Part of the saga of Jen Shah’s arrest on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City involved an emergency with Jen’s husband Sharrieff. Before the women’s party bus was surrounded by Homeland Security and NYPD officers, Jen told them that her husband was suffering from a major medical issue. Is Sharrieff ok?
At the end of Episode 9, the RHOSLC cast was loading up a party bus in the parking lot of Heather Gay’s Beauty Lab to drive together to Vail, Colorado when Jen Shah got a phone call. She answers with “Hi Baby!” and then asks “I need to go to the house?”
Jen immediately asks Whitney to turn off her microphone and exits the van. She talks on the phone for a bit where no one can hear her and then tells Heather Gay that she just found out from the hospital that Sharrieff Sr., her husband, is in the hospital with internal bleeding. Jen says “they’re not sure if they’re gonna need to do surgery and I don’t know what’s going on. If he’s ok then I can catch a flight or something.”
Since internal bleeding is a very serious health complication, Heather is a little confused by Jen’s offer to possibly make the trip to Vail with the rest of the girls. “I mean, how can he be ok?” she asks. All Jen says is that Sharrieff had an appointment, and “he had internal bleeding.”
Jen goes in breaks the news to the rest of the girls, who express concern about Sharrieff. While they’re trying to gather more information about Sharrieff’s condition the party bus gets surrounded by the authorities. Lisa Barlow says she still has PTSD from the experience. The detectives say they want to know if Jen is ok, and the production team tells them she’s at the hospital.
In an After Show segment for Episode 10, Jen says she only received a call from police after she left the party bus. She said they asked her if she was ok. Both Jen and the other women assumed from this question that Jen’s life might be in danger from a stalker she had a restraining order against in New York. This would also explain why NYPD might be there. Of course, the viewers knew that this was not the case about what really happened that day. Jen Shah was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
Here’s why she may be telling the truth about the detail about when she received a call from the police: the first call appears to be from her husband, urging to her come home. We know the detectives were at her house that day, so he was likely calling her to tell her about the police.
What seems like an untruth is that she said she was on the phone with the hospital when she received the call about Sharrieff. She had answered the phone call “Hey Baby,” which implies that it was her husband on the other end of the phone. It could also be her son but did not seem to be someone she didn’t know. During this part of the call, the person told her to come to her house, not the hospital. At this point, there was no indication that there was a medical emergency from the viewer’s point of view.
In her confessional interview of the next episode, however, Jen Shah explains that the unnamed person had called her from her husband’s phone, which is why she thought it was him when she picked up the phone. She says the person told her to go home and pick up her son and take him to the hospital because Sharrieff had a medical issue.
Later, at the rental chateau in Vail, Lisa called her husband John to discuss Sharrieff’s internal bleeding. Lisa pointed out that if it had been him with internal bleeding, she would have been “breaking down and panicked.” Of course, not everyone reacts to this kind of news the same way and Jen could have just been in shock.
John then tells Lisa that he texted Sharrieff, but hasn’t heard back from him.
Even though Jen says she didn’t receive a call from police until after she left the other women, it doesn’t clear up what happened to Sharrieff and whether or not he had a medical emergency, and Jen hasn’t done much to explain. What we do know for certain is that Sharrieff is currently alive and well.
In court papers Jen filed to try to dismiss her case, Jen says that she had gotten a call from an “unidentified” person claiming that her husband was in the hospital and asking her to come home. In these filings, Jen says she tried to call her husband Sharrieff back after this mysterious call, but he did not answer his phone.
UPDATE During the Season 2 RHOSLC reunion, Sharieff and Jen maintained that he had really been at the doctor and asked Jen to come home before police swarmed their house and also the Real Housewives production while they were filming.
