Jen Shah may be spending the next half-decade behind bars after pleading guilty to committing wire fraud as part of a telemarketing scheme, but before she reported to Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas last February, she had a VERY interesting offer on the table!
According to the US Sun, the 50-year-old Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star was asked to consider a spinoff following her run on that show before she landed in prison! On Wednesday evening, that outlet reported Bravo execs offered Shah the opportunity to do a spinoff series. And she turned it down!
Related: Jen Shah Has Become ‘Friends’ With Elizabeth Holmes In Prison?!
After learning of the spinoff offer that had been doled out by the Real Housewives-laden network, the news org asked Shah’s rep if there was any truth to the claim. And he confirmed it! Straight-up, the rep said Jen was offered the chance for a Bravo spinoff about a year ago:
“Bravo did offer Jen a mini-series in January 2023.”
Whoa!
Honestly, that’s smart business on the part of Andy Cohen and the Bravo team. After all, this offer occurred just a couple weeks before Jen reported to federal prison to begin serving her six-and-a-half-year sentence (which was later reduced by a year). Jen’s arrival at a federal slammer in the Lone Star State was (and still is, TBH) really big news. No wonder Bravo wanted to get her talking about it on camera!
But there was one BIG problem: Jen didn’t want to let them edit her life story like that! Per Shah’s rep, production company Shed Media — which makes a lot of Bravo fare, including THAT infamous ill-fated season of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip — wanted to film Jen in a way that “would have followed her day-to-day” life. However, Shah read the contracts carefully before agreeing to do the spinoff, and she didn’t like what she found in them! Ultimately, Jen declined to jump on board because the contract had Bravo retaining final edit rights on everything! The rep explained:
“[Jen declined] due to the exclusivity and misrepresentations clause in her agreement that Andy [Cohen] was adamant in keeping. … [Bravo] could freely edit anything they want in her story.”
Hey, that’s how reality TV works, right?? But after appearing on RHOSLC for so long prior to prison, Jen knew how the game was played. And she wasn’t keen on playing it like that any longer!
As Perezcious readers may recall, nearly a year ago, Jen took to her Instagram page weeks before reporting to prison. In a statement published on January 19 of last year, she wrote a long missive that included this key passage:
“I will not be doing the 1:1 with Andy Cohen and Bravo because of their unwillingness to remove contractual provisions that allow the network to legally make misrepresentations of me and my story, relating to any and all topics, prior to and during the course of my participation.”
You can re-read her full post from last January HERE, but basically, she was alluding to the same issue that is now coming out regarding the spinoff offer: she wanted control over how her story was portrayed, Bravo didn’t want to give it, and they couldn’t strike a deal. Sad! We are sure it would have made GREAT television!
For his part, days after Jen’s IG post about declining the interview back in January of 2023, Cohen hopped onto his Radio Andy show and said he was “over it” regarding Shah’s supposedly excessive interview demands:
“I did want to do a one on one with her. I don’t care about it anymore. I’m over it. Her stipulations were insane. I know she wanted to do a docuseries of her days leading up to jail. She wanted a lot of money and she was still professing her innocence, so it would have been another interview of her sitting across from me, lying to my face, which we got at two reunions from her.”
So, clearly his perspective was quite different than the POV coming from Jen’s team. How does that quote go again? “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth?” Yeah, THAT! LOLz!
Related: Jen Celebrated Her 50th Birthday In Prison With One VERY Special Moment!
Even with the spinoff dead and gone, it’s not like RHOSLC hasn’t seen a s**t load of drama after Jen’s incarceration anyways. For one, there was this most recent season’s bombshell revelations about cast member Heather Gay‘s mysterious and unsettling black eye that appeared back in season three, and whether Jen was the one who may have dished it out. And who could forget this week’s jaw-dropping revelation about cast member Monica Garcia‘s alleged IG trolling of her fellow cast members through a fiery Finsta account that was originally set up to take down Jen?! So much dramz!!
Come to think of it, with all these sordid stories floating around the RHOSLC universe, maybe Kim Kardashian really should play Shah in a biopic! Ha! Just saying!
What do U make of the spinoff revelation, tho, Perezcious readers?! Would U have loved to see a mini-series following Jen’s life right before reporting to prison or what?? Sound OFF with your thoughts on the matter down in the comments (below)!