June of twenty twenty one, Bravo's Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shaw makes a public declaration to the judge in her criminal case, a criminal case accusing her of masterminding an elaborate scheme to defraud thousands of people out of millions of dollars and from about as far left field as a person can come from and still be on planet Earth. Jen states to the judge regarding the criminal case against her, that quote, I.

Was the victim of multiple crimes by an individual known to me who stole money from me, violated an order of protection issued by a judge, and assaulted me, causing my physical injuries.

A quick note before we go on. I know this sounds a lot like the real Jenshaw, but it's actually an actor reading from a declaration. Jenshaw wrote to the judge. You'll hear more of this kind of thing throughout the season. Anyway, Jenshaw continues now writing about some guy who supposedly assaulted her.

He was arrested for, among other things, stealing from me in New York County, New York. The arresting officer was a detective of the New York Police Department. After his initial arrests and arraignment, a judge issued a temporary order of protection, which required the individual to stay away from me.

So jen Shaw is being prosecuted for federal crimes. Then suddenly she flips the script, bringing up something she says happened to her that literally has nothing to do with what she's being charged with. It seems like she just wants to play the victim at this point. Sounds a lot like the definition of a narcissist, right, But what does any of that have to do with the many criminal exploits of con artist Jennifer Kai Kalani Shaw simply put everything. I'm Jonathan Walton and this is season four

Jenny, you can be okay, Yeah, I just gotta go figure out what's going on. What's going on? I've just got a phone call and strap Stain years in the hospital.

It's March thirtieth, twenty twenty one, Salt Lake City, Utah.

A fleet of black SUVs.

And a sprinter van have haphazardly pulled up in the middle of a strip mall parking lot. Bravo's Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is shooting season two of their show. They're outside a shop called Beauty Labin Laser, owned by cast member Heather Gay, but one of the show's most outspoken stars, Jenshaw, is in full panic mode. She's the picture of Hollywood glam, with professionally braided hair and glitzy makeup,

He has internal bleeding, so I need to go there, Like, are you still on Salt Lake? But yeah, we're still here, glad us if you need any okay, I will so.

Jen jumps into a pickup truck with a driver and starts speeding down the highway. Ten minutes later, federal agents with Homeland Security and officers from the New York City Police Department descend on that strip mall parking lot.

We're looking for Jen Saw.

She just like, wow, I have like swap team minut stuff.

What the heck?

In the end, agents in unmarked vehicles suddenly appear behind that dark gray f one point fifty Jen's being driven in and she gets pulled over and unceremoniously arrested handcuffed in a random parking lot on the side of a cold and dusty Utah road. At this point, Jen Shaw is accused of scamming millions and millions of dollars, and dozens of police officers and federal agents want her behind.

Bars, and she might have had things in place, knowing this was coming. Because so many of her co defendants were already arrested and already going through the process, she knew that one day the Feds were going to come knocking at her door.

That's the amazing Emily D. Baker, a former prosecutor with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office who's now the internet's go to legal analyst and host of the hugely successful Emily Show podcast. And you were the only female on all male water polo team.

I was.

I played water polo in high school and at the time, our high school did not have a women's water polo program.

I imagine it took some talk in convincing to allow them to put you the only female on an all male team, Like how'd that go down? Can be very persuasive, and that's what made Emily a force to reckon with in the DA's office, and it's what makes her an extremely insightful legal analyst. Add to that, she's a huge fan of the Housewives franchise. She's got the pop culture equivalent of a PhD in this stuff. And as you can probably tell, I never even went to Housewives Elementary

Genshaw is quite a character, and she was in for all of the seasons. Most of the scenes. She was driving storylines towards her.

You're gonna go with Mary, it's your grandfather.

Only Genshaw would scream that in a restaurant.

What is that about? Is she having sex with her grant? Did she marry her grandfather? What's the story?

It was very much a moment. So one of the other housewives in the first two seasons before she left, ran a church in Utah and her grandmother had been the head of the church. Her grandmother passed and Mary Cosby married her grandmother's husband, so he is her step grandfather, not her biological grandfather. And it was a very interesting part of the first season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. So Mary was in fact married to her stepgrandfather.

