Jen Shah is helping Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes tone her abs behind bars
Bravo star-turned-jailbird Jen Shah is influencing ladies behind bars — including helping Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes tone her abs.
The “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” alum is serving a six-and-a-half year sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, for running a nationwide telemarketing scheme that ripped off thousands of people, many of them elderly.
Now, Page Six is told, she’s running workout classes in the prison yard and giving makeup tutorials with products she buys from the commissary — and even managed a “sushi” birthday feast.
Shah, 50, pleaded guilty in July 2022 to the con and was ordered to pay back $6.5 million of the cash she extracted from elderly and vulnerable victims.
But now she has been reinvented as “Jen Fonda” and has come up with a 30- to 60-minute ab workout class she calls “Shah-mazing,” her longtime manager Chris Giovanni tells Page Six.
It includes cardio blasts and ab flexors as part of the routine at the minimum-security prison camp.
“She created it in prison. It started off as something she was doing to improve her fitness,” Giovanni shares.
“As she went in, she lost a good amount of weight. She developed the Shah-mazing abs class. … All the ladies started coming up to her on the yard and they would do workout segments.
“Elizabeth [Holmes] attended with other inmates, and it’s become a thing in there. Jen Fonda, that’s her nickname in there.”
Holmes — the disgraced Theranos founder who is serving nine years and six months of her 11-year, three-month sentence — is a participant, Giovanni tells us.
Shah — who starred on “RHOSLC” from Seasons 1 to 3 — has also stocked up on foundation she purchased from the commissary to give glam tutorials she’s learned over the years from being in showbiz.
“She has helped a few ladies — they might ask, ‘How much [makeup] should I put on?’ She gives a little advice,” Giovanni says.
And Shah also spends her days reading self-help and motivational books with the hope of one day penning her own.
“She reads to pass time. She spends most of her time journaling. She has over 90-something pages of her experience. She’s doing what she can [to] pass time,” Giovanni tells Page Six.
“She gets up, she prays, she works in a library and then she mentors the other inmates on her downtime who are trying to get their GED. The ladies have developed a good relationship.”
The seemingly wholesome routine is a far cry from the crime the reality TV star committed.
From at least 2012 to her arrest in March 2021, Shah was leading a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that victimized thousands of innocent people.
The scheme convinced victims to buy business services that would help them make money all the while pressuring victims to purchase additional “business services” leading them to accrue debt, according to court filings.
While filming for Season 2 of “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” Shah and one of her assistants, Stuart Smith, were arrested in Utah.
Shah and Smith first pleaded not guilty in April 2021, then her former assistant changed his plea to guilty in November of that year.
The Bravolebrity initially claimed she was unaware of the illegal scheme related to her business.
But in July 2022, she pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom.
Shah was sentenced in January and agreed to forfeit $6.5 million, 30 luxury goods and 78 counterfeit luxury items and pay $6,645,251 in restitution.
At her sentencing, Shah said she takes “full responsibility for the harm [she] caused and will pay full restitution to all of the victims.”
But she failed to pay anything back, and prosecutors have now obtained an order to garnish her earnings from the company that owns “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” Shed Media; NBC, which broadcasts the show; Warner Bros. Discovery, which ultimately owns Shed; and Cameo, the celebrity greeting app on which she charged $150.
Her salary for one episode of the reality show was $34,500, according to court papers. Her earnings, according to the order, should be paid to the court until her release date in 2028.
It hasn’t stopped the star from living as large as she can behind bars. Last month, TMZ reported Shah celebrated her 50th birthday eating sushi — premade spring rolls wrapped in sticky rice, aka “prison sushi,” polished off with a “prison pineapple upside-down cheesecake,” according to her former assistant Murilo Bueno.
Shah has also managed to stay vocal behind bars. The former reality star — who is of Tongan and Hawaiian descent and is married to Sharrieff Shah, who is black — told Page Six that production company Shed Media found “nothing wrong” in an investigation into a cast member who allegedly called her son the N-word.
“A cast member of the show called my child the N-word, which I reported to Lisa Shannon and the rest of the Shed Media production team,” Shah, mom of sons Sharrieff Jr., 29, and Omar, 20, told us.
“My husband was also gifted a bag of watermelon from [a former ‘friend of’ and current ‘Housewife’] during a scene.”
In response, a rep for Shed Media said in a statement to Page Six, “We strongly disagree with Mrs. Shah’s characterization of events. Consistent with our internal guidelines, we decline to comment on confidential investigations.”
Shah’s claims against Bravo’s production companies follow similar allegations made in a Vanity Fair report that “Real Housewives of New York City” alum Ramona Singer used the N-word in 2021.
The investigation was deemed “inconclusive.”
Singer, 66, denied using the racial slur.
Giovanni says Shah is focusing her efforts on getting through her sentence. Her release date has been pushed up to July 1, 2028, from Aug. 2028, according to the Bureau of Prisons, under the very limited room for early release from federal sentences.
“She’s focusing on staying mentally strong while in there and remaining as connected as possible with her family,” Giovanni tells Page Six.
