The Real Housewives Is TV’s Best Window Into White Collar Crime

In this guest story, the lawyers and Real Housewives aficionados behind the podcast “The Bravo Docket” take on the question: How did white collar crime becoming a recurring theme in the franchise?

The news broke on March 30, 2021. Jen Shah, a star of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, was arrested and charged in connection to a fraudulent telemarketing scheme. As attorneys, we wanted to understand the charges — one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering — but as Bravo fans, we wanted to know how much of it we’d see on air. It turns out a lot.

Seven and a half months after her arrest, RHOSLC fans watched NYPD officers and Department of Homeland Security agents descend on the Bravo production in search of Shah, followed by Ring camera footage of law enforcement brandishing weapons outside of her home, preparing to execute a search warrant. As Season 2 went on, viewers watched Shah claim her innocence to a criminal defense attorney — and complain that said attorney told her to stop using Botox, presumably in an effort to appear more relatable to a federal jury. The show ended just before the final twist, when Shah reversed course, pleaded guilty to the wire fraud, and earned a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

It was certainly surreal to watch a federal prosecution become a subplot on a show ostensibly about the real lives of the rich and sometimes famous, but it’s not without precedent. While Housewives’ run-ins with the law are often relatively minor offenses, several Housewives, significant others, and friends-of have been charged with committing serious crimes. Entirely by accident, the Bravo franchise has arguably become the best look at white-collar crime currently on TV.

Teresa Giudice of the Real Housewives of New Jersey and her then-husband Joe Giudice were charged in 2013 with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud; bank fraud; making false statements on loan applications; and bankruptcy fraud in a 39-count indictment. Dana Wilkey, prominent Real Housewives of Beverly Hills friend-of, was indicted in 2014 for conspiracy to commit wire fraud; wire fraud and aiding and abetting; and making false statements to government agents. Apollo Nida, the Atlanta house-husband of Phaedra Parks, pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiring to commit mail, wire, and bank fraud in a complex scheme spanning over four years, harming more than 50 victims, and causing more than $2.3 million in losses. Tom Girardi, house-husband of Erika Girardi of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, was charged earlier this year with eight counts of wire fraud and four counts of criminal contempt of court in Illinois and five counts of wire fraud in California.

This raises the question: Why would these people keep agreeing to go on reality television when they’re in the process of committing federal crimes? We are not psychologists, but as both Bravo experts and experienced attorneys, we’ve developed a pet theory. There appears to be a large overlap between the type of person who would commit a federal crime and the type of person who would willingly broadcast their life on television. We like to picture a Venn diagram of narcissism and delusion, with “Real Housewife” and “White-Collar Criminal” right in the center.

Most housewives think they will be fan favorites when they agree to join the show, which is delusional in and of itself — after all, only a few earn this distinction. Once filming begins, this delusion can become a type of armor against judgment and vitriol. If she is going to survive life under the microscope, she must think she is the most fantastic, successful, wealthy, and interesting creature on Earth.

White-collar criminals must have a similar delusion: that they’re so smart, cunning, and special, they won’t be caught. As Kelly Richmond Pope explains in Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry, those who intentionally commit fraud tend to exhibit signs of what psychologists term “grandiose narcissists,” who are distinguished by their combination of high confidence and high self-esteem. “They’re dangerously arrogant and entitled, and it’s their arrogance that makes them think they can get away with things that other people can’t,” Richmond Pope writes.

Why would these people keep agreeing to go on reality television when they’re in the process of committing federal crimes?

Housewives are notorious for failing to see themselves clearly. Take Ramona Singer saying she looks like an older Cameron Diaz, Kelly Killoren Bensimon blithely going for a jog down the middle of busy New York City street as if that’s normal, or Bethenny Frankel claiming to have invented the ever-popular skinny margarita.

As corporate malfeasance researcher Eugene Soltes suggests in Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal, because the harm to their victims is usually distant or abstract, the white-collar criminal does not internalize or even identify with the harm they cause. It is not as intimate as taking someone’s purse, even if the outcome is the same.

In Shah’s case, for example, she instructed others to make devastating calls to the individuals she stole from. She orchestrated the scheme and saw the money coming in, but because she was not engaged with her victims face to face or even on the phone, she could keep herself at a distance.

There’s also the fact that the Real Housewives franchise is undeniably a platform for showing off wealth and privilege, and when you examine each criminal case, you can pinpoint how the crime helped keep up the facade. Take Tareq Salahi and Michaele Ann Schon (formerly Salahi), who waltzed into a White House state dinner completely uninvited and shook hands with President Barack Obama. Surely, they didn’t break into the event just to enjoy the appetizers; it was a ploy to project status. The same could be said for Shah, who flaunted her ill-gotten wealth with extravagant parties and diamond snowflake pendants for her castmates. (Meredith Marks, the only Salt Lake City Housewife with a law degree, wisely turned hers over to federal authorities.) Another good example is Beverly Hills’ Dana Wilkey, who famously showed off $25,000 sunglasses pleading guilty to misprision of a felony (which is a charge for when someone knew a felony was committed and concealed it) for failing to report her knowledge of federal fraud involving an insurance company.

As fans of the franchise — and some of its fraudsters — does some of the blame fall on us, too? After all, how many of us started watching RHOSLC only after Shah was arrested? In a sense, we’re welcoming this type of criminality on our screens.

We believe the crimes would happen without the shows, as evidenced by the fact that Shah and Wilkey’s schemes began years before they joined the franchise — and sometimes their delusion precedes the show.

Yes, Housewives can earn attention by committing headline-grabbing crimes, but if anything, the publicity surrounding Jen Shah’s crimes spread awareness about these pervasive and predatory telemarketing schemes that target elderly people in the United States. The same goes for many of the franchise’s other white-collar criminals, and that’s for the good. In a country where white-collar crime is underprosecuted, the Housewives provide a welcome, if unexpected, corrective to popular narratives around the pervasiveness of financial fraud.

Ultimately, rather than contributing to the proliferation of white-collar crime, our fascination with these figures is yet another symptom of our Venn diagram’s Housewife-criminal personality type: Those who commit white-collar crimes are often described as charming, even charismatic, and rewarded for being so. As Pope writes, “because they’re so charming, people tend to like them, often opening doors for them that might be closed to the rest of us.”

It’s not just that the kind of person who’d be willing to go on reality TV is the kind of person who’d commit a white-collar crime; it’s that the kind of person we want to watch has many of those criminal traits, too.