Lara Sophia 
Jen Shah is trying her hardest to get out of the current fraud charges she faces.
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star recently asked a judge to dismiss the criminal charges she faces for her involvement in a nationwide telemarketing scheme.
According to Jen, her “dry” contact lens led to her involuntarily waiving her Miranda rights.
In court documents, Jen accuses law enforcement officers of “trickery.” She also slams the “bare-bones” indictment and a “flawed theory of criminality.”
Jen admits she signed a document waiving her Miranda rights but only because “my contact lenses, which were in my eyes, were dry, and I did not have my reading glasses, so my vision was blurry, and I was unable to read the paper in front of me.”
Her lawyer claims Jen signed the document “as a direct result of law enforcement deception and trickery calculated to overpower her will.” The lawyers also argue that there are “multiple flaws in the theory of this case [and] the investigation.”
Jen claims she was “confused” after being arrested on March 30. She initially believed the arrest was connected to a 2017 case from New York where she was the victim of “theft and assault and had an order of protection against the perpetrator.”
“I was at this point very confused and emotionally off-balance from the strange series of events and thought I might have been the victim of a false identification,” Jen said in the affidavit.
When she asked if she was under arrest, Jen claims the officer told her, “I promise we just want to talk to you.”
She also says that she “was never told, and did not suspect, that the entire conversation was being recorded.”
“I did not know the purpose of the conversation or what, if anything, I was being charged with until close to the end of the 1 hour, 20-minute interrogation, shortly after Det. Bastos said, ‘I want to conclude,’” she claimed in the affidavit.
Jen’s attorney insists the officer’s comments implied he was “trying to clear up an issue, if not trying to help her.” Adding that the statements “were plainly untrue, as he well knew that he would be taking Ms. Shah to a magistrate judge that day based on her having been indicted in New York. To be sure, he desperately did want to talk with her — but he did not just want to do so.”
In April, the reality TV star pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. She is currently free on a $1 million bond.
Jen is hoping the judge will dismiss the case against her. However, if not, Jen’s attorney wants the statements she made after waiving her Miranda rights not to be used against her in a court of law.
They also want prosecutors to make more specific allegations against Jen to build a strong defense case. Jen’s team of lawyers currently have to sift through more than 1.3 million documents.
“This information cannot be adequately reviewed in a lifetime and requires, as we argue below, that the government particularize the charges in a way that this relatively bare-bones superseding indictment does not,” the court papers claim.
Jen and her assistant, Stuart Smith, are “accused of targeting elderly people by asking them to invest in online projects and to buy phony business services such as tax preparation, coaching sessions, and website design services in a scheme that began in 2012 and ran through as recently as March.”
“Shah and Smith flaunted their lavish lifestyle to the public as a symbol of their ‘success,’” Homeland Security Special Agent-in-Charge Peter Fitzhugh alleged in a statement in March 2021.
RHOSLC will return to Bravo for season 2 in late 2021.
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Source: Page Six