It is.

Interesting.

It's like a reverse Woody Allen, I.

Mean, with their age gap. It just felt very strange and kind of surreal to watch. And then to see that throne in Mary's face by Jen was a very weird moment.

But Jen Shaw is the master of weird moments. Everything she says and does is just so outrageous you can't look away, and Emily thinks that might be by design.

It felt to me, as someone who has watched Real Housewives since the very beginning of Orange County, that Jen kind of took notes from the housewives that were the mainstays of different franchises and made sure that she was bringing that on screen, bringing the drinking, the fighting, not afraid to say things that were absolutely outrageous, getting mad, but then apologizing so people would still film with her.

She watched all the other seasons of Real Housewives, studied them, figured out who the breakout stars are, and then became an amalgam of all of those personality traits herself.

I think, so this was a calculated, curated persona.

But here's what I can't figure out. When Jenshaw is sitting on that sprinter van on the day where she eventually gets arrested by the FEDS, she gets a phone call and then gets a panic look in her face and tells her fellow cast members the call was about her husband Shaw, who everyone including Jen, calls coach because he's a football coach at the University of Utah.

He has internal pleading, So I need to go there, Like, are you still on Salt Lake? Yeah, we're still here. If you need any.

Okay, I will So at this point, I'm thinking it's the Feds who made that call to Chen to trick her into going somewhere where they'd be waiting to arrest her. I mean, they do that kind of stuff all the time. In season three of Queen of the Khan, when we did Danielle Miller, federal agents tricked her into opening her door by having the lobby call up and say there's something in the lobby, it's an emergency, come down quick, and as soon as she opens.

The door, they rush in, throw her up against the wall and cuffer. What do you know about that phone call?

Was that federal agent's calling to trick her into going home so they could arrest her.

Oh, there's no way federal agents called her to lure her to come home, because we know they were en route to the parking lot because they show up there so quickly thereafter, so we know a team showed up and did the sir to warrent at her house and then a team showed up into the search hoorn at Stuart's house, all at the same time.

Stewart is Jen's assistant, one of them. Anyway, in season one of the show, Jen claims she had seven others, and.

They try to have multiple teams to hit locations at the same time so that somebody doesn't get tipped off. The Feds are trying to avoid the circumstance that happened here where somebody gets a phone call and then has time to take off. That's what they don't want to have happened. They want to try to take everyone into

They want to secure the.

Person away from their cell phones immediately, and they want to secure all the tech devices immediately.

That phone call she got was that someone on her side quote unquote trying to warn her. That phone call she got was that someone on her side, quote unquote trying to warn her.

I think she was absolutely getting warned. It could have been somebody that saw federal agents at the house. I'm not sure who was on the phone, but I am very confident that it wasn't Coach going to the hospital with internal bleeding.

That was all a lie that she made up.

She just made that up on the fly, on the spot and in a way that others wouldn't question her. Once it's like my husband's going to the hospital he has internal bleeding. The other women aren't going to ask that many questions on camera. And you could see it because Bravo editing is so cheeky. You could see her side eye the camera. It wasn't because she just got worried that her husband was going to the hospital, because Jen would generally lean into something like that for a storyline,

There's so many different tentacles to this scam that they wanted to get everyone at the same time. And even as hard as they tried and as many people as they put on it, still someone was able to sneak away and call Jen and say, hey, run, they're coming for you.

I have to wonder if she thought being on Real Housewives insulated her a little bit, like almost, I'm a public figure, now, why would you do this to me? Not realizing that the FEDS love to make a spectacle out of somebody like you become the lesson. It's like, oh, you have a higher profile. Good, We're going to remind everyone that this is what you can't do. So we'll go ahead and use that profile to make a high profile arrest. They're not going to shy away from that.

Thank god Jenshaw ended up being a con artist because she really helped to puts out like on the map.

That's Zach Peter, host of the podcast No Filter with Zach Peter. He's kind of a Housewives expert.

Well, I'm the Housewives expert, Jonathan. Not only do I watch all the housewives, but I know most of them. I've interviewed all of them. And every time you see a headline about a housewife, it's probably because they spilled some tea on my show.

