transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Campside Media.

Speaker 2:
[00:05] So a wide-ranging fraud case has been built by authorities. It wasn't just Jen Shaw. There were about a dozen other people charged in the case, and it was a multi-agency operation to bring them down. Sure, Jen's co-defendants weren't Utah Housewives, but they were running a really huge endeavor with thousands of alleged victims. It wasn't just Bridget. We spoke with another victim whose story felt eerily similar. Her name's Molly McLaughlin, and she has blue eyes, reddish-auburn hair, and when Natalie's talking to her, she's had her home in rural Iowa.

Speaker 3:
[00:46] We are by the Mississippi River, so we basically share a border with Illinois. If I go about 20 minutes, I will be in Illinois at my parents' house. There was one time a person nearby must have been a farmer. They were trying to wean a baby cow, so I could hear it kind of mooing for its mother. So I was like, yeah, we're kind of in farm country.

Speaker 2:
[01:10] Back in 2016, Molly was looking for work. She had a part-time job as a sales associate at a local store, but she wanted to make more money.

Speaker 3:
[01:18] I hadn't had much luck really finding jobs, at least in my area. I was struggling to make rent, so I just was looking online. I knew that there were legitimate work-from-home jobs. I was Googling, I was searching for things, and I don't remember what website it was, but I do remember seeing an ad for something called Drop Shipping.

Speaker 2:
[01:43] Drop Shipping. You sell your stuff on your own website, then you use another business to fulfill and ship your orders. Molly says she paid $100 or so to get an informational kit on Drop Shipping. Then, the next day, she got a phone call.

Speaker 3:
[01:57] I said, have you thought about really starting your own online business? Yeah, we'll get you on the front page of Google and you can make all of this money.

Speaker 2:
[02:09] I think you know where this is going. Molly says she handed over $10,000 to this company to build a website, she took the classes, how to run a successful online store.

Speaker 3:
[02:18] I ended up landing on clocks and mirrors.

Speaker 2:
[02:21] She was selling clocks and mirrors.

Speaker 3:
[02:23] Because I thought everyone needs a clock, everyone needs a mirror, so there's a good idea. Then I started getting phone calls from, I assume, people who were affiliated with them. They were companies that wanted to help with certain parts. One was more with marketing and how they can make it shine. I do remember one of the companies talked about how, oh, yeah, you need to have a weekly blog and blah, blah, blah, and we can help write the blogs.

Speaker 2:
[02:59] Molly signed up for more services, spreading the costs across her credit cards.

Speaker 3:
[03:04] That's one thing they encouraged, put it on multiple cards to pay. I said, oh, I don't have enough on this card. They said, oh, use two. That's heavily what they encouraged, opening up new cards in order to pay for it.

Speaker 2:
[03:20] All in, after about three months, Molly says she put in more than $30,000 to this clocks and mirrors business. But her website never even went up and running, and yet she's still getting calls.

Speaker 3:
[03:34] Sometimes I would get two calls a day because of, and it started to register with me, hey, these guys are working together. They know each other. Your information is being passed around. I had a few people telling me this, and finally it clicked, and I started realizing this is not anything legit. This is a scam. But of course by then I was already thousands of dollars in debt with nothing to show for it.

Speaker 2:
[04:08] Then Molly gets another call from someone who seems like a lifesaver.

Speaker 3:
[04:14] I had gotten a call, and they said, we work with people to get their money back. And I found out later that yeah, they were part of the scam too.

Speaker 2:
[04:27] In a way, this scam seems to have been incredibly vertically integrated, which is something I don't think people understand. It appears to have been set up to maximize profit, to get as much out of the victims as possible at every turn, passing victims on and on to different services, including ones that purported to help them.

Speaker 3:
[04:47] They were promising to help kind of take the company down, get your money refunded to you, have it be reported that these companies are scamming people.

Speaker 2:
[05:00] Having already been burned, Molly looks up this new company online.

