Andy Cohen doesn’t know how to feel about Jen Shah’s guilty plea, which came more than a year after she was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with telemarketing.
Cohen said on Tuesday’s episode of “Radio Andy” on Sirius XM, “I don’t know how to feel about Jen Shah pleading guilty.”
The 54-year-old producer of “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” also said he was hesitant to call the star “guilty.”
He said that Monday’s legal bombshell just meant that she was changing her plea.
Cohen then said that the plea change surprised him even more because Shah had just sent a gift to his 2-month-old daughter Lucy.
“I told Jen Shah, ‘With all you have going on, I can’t believe you thought to send Lucy a gift.'” “I just thought that was such a nice thing for her to do,” Cohen, who also has a 3-year-old son named Ben, said.
But theatre actor John Hill, who co-hosted Cohen’s radio show on Tuesday with Cohen, sided with the reality star’s alleged victims in the telemarketing scheme.
“If you say you’re guilty of something, that might mean you are,” he said.
A caller weighed in on the situation and said that Shah was like Teresa Giudice from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Giudice pleaded guilty to fraud in 2014 and spent 15 months in federal prison because of it.
“We’ve been fans of Teresa for years,” the caller said, suggesting that Shah’s fans would be just as loyal.
Hill and Cohen pointed out, though, that the cases were different because Shah is said to have hurt people, many of whom were over 55.
Cohen said, “What I’ve found about how viewers react to some of these events is that some of them are more outraged when there are actual victims to look at, like when you look at Tom Girardi and what it looks like he did.”
(Girardi, the ex-husband of “RHOBH” star Erika Jayne, is being sued for allegedly stealing settlement money meant for the survivors of the victims of Lion Air Flight 610.)
“When you look at Joe Giudice stealing tax money from the government, I think it makes you feel worse that there are victims,” he said, referring to Teresa’s ex-husband, who was also found guilty of fraud in 2014.
Shah was arrested in March 2021 on charges that he had scammed hundreds of people through telemarketing. She first said she was innocent of all the charges against her, and she did this many times in the months that followed.
She surprised her fans, though, on Monday when she filed a last-minute motion to change her plea from not guilty to guilty, just days before the trial was to start.
Shah’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, told Page Six that the “RHOSLC” star “accepts full responsibility for her actions” and changed her plea because she “wants to pay her debt to society and put this ordeal behind her and her family.”
On Nov. 28, Shah will be given his sentence.