The Real Housewives franchise has been a cash cow for Bravo ever since it premiered nearly twenty years ago.

Most people don't realize like Bravo used to like show Soft Foreign back in the day, and then eventually they started to build out their culture programming, and then happened to do Real Housewives of Orange County, which was really just to look at some affluent women that lived in the OC.

And then just everything in My world.

And from there it kind of just continued to build. And then they brought Atlanta and New York and New Jersey, and every time they brought a new franchise that got more and more outlandish, and we started getting the table flips and the leg throws and all of that sort of stuff.

They throw legs, legs.

It was one with the prosthetic leg and she in the finale threw her prosthetic leg across the room.

Only thing that is artificial or faith about me.

She threw her leg, her actual legs them out after I think somebody eventually picked up the leg and gave it back to her.

So that she didn't have to hobble on out.

They say, this is the last straw.

I mean, this is the last leg I mean. And now we're in a great time where there are so many crazy legal scandals that are making it even more culturally relevant.

Enter The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City in twenty twenty, Bravo's tenth Real Housewives franchise.

A quick lesson on how to be a good Mormon.

Don't drink, don't swear, treat your body like a temple.

Why do a Housewives in Salt Lake City, Utah?

I feel like Salt Lake they did it for the Mormon aspect and for like the polygamy side of it.

You know.

I think they thought they would find some interesting housewives, and they knew they wanted a branch out, and so they just figured Salt Lake was the best place to explore, you know, a niche community. And we see a lot of the Mormon stuff, we see a little bit of the open relationship stuff.

But from the very first day of shooting The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, there was one woman who quickly stood out from the rest.

You can't buy the tids because my plastic surgeon retired.

Jenshaw was the breakout star of real house as of Salt Lake City. Do you understand she was the one that people recognized because she had such a big personality and such an infectious personality. Right, She gave good sound bites, she knew how to give good interviews, she knew how to bring the drama.

Do you bitch?

Do you hope she's okay?

How did Jenshaw portray herself on Housewives?

I think Jenshaw really wanted us to believe that she was a very successful business woman. She had multiple businesses that was bringing in all of this money to fund this affluent lifestyle that she was trying to portray on the show. And on top of that, she was a stellar mother. You know, she was raising two boys. She

But it turns out the perfect housewife is not so perfect. In fact, her origin story is fraught with ridicule, racism and an overwhelming urge to show them all.

My name is Amy Jones Glenn and I'm from orm Utah. I went to school with Jen mount View High School. You could pretty much recognize, you know, everybody, you kind of shared, everybody had the same classes together. We'd fit in one picture, you know, that senior class picture.

Amy's right, I'm posting that senior class picture at Queen of the Khan on Instagram, so you can see the entire graduating class of Mountain View High School does actually hold in one photo. See if you can spot Jenshaw. She was born Jennifer ki Kialani Louis on October fourth, nineteen seventy three, in Provo, Utah, about forty miles south of Salt Lake City.

So in Utah there's basically three pockets. There's the Ogden area pocket where Hill Air Force Base is, and then there's Salt Lake Valley, which I would say is the epitome of the Mormon Church on the east side.

That's where the leaders of the Mormon Church lived, and they seem to be sort of the intellectuals and they look down on Utah Valley.

And while Jen is Mormon growing up in Salt Lake City, she doesn't look like the other Mormons at all. She's of Tongan and Hawaiian descent and has darker skin than all all her friends and classmates.

At school, there was a huge, huge lack of diversity. Everyone was white. There were not a lot of people that had any sort of.

Color to their skin.

She was exotic, i would say, compared to all of the white Mormon kids, and completely different than almost everyone at the high school.

And even before high school, navigating that all white Mormon culture was painful for Jen.

So Ram Junior High School had a reputation for being a very rough school. People were mistreated my sister. When we first moved up to Utah, she was made to sit on the floor of the bus by people who lived down the street. So these were people we went to church with. These were people who were good Mormons, who came from good families. My sister had glasses and braces and was going through the ugly duckling stage and these neighbors, these good kids, made her sit on the

But Jen gets picked on for an entirely different reason her skin color. Jen's own ants has said publicly on that ABC News Hulu documentary The Housewife and the Shawshaker that Jen's life as a young girl growing up in Utah was rough.