Speaker 3:
[05:05] There really wasn't much on their website. It was just, you know, this is what we are. No testimonials on this one. It just kind of seemed very stark and clean.

Speaker 2:
[05:16] The company has a legit name. Sounds pretty similar to a name brand insurance company. Exactly the kind of company that you might trust.

Speaker 3:
[05:25] So I thought, well, this sounds great. And here's the kicker. I had to shell out more money for them. I believe it was about 8,000, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 2:
[05:40] Paying 8,000 to get back 30,000 seems worthwhile. In fact, she's so grateful for what this company says they're going to do for her, that she actually sits down to write them a Christmas card.

Speaker 3:
[05:54] I thought, oh, they're going to help me, so I'm going to send them a Christmas card. I think it was just good tidings, blah, blah, blah. And then I said something like, thank you for all of your help with this.

Speaker 2:
[06:09] From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Infamous. I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis.

Speaker 4:
[06:16] And I'm Natalie Robehmed. So, last episode, we dove into Jen Shah's backstory and her alleged role in the telemarketing scheme. This episode, we're going to talk about what happened when the news finally broke.

Speaker 2:
[06:35] By March 2021, the feds were closing in on Jen Shah. But at home, the Bravo Watchers had no idea. Her show was just a monumental hit at this point. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, it was phenomenal. Kate Arthur, an editor at Large at Variety, is pretty much an expert on the whole Real Housewives franchise. We're going to talk to her for a moment about the show in general and why it got so popular before we get back to Jen's story.

Speaker 5:
[07:07] The Real Housewives franchise is turning 20 this year. The Real Housewives of Orange County premiered in March 2006. And I have been watching since March 2006. So, I remember getting a screener. So, yes, I am a watcher.

Speaker 2:
[07:25] Natalie talked to her about its beginnings.

Speaker 4:
[07:28] This show was inspired by Desperate Housewives. That's right. The premise was we're following these rich women around while they live their crazy lives.

Speaker 5:
[07:37] Yes, in the same way that Laguna Beach on MTV was inspired by the popularity of the OC., Bravo decided to make a reality version of Desperate Housewives. And boy, they succeeded, I'll say. I mean, the show itself went through periods of adjustment as they figured out what it was. At first, it was kind of a loosely improvised, more curb-your-enthusiasm type, what is the tone of this? But I mean, to me, it's like the most important documentary project that any US media has embarked on. It's chronicled the lives of women in various parts of the country since 2006 in various states of the rest, I would say.

Speaker 4:
[08:26] Wait, why do you think it's the most important documentary project?

Speaker 5:
[08:29] Well, it's like Michael Apted's 7 Up series, you know? I mean, it's shown women as they head toward divorce and divorce. It's shown women after their partners die. It's shown women in various states of economic pressure. People have declared bankruptcy. There is a famous instance where someone from the Real Housewives of Orange County, who was about to go bankrupt, her teenage daughter was served foreclosure papers on camera.

Speaker 2:
[09:00] As we've mentioned, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City was different. It featured religion front and center.

Speaker 5:
[09:07] Two of the members of the cast were in the process of leaving the Mormon Church. Heather Gay, who was leaving the Mormon Church, having grown up in it, in a very prominent Mormon family, and she also married into a very prominent Mormon family. She had a special in the fall that aired on Bravo, called Surviving Mormonism, where she concluded that Mormonism is a cult.

Speaker 4:
[09:35] We also have to mention Mary Cosby, who is one of the other main cost members, has been on pretty much every season, who has her own church that TLC recently did a documentary about, and is married to her grandfather.

Speaker 5:
[09:55] Step.

Speaker 4:
[09:56] Yes, step grandfather, excuse me. Married to her step grandfather. That's a very important difference.

