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Reality star Jen Shah built a bond in the prison bathrooms with her fellow inmate and friend, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Three months after Shah was released from a Texas institution on good behavior after serving more than two years behind bars on wire fraud charges, the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star broke her silence on life in prison.
Shah admitted she got “really close” with a lot of her 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 knowingly misleading investors at Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003. The company ceased operations in 2018.
She was sentenced in 2022 after she was convicted on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire 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 committing wire fraud in a telemarketing scheme targeting the elderly.
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Her initial release date was set for Aug. 30, 2026, but the reality star’s initial 78-month sentence was reduced twice for good behavior. She left prison just before Christmas.
The prison in Bryan, Texas, is the same facility where Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted associate of deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, is now being held after she was transferred last year from Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee in Florida.
“Lizzy and I are good friends,” Shah told People. “When you come through, I guess, as a high-profile too, there are just certain things where you both are dealing with, right? You naturally kind of come together in those instances.”
Elizabeth Holmes, founder & CEO of Theranos, was convicted on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Gilbert Carrasquillo)
“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah entered a guilty plea in 2022 and served more than two years behind bars on wire fraud charges. (Chad Kirkland/Bravo)
She added, “We both got assigned to poop duty together, so I feel when you do poop duty with someone, you’re going to be close.”
Shah explained that she lived in the same unit with Holmes for the last 10 months of her sentence, where they were both assigned to maintain the same bathroom.
“If someone in your bathroom does not clean it or something like that, you get a strike,” Shah said. “If your bathroom gets three strikes, you have to do poop duty. We would try to make sure that, like, hey, we’re not doing poop duty.
“I almost made it through my time without having to do it. And sure enough, sure enough, we got hit. Our bathroom got hit.”
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“Poop duty” was as glamorous as it sounded.
“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah was assigned “poop duty” with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. (Bravo)
“You have to go sit in the bathroom, pull a metal chair in there, and sit in the bathroom for an hour and watch everybody come in and use the bathroom,” she said.
“When they use the bathroom, you have to get up, go inspect the bathroom, either 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.”
She added, “So, if you can imagine, you know, the smells and everything going on for poop duty. And if you get more strikes, you keep doing hours of poop duty. We were both very busy during the day.”
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When it came to evening hours, the reality star and Stanford grad would take walks around the prison and talk about their families.
“That’s when we would have just, you know, our time to just talk,” she said. “Talk about how much we miss our family, talk about, you know, things that were going on, important things that were going on in prison, different legislature like the First Step Act and certain challenges of it not being implemented and what remedies needed to be taking place to try to help get these things implemented 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 really tied there. There’s not much you can do as an inmate, but I felt like … Lizzie and I felt like, you know, we could make a difference and advocate. So we would talk about a lot of stuff like that.”
Holmes would ask Shah about the outside world, and would ask, “‘What do you think it’s going to be when you walk in the house?’ and, ‘What is your first, like … can you imagine that? Like, can you put yourself in there? Do you see yourself walking in the house?’”
“It would be a lot of those kind of deep conversations, and there’s a lot of heartache there too, in prison,” Shah said. “It was just, you know, being that sounding board for each other when you could just be like, hey I need to … can we go walk and cry? I just need to cry.”
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Bravo cameras were rolling when authorities stepped into a “Housewives” production in search of Shah. Only minutes before Homeland Security arrived in the Beauty Lab parking lot, Shah had received a phone call from an unknown person and abruptly left the shoot.
Shah was arrested on her way home on March 30, 2021.