Jen Shah became close with Elizabeth ‘Lizzie‘ Holmes during her time in prison while on poop duty.
In Dave Quinn’s article for PEOPLE, the former Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star opened up about growing close to the disgraced Theranos founder while serving time together at the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, alongside Jeffrey Epstein’s child r*pe accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Prison life:
“Lizzie and I are good friends,” began Jen.
“As another high-profile prisoner, there are just certain things you’re both dealing with, so you naturally come together in those instances.”
“We both got assigned to poop duty together,” explained Jen. “When you do poop duty with someone, you’re going to be close.”
The assignment came after there were repeated cleanliness violations in the unit they shared for over 10 months. “If someone in your bathroom does not clean it, you get a strike. If your bathroom gets three strikes, you have to do poop duty.”
“We would make sure that [didn’t happen]. Like, ‘Hey, we’re not doing poop duty!’ And I almost made it through my time without having to do it. And sure enough, our bathroom got hit.”
“On poop duty, you pull up a metal chair and watch everybody come in and use the bathroom. After they use the bathroom, you have to get up, go inspect it, and either clean it if they don’t or tell them to come back and clean it.”
“You can imagine the smells and everything going on,” she adds. “If you get more strikes, you keep doing hours of poop duty. So, yeah. It’s a thing. It’s poop duty in prison.”
Pen pals:
Jen revealed that ‘Lizzie‘ took her line dancing class, but “drew the line” at joining the dance and step teams Jen captained while in the clink. “She was like, ‘No, I’m not … I’m good. I think I’m better off … My talents are better utilized elsewhere,'” laughed Jen.
Outside of their workouts, Jen spent time with Elizabeth and her kids when they visited. “[I saw] her children grow up while I was there for almost three years. You get to know each other’s families because you see each other at the visitation.”
The pair often walked the track together in the evenings. “That’s when we would have our time to just talk. We’d talk about how much we miss our family. We would talk about plans after; when we were both going to get home. She would ask me, ‘What do you think it’s going to be when you walk in the house? Can you put yourself in there?’ Deep conversations.”
“There’s a lot of heartache in prison so we were a sounding board for each other where you could just be like, ‘Can we go walk and cry? I just need to cry.’ And just knowing that you had somebody there that understood you.”