Speaker 5:
[10:02] There's a cast member named Meredith Marks, who we haven't mentioned yet. She has a son still, who was in college at the time, and Jen decided to just say homophobic things about him on Twitter. A lot of them. I don't know what was happened. Brooks is now an out gay man, but at the time, it was attacking the child of one of her cast mates, and being homophobic about him. That became a plot point later between her and Meredith, and Brooks actually, he sat down with her, I think.

Speaker 3:
[10:41] I don't even know how to articulate the pain that I went through because of everything.

Speaker 6:
[10:45] I would never want you to feel I somehow outed you.

Speaker 2:
[10:49] So a lot is happening this season that's crazy. But of course, the craziest moment of all is the one we started this series with. The Real Housewives are in a Sprinter van, and they're waiting to go to Vail, Colorado when officers surround the van looking for Jen Shaw.

Speaker 7:
[11:08] What's going on?

Speaker 8:
[11:11] We have to just walk her to make sure she's okay.

Speaker 5:
[11:14] I mean, this was one of these, where were you when Kennedy was shot moments for me?

Speaker 2:
[11:21] Kate reported on the events that day.

Speaker 5:
[11:23] The headline is Jen Shaw from the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City has been arrested for fraud. The charges allege that from 2012 until today, Shaw, Smith and others ran a telemarketing scheme that defrauded older people by selling quote, lead lists for non-existent business opportunities. And then I get into the Department of Justice press release.

Speaker 2:
[11:46] The Real Housewives who are huddled inside the van are reading the news too. What?

Speaker 7:
[11:51] Oh my gosh.

Speaker 5:
[11:52] What?

Speaker 7:
[11:54] Real Housewives are charged with massive fraud money laundering scheme. No.

Speaker 9:
[11:58] I have the chills.

Speaker 10:
[11:59] No, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 5:
[12:02] Since they're from Utah, they are familiar with fraud in a way that-

Speaker 6:
[12:08] Say more about that.

Speaker 5:
[12:10] Well, I mean, it's the home of the MLM, right? Whitney Rose, who's one of the Housewives she and her husband met when they were both working at an MLM. They speak with an authority on this that say, I would not have.

Speaker 6:
[12:25] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[12:26] Then by the time they get to Vale, that was when Meredith is waiting for them in the tub, right?

Speaker 6:
[12:33] Yes, exactly. She's in the tub.

Speaker 5:
[12:36] And at a certain point, this is Meredith Marks, who Jen had thrown the $80,000 party for her. But by this time, there are enemies and Meredith is waiting in a tub. She loves a tub. And Jen decided later that maybe Meredith was the one who had reported her to the feds, which doesn't make sense because these investigations, they take years and years and years, but Jen could not get it out of her mind. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[13:06] You see all these women reacting to it and then kind of piling on. Some of my favorite little claims were Meredith alleging that Jen Shaw was red-flagged at Louis Vuitton for paying in cash. Lisa Barlow, who's another of the cost members, she immediately gets on the phone with all her lawyers, her six lawyers or whatever, famously, and calls them all. But she has this great quote where you just hear her go. I mean, this is just not awesome. It's just this really fascinating combination of an incredibly serious situation being presented in like reality TV fodder with all the backdrop and the music and everything else and the woman in a bath. Even though Jen's arrest was packaged and consumed as entertainment, this was not a stage storyline. It was Jen's real life.

Speaker 9:
[14:03] It was a federal criminal investigation out of the Southern District of New York, and when the Southern District of New York strikes, they're not going to miss. This was a huge deal. So I'm Ceci, I'm one of the co-hosts of The Bravo Docket, and I'm an entertainment litigator.

Speaker 1:
[14:21] And I am Angela Angati. I am also a co-host of The Bravo Docket, and I do product liability defense.

Speaker 4:
[14:28] Angela and Ceci are two lawyers who host a podcast that dives into Bravo-leberty legal disputes. When they saw the press release and read the indictment detailing all the allegations against Jen, they knew straight away that it was serious.

Speaker 9:
[14:41] We knew right then that they had significant evidence. They said that they had been investigating this for 10 years prior. So you could just tell everything was pointing to this being a big deal and probably leading to a conviction just based on what was in the press release.

Speaker 4:
[14:58] Jen was arrested in Utah, but it was confusing to some viewers and even some of the housewives why the officers arresting her were from the NYPD and Department of Homeland Security. Angela explains why that happened.

Speaker 1:
[15:10] She had been working out of an office in Manhattan where they had had one of these call centers or whatever. So that made sense that the NYPD would be investigating that. And then they didn't really get into this with Jen Shaw, but there were ties to overseas accounts and overseas activity, which I think would involve the Department of Homeland Security as far as having the ability to sort of investigate those foreign assets. So that made sense.

Speaker 4:
[15:41] You would think that after her arrest, Jen might stop filming. Go quiet. Stay out of the public eye for a while. But not Jen.

Speaker 5:
[15:50] I mean, this was during the filming of season two, when she was arrested, and she filmed all of season three, and her tagline was...

Speaker 6:
[15:58] The only thing I'm guilty of is being Shawmazing.

Speaker 4:
[16:03] Throughout seasons two and three, well after she's been arrested, Jen shoots scenes in which she protests her innocence.

Speaker 8:
[16:10] I'm fighting this. I am innocent, and I will fight for every person out there that can't fight for themselves because they don't have the resources or the means, so they don't fight. I will fight, because number one, I'm innocent, and number two, I'm gonna f***ing represent every other person out there that can't fight and hasn't been able to.

Speaker 4:
[16:30] Jen also takes legal action.

Speaker 9:
[16:32] In emotion, she argued that anything she said during her arrest should be precluded from being presented to the jury, because she claims that when she was read her Miranda rights or when she was given the papers, she claims that she didn't have her contact lenses that day, so she couldn't read it properly, so they didn't accurately get her to waive her Miranda rights. And then such that anything that she said during her arrest couldn't be shown to the jury. And I think that was denied.

Speaker 4:
[17:03] That wasn't all.

Speaker 9:
[17:04] She filed a motion to dismiss, and she was arguing things like that they didn't put, that she had the specific intent to defraud people. She challenged the fact that some people didn't have computers that was written in the indictment. She was just trying to attack the indictment and what was in there, and then later attack the evidence.

Speaker 4:
[17:22] Jen takes it one step further. She starts selling merch.

Speaker 9:
[17:26] She was selling free Jen Shaw t-shirts. Yes, she was not over maintaining her innocence. She was trying to profit off of her innocence, her claimed innocence.

Speaker 5:
[17:37] The whole season, she was just saying, I didn't do this, I'm going to mount a vigorous defense.

Speaker 4:
[17:45] Now, you might expect in a show like Real Housewives, where the women turn on each other over the smallest slight, that Jen's fellow cast members might ditch her immediately given her federal fraud suit. But not so, says Kate.

Speaker 5:
[17:59] It was interesting watching it play out, but the women should have immediately said, this is disgusting and I want nothing to do with this person, but they did not do that. The whole time, a bunch of them stuck by her.

Speaker 4:
[18:16] What's even more interesting to me is that Jen didn't start magically behaving better.

Speaker 5:
[18:23] During season three, when Jen was claiming her innocence the entire time, they couldn't leave the country for a trip because she was under federal indictment. So, they took a glamorous trip to San Diego as a cast and got wasted every night, like they do. And there was a night when the next morning, Heather emerged from her room with a black eye. No one knows what happened and Heather claims not to remember. And this got Heather in quite a bit of trouble. But later, she said that she's pretty sure that while in a blackout state, that Jen punched her. She honestly seems not to know, or at least, and Whitney Rose was like, Jen punched her, you know? So, but how did that happen? Like, why were the cameras down for god's sakes? Yeah, I mean, that's an act of violence.

Speaker 4:
[19:25] It just seemed so odd, so completely strange for Jen to choose to keep being on camera, when at the same time, the authorities have built this really intense case against Jen and her co-defendants. Because horrible things have happened to victims of scams like this. Like Molly McLaughlin, who you heard from at the top of this episode.

Speaker 3:
[19:44] I sent them a Christmas card, and I didn't get a thank you, so at that point, I had been very offended.

Speaker 4:
[19:50] Instead, she's getting endless calls from her credit card companies.

Speaker 3:
[19:56] It was the Collections Department. Unfortunately, just at the time, I just did not have the money even for payment options. Anything from the part-time job went to pay what little I could for the credit card, so I wasn't really earning much for myself to live on. At that point, it felt like I was drowning, trying to figure out things I could do. Can I do a consolidation? Can I maybe go to like credit services and see what we can work on?

Speaker 4:
[20:31] Molly can't pay her rent. She moves in with her boyfriend. And by the spring of 2017, she feels she has no other choice but to file for bankruptcy.

Speaker 3:
[20:41] I remember the day after the paperwork was filed, I said, I hear silence. Because at that point, it's like, you know, as soon as you hit that button, it was like calm and done. I didn't have to worry about any calls, even though I did kind of feel a bit of shame because I got to file for bankruptcy. I also felt tremendous relief, like a burden had finally been lifted.

Speaker 4:
[21:10] Molly does get one call she's happy to take.

Speaker 3:
[21:14] I received a call from the FTC.

Speaker 4:
[21:16] That's the Federal Trade Commission, who go after businesses with unfair or deceptive trade practices.

Speaker 3:
[21:22] The person on the other end of the phone tells her, they were investigating some of the companies affiliated as part of this scam.

Speaker 4:
[21:33] You can imagine the FTC called Feeling Big for Molly. This is a government agency taking action. And Bridget, the victim you heard from in Episode 1, got a similar call.

Speaker 11:
[21:44] I received a call from Homeland Security and they started asking me all of these questions. Did I purchase an affiliate marketing program? Did I pay for coaching sessions and so forth and so on? And I answered yes, yes, yes, yes. And so that's when they told me that they were building a case against these individuals who were running a scam.

Speaker 4:
[22:16] And soon Bridget was making plans to travel to New York because she'd been asked to take the stand against Jen Shaw.

Speaker 2:
[22:34] In the summer of 2022, after some initial calls with investigators, Bridget goes to see a special agent and an assistant district attorney to prepare for the impending trial.

Speaker 11:
[22:46] We were gonna go to court, and they wanted me to be the first witness. I met with them in Las Vegas at a government building. You know, it was a very gloomy day. The sun did not shine that day. And the special agent sent a driver to pick me up. And during that ride, it just felt like I was going to a funeral.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] At this point, Bridget has no idea that Jensha is involved in her case. She doesn't even know who she is.

Speaker 11:
[23:22] I've heard of real housewives of Atlanta and other places, but not Salt Lake City. So when we sat down, they handed me the binder, okay? US versus Jennifer Shaw. And I'm like, I don't know who that person is.

Speaker 2:
[23:43] Bridget says the assistant district attorney wants her to focus on her personal experience, to humanize all those other victims for the jury. They give Bridget that binder, the United States versus Jennifer Shaw, which has a lot of Bridget's own notes and correspondence with the companies she gave money to.

Speaker 11:
[24:04] So we went through it page by page. They told me what to expect during the trial. They said that I should be prepared to stay two days.

Speaker 2:
[24:15] Bridget's nervous. She's scared by all this. It's daunting to take part in a trial, to testify on the stand as a witness.

Speaker 11:
[24:22] They're relying on me because they said that people or jurors tend to remember the first person who testifies and the last person who testifies. And so they wanted me to go first. And all the while I'm thinking, I want to back out. I don't want to go through with it. But then I had to pull myself together. The next day, I was like, okay, I'm going to start packing.

Speaker 2:
[24:52] But Jen, Jen has other plans. Not long before Bridget's getting ready to travel, she gets a message.