I remember her on one afternoon coming home from school.

I noticed that her skin was.

Just bright, had a bright, bright, bright red tint to it. And she said, I've scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and it won't come off. And I said, we're talking about what won't come off? She said, the kids is school are calling me dirty, and I'm trying to scrub it off.

It won't come off.

And they saw her as different enough to ridicule her and make her feel different and feel less than.

But to Jen's credit, she quickly figures out a way to rise above all the racism surrounding her and goes on to become one of the most popular girls in high school.

The first time I remember seeing Jen was when we were at an assembly and out came this tiny Polynesian girl with this beautiful long hair, and she seemed to have a look of uncertainty in her eyes. And when she danced, everybody went crazy because she was such a great dancer, and everyone else was white and couldn't dance. And Jen was the center of attention, all eyes on her, cheering, applause, screaming it was like you'd think the Beatles were in the gym. She was that that fun to look at

Her, So you were kind of like, were you like a fan? You say it was like a like she was like a celebrity. Were you like one of Were you one of the people cheering.

I played the cello and did ballet, and I was probably too refined for that, but secretly I couldn't take.

My eyes off of her.

It was so fun to watch. I probably would never have admitted that, and I don't know why, but I everybody loved this. You know, when someone's a good dancer, you just it captivates you. I can still see in my mind's eye this insecure girl, shy even walking in in the auditorium, and just that look in her eye of insecurity. And then the lights came on, the music came on, and that girl danced, and every one loved it.

And she was a cheerleader in school, like she go to all the games and that's how she would dance as part of the cheering.

Front and center, front and center because she was the only one that could move. She was the only one that had any rhythm. She was the squad, She was the cheer team.

Jen Shaw was so popular in that high school and apparently made so many lifelong friends that even to this day, in light of the scandal currently englfing her, most of her classmates are refusing to talk to me. We reached out to a bunch of them and got radio silence. Some even take a Facebook commenting publicly on the Mountain View High School alumni page about our efforts to locate Jen's former classmates.

So how many of us received an email asking us to spill dirt on Jen?

A depilling kind of girl.

Jen and I moved in different circles, but I always thought.

She seemed fun and nice.

I got one. I'm assuming they sent out mass messages and somehow got a list of Mountain View High School graduates. I was putting on ignoring it as well, not interested in the least in giving them any sort of information for their expose. I'm with you, I'm at Jenden Elementary School, and the last I've seen her was our five year reunion.

I still think of her as the very young girl from high school.

I got one as well. Not interested in becoming a professional gossip myself. I figure someone probably would, though.

But there's one former student in that alumni group who's refusing to talk for an entirely different reason.

I would never say anything about Jen. She scares me.

Maybe this woman watches the Real Housewives and knows all too well how combustible Jenshaw can be.

Because you're an evil ass bitch that is pissed off because her membership. But face tune ran out.

I do you think that Jen's crazy temper and belligerence probably have something to do with her childhood. The racism, the teasing, the being Mormon of it all. Jen's high school classmate Amy Glenn, knows all too well the rigor of that kind of life.

Are you Mormon?

Yes, I have six children living in Utah Valley, which is often referred to as Happy Valley, which is predominantly Mormon. The things that are normal about the world are viewed as wrong here in this valley. This is a different world for women. We live in a very patriarchal society where you are absolutely supposed to follow the man's lead. You bow your head and say yes to the man. And that's how I was raised with my father, That's how I was expected to be with my husband. That's how I.

Was That was it.

It was complete submission. I tried with everything that I had to follow his lead.

There are more than six million Mormons living in the United States right now, and a sizeable chunk of them reside in the state of Utah. Because Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City and he was the second leader of the Church of Latter day Saints. How would you describe Mormonism to someone who's never heard of it.

