Even after Jen Shah's arrest, it's hard to say the Real Housewives franchise attracts grifters

NBC News

"It's more complicated than that," Brian Moylan says of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star's alleged fraud. "It’s hard to tease out the correlation and the causation between Housewifery and fraud, particularly because many of these crimes started long before the show," says Moylan. "Shah’s alleged telemarketing scheme targeting older people has been going on since 2012, according to prosecutors, years before sticking a ski pole in Salt Lake City was even an idea for Bravo. (Shah has pleaded not guilty.) Also, if the show and its somewhat unattainable lifestyles were a cause for theft, there would be a lot more criminals on this list, considering the over 100 women who have been cast throughout the various series’ lifetimes. There have been no allegations against Bethenny Frankel, the Ur-Housewife, or her Skinnygirl lifestyle brand fortune, for instance. Even Ramona Singer, the infamous Real Housewives of New York star, hasn’t had her business called into question. But there is definitely an overlapping in the Venn diagram between good reality TV and a certain kind of crime. To be a good Housewife requires performativity, narcissism, a comfortability with risk, charisma, self-mythologizing and often a little bit of aggression. Those are, I assume, some of the very same qualities it takes to lead a life of financial crimes. It’s not that one leads to the other; it’s just that there’s bound to be some overlap. Plenty of Americans spend their lives trying to look richer than they are — and what better way to accomplish this than being cast on a show about the lifestyles of the privileged."