There’s a new “Real Housewife of Salt Lake City,” and she’s not just one of Jen Shah’s former assistants, but she helped send Jen to prison.
In the fourth season premiere, