The Rich Utah Wives and Their Scams I Part 1
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Campsite Media. For the past few years, there's been nothing more popular than Mormon wives in our culture. From the real housewives of Salt Lake City to the secret lives of Mormon wives to the huge blow up over The Bachelorette casting the star of that show, Taylor Frankie Paul. There's just something about Utah and religion and femininity that has captured our cultural imagination. And the massive irony is that whether they're soft swinging, whatever that means, or being accused of assault or scamming, there is something we just love about these women pretending to be so virtuous, only to find out it's just not true. I mean, everyone eats that up. Of course we do. So we're about to focus on one of the most extreme stories of irony in this arena.
Even maybe more extreme than Taylor Frankie Paul being accused of domestic violence, though we'll get into that in a later episode as well. And that is the story of the one and only Jen Shaw. You may have seen that Jen gave an interview on very recently, and she is trying to defend herself. I understand that people have their opinion and their feelings because they are basing it off of what they saw in the media. They're basing it off of the headlines. But what I would hope is that they would give me the grace to at least hear me and to understand that, you But right now, we're going to go behind these headlines to find out what Jen was actually doing and speak to some of the people who were victimized by her.
And you may think you know the story of Jen Shaw's scams, or at least the broad strokes. She's a real housewife. She ran a scam. She got arrested for it. She spent a couple years in prison. But there is really so much more to it. From what actually happened in this very complex, multi-layered crime, to who the thousands of victims really were, to what it tells us about our society right now, from dropshipping to everybody trying to get rich online, to that just sneaking feeling you might have that everything is sort of a scam. But first, back to Jen. Jen Shaw was, of course, one of the real housewives of Salt Lake City. She appeared in seasons one through three of the hit Bravo show, and she was arguably the group's ringleader.
She was certainly like the woman who was throwing the fuel on the fire. She had long black hair, plump cheekbones, eyebrows that were as arch as her comments, and she was known to frequently yell and to point fingers, literally. I mean, yes, that's quite foul-mouthed. Jen is certainly extreme in both looks and personality. It's like somebody upped the contrast on a picture. I mean, you can just imagine her walking into a room and a reality TV producer going, her, I want her. And if people want me not to lose my mind, I defend my family. Jen dresses loudly, too. Lots of ruffles, feathers, exotic prints. She's so dramatic, which is perfect for the real Housewives franchise, a show that follows rich, dramatic married women as they often become
unmarried and sometimes less rich, but never less dramatic. In fact, I think you could argue that no one in Housewife's history would ever turn out to be as dramatic as Jen Shah. So what was Jen Shah actually doing? How did the dropshipping, affiliate marketing, influencer economy factor into her scam? And what is it about our culture that makes so many of us so willing to scam and so vulnerable to being scammed?
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