Speaker 11:
[25:00] I get an email from the assistant district attorney indicating that there wasn't going to be a trial because Jennifer Shaw took a plea deal.

Speaker 7:
[25:11] The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shaw pleaded guilty at count one, conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with telemarketing. The prosecutor agreed to drop count two which was conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Speaker 2:
[25:25] It was just a week before the trial was supposed to start. And later, to People Magazine, Jen explains her fourth quarter decision like this.

Speaker 6:
[25:35] We were waiting for supporting documentation. That's when my attorneys are educating me on, okay, in order for them to find you guilty under conspiracy, there just needs to be enough text messages, emails, communication to show that you conspired with others, with somebody, like with my co-defendant. And I really thought, well, just the truth is going to prevail. And they said, it's not about the truth at trial, Jen. It's about the story that is told and what story is the jury going to believe. And that was like the hardest decision that I ever made.

Speaker 1:
[26:09] You are innocent until proven guilty, but the case that the government had was so overwhelmingly comprehensive and substantial.

Speaker 9:
[26:19] When Jen Shaw was arrested, there had already been, I think, 10 other co-defendants arrested in the exact same case. I think she was number 11. Her assistant, Stuart Smith, was number 12. So multiple people had already gone down for this. I think she was the last one.

Speaker 1:
[26:37] All of her co-conspirators had already pled guilty and made deals. And they were obviously all going to testify against her.

Speaker 2:
[26:45] Sassy and Angela have another theory about why Jen might have pleaded until the last minute to plead guilty. This is just their opinion. But perhaps unsurprisingly, it might have had to do with money.

Speaker 1:
[26:57] Morality clause. She wanted to get paid for the rest of the season.

Speaker 9:
[27:01] A lot of the times, if you're dealing with someone who's risky, you will put in what's called a morality clause, which basically says, if you engage in this type of behavior that will hurt our reputation or will hurt the show's reputation, then we can terminate your agreement without it being a breach of a contract. Maybe they added a morality clause that says, if you plead guilty or if you're found guilty of a crime, then we can terminate our contract with you and you can no longer appear on the show or be engaged in anything with Bravo.

Speaker 1:
[27:31] They get paid per episode, so they don't get a flat fee for the entire season. So she would be missing out on those episodic payments, we are theorizing, if she had pled guilty beforehand. So she waited, got all of the money, income, everything that she could, and then at the 11th hour, pled guilty.

Speaker 2:
[27:50] But after she pled, Jen actually showed up at a Bravo cast party that Angela and Ceci were also attending.

Speaker 1:
[27:57] We were in the same room as her after we had recorded episodes. It was crazy.

Speaker 4:
[28:01] What did she look like?

Speaker 1:
[28:03] Herself, normal.

Speaker 4:
[28:06] What did she, I mean, was she, she's not like sheepish hanging her head.

Speaker 9:
[28:10] No, she never was.

Speaker 2:
[28:12] Soon, Jen Shaw would stride into prison with her head held high. And there, she would make friends with another famous inmate, Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, plus Gillen Maxwell, who we'll be talking about next episode.

Speaker 10:
[28:31] It's kind of like a dramatic shift in the vibe from outside where people are chatting, gossiping, hoping to get in to, okay, now you're in. And it's like very serious.

Speaker 8:
[28:41] What else do we know about Shaw's time behind bars?

Speaker 4:
[28:44] There were photos of her in the yard with Elizabeth Holmes.

Speaker 10:
[28:48] Gillen Maxwell, did you have any interactions with her?

Speaker 6:
[28:51] I had interactions with her.

Speaker 9:
[28:53] What would make someone do this and what would make someone go on the TV show are the exact same. It's this confidence that you think that you can get away with it.

Speaker 5:
[29:03] I think Andy Cohen answered this for all of us, which is no one ever wants to see her again.

Speaker 9:
[29:09] Would the House Oversight Committee ever seek to subpoena Jinshaw?