Mormonism is an extremely family oriented, time consuming, money consuming investment, and the emphasis is on pre earth life and where you're going to go when you die, and that families can be together forever, and we should have large families, and we pay ten percent of all of our income back to the church. You go three hours to church every Sunday and then you have a couple of hours

Mormonism actually began in western New York in the eighteen twenties, when a man named Joseph Smith is said to have dug up some golden plates from a nearby hill inscribed with strange writing that looked hieroglyphic. God is then said to have helped Joseph Smith cipher those golden plates. And right, have you.

Ever seen that musical the Book of Mormon?

No, I have not.

I saw it, and it was, It was brilliant, it was hysterical, it was amazing.

I believe that y'all live on a planet pocum. I believe that Jesus has is a planet well, and I believe that the Garda mean he wasn't Jackson County, Missouri.

And all these things are in lyrics of songs that the audience is laughing, thinking, oh, this is so funny, but like it's true, Like that's what Mormons believe, right.

Yes, And when you say it like that, it really does sound over the top, but it is exactly spot on. You, as a member of the church, are expected to not look up anti Mormon information. You're expected to only explore the things that the prophets and leaders have said. To listen to anti Mormon sentiment, you would be running the risk of endangering your testimony, your testimony of the only true Church on earth.

And Jen Shaw is a member of the only true Church on Earth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, for most of her life, but in the nineteen nineties she attends the University of Utah and meets the man who would become her husband and the father of her children, Sharif Shaw, and ultimately it's her marriage to Sharif that prompts Jen to walk away from Mormonism altogether.

My husband, Sharif is Muslim, but I was raised Mormon and that's all I knew until five years into my marriage. I'm like, hey, sure, If, why don't you convert to Mormonism? And he was like, are you kidding me? They didn't accept black people into the Mormon Church until in like nineteen seventy something. That's when I started questioning, you know what, I cannot sign up for a religion that didn't accept my husband and my kids. That's the point when I was like, Okay, I'm converting to Islam.

Asalama leka bitches.

Jen Shaw is correct. Up until the nineteen seventies, African Americans were persona non grata in the Mormon Church, and the Book of Mormon Musical confirms that fact.

And I believe that in nineteen seventy eight contains his mind about black.

Anyway. As a teenager, Jen works as a nanny for a doctor, and on the weekends she models at local fashion shows and does photoshoots for various magazines and online publications. But while attending the university of Utah. Jen gets pregnant and eventually drops out to help support her husband, Sharif, who's in law school at this point. In two thousand and six, Jen starts working in the telemarketing industry and she quickly rises up the ranks, eventually starting her own company,

My job with Denshaw was styling her and also creating, designing and sewing looks for her a lot of the things that she needed for her Bravo life pretty much.

Kohajhnson is a fashion designer and stylist who Jen hires to help her create the image you see on the Real Housewives. He had eyes and ears on everything Jen was up to. He's also one of the reasons she got caught.

I remember one time Stuart screwed up on some kind of transaction or lost like about eight million, and Jen was very upset and she came down to the office late at night with Coach and they were both yelling and scream at I am asking him where their money is.

What CoA Johnson is about to share has never been shared with anyone before, and it's insane.

Would you call her a con artist?

I would just call her a con She's not very much of an artist.

Next time on Queen of the Con and.

No, not yet, handle it.

Very sorry.

Who do you think recorded that video and released it?

That's a good question. I know everybody wants to say it's me.

There's something that me being an employee of Jenshaw is truly a terrifying experience.

Going through abuse and being assaulted the entire time and berated the entire time.

Her life was in shamles. She was in chaos constantly.

It was a complete nightmare, and my colleagues had to go through it myself, a lot of the people around us had to suffer her wrath.

Looking back, did Jenshaw scam you?

Yes?

She did.

Portions of public statements from court records and from social media posts were dramatized verbatim in this episode. Queen of the Khan. The Unreal Housewife is a production of AYR Media and iHeartMedia, hosted by me Jonathan Walton, executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton Productions and Elisa Rosen for AYR Media. Written by Jonathan Walton, Segment producer Gregory Harvey, Senior Associate producer Jill Pshesnik, Coordinator Melana Krolyevsky. Sound designed