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Reality star Jen Shah bonds in prison bathrooms with inmate and friend, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Three months after Shah was released from a Texas facility on good behavior after serving more than two years in prison on fraud charges, the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star has broken her silence in prison.
Shah admitted that he became “very close” to a number of his fellow inmates, including Elizabeth “Lizzy” Holmes.
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Jen Shah befriended Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in prison. (Getty Images)
Holmes, 42, is serving an 11-year sentence for deliberately misleading investors in Theranos, the blood-testing company he founded in 2003. The company ceased operations in 2018.
He was sentenced in 2022 after being convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud.
The “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star was sentenced in 2023 to six and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in an adult marketing scheme.
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His first release date was scheduled for Aug. 30, 2026, but the original 78-month sentence was halved for good behavior. He was released from prison before Christmas.
The prison in Bryan, Texas, is the same place where Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sexual assault Jeffrey Epsteinhe is now in custody after being removed last year from the Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee in Florida.
“Lizzy and I are best friends,” Shah told People. “When you go through, I think, as a high-level person, there are just certain things that you both go through, right? You naturally come together in those situations.”
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, was convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud. (Gilbert Carrasquillo)
“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah pleaded guilty in 2022 and served more than two years in prison on fraud charges. (Chad Kirkland/Bravo)
He added, “We’re both assigned to do the poop job together, so I feel like if you’re doing the poop job with someone else, you’re going to be close.”
Shah explained that he shared a room with Holmes for the last 10 months of his sentence, when they were both assigned to share a bathroom.
“If someone in your bathroom doesn’t clean it or something like that, you get a strike,” Shah said. “If your bathroom gets three strikes, you have to do the poop job. We’re going to try to make sure that, like, hey, we don’t do the poop job.
“I almost ran out of time without doing it. And sure enough, we got hit. Our bathroom got hit.”
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“Poop duty” looked just as it sounded.
“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah was assigned “dirty work” with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. (Bravo)
“You have to go sit in the bathroom, pull the steel chair in, sit in the toilet for an hour and watch everyone come in to use the bathroom,” she said.
“If they use the bathroom, you have to get up, go check the bathroom, or clean it if they don’t clean it or let them know to come and clean it, but you’re literally sitting there in the bathroom.”
He added, “So, if you can imagine, you know, the smell and everything that happens because of private duties. And if you get more strikes, you keep doing more hours of poop duty. We were both very busy during the day.”
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When it came to the evening hours, the reality star and Stanford grad would walk around the prison and talk about their families.
“That’s when we will have our time to just talk,” he said. “Talk about how much we miss our family, talk about, you know, the things that were happening, important things that were going on in the prison, with different legislators such as the First Step Act and some issues that it is not being implemented and what remedies should have been there to try to help these things work at the institutional level.
Elizabeth Holmes is serving an 11-year sentence for fraud related to her former company, Theranos. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)
“Your hands are tied there. There’s not much you can do as a prisoner, but I felt like … Lizzie and I felt like, you know, we could make a difference and talk. So we’re going to talk about a lot of things like that.”
Holmes would question the Shah about the outside world, and ask, “‘What do you think it will be like if you walk in the house?’ and, ‘What’s your first, like … can you imagine that? Like, can you put yourself in there? Do you see yourself walking around the house?’
“There can be a lot of deep conversations, and a lot of heartache there, in prison,” Shah said. “It was just, you know, being a sounding board for each other when you might just be like, hey I need to … can we go cry? I need to cry.”
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Bravo cameras were rolling when authorities entered the “Housewives” production looking for Shah. Minutes before Homeland Security arrived at the Beauty Lab parking lot, Shah received a phone call from an unknown person and left abruptly.
Shah was arrested on his way home on March 30, 2021.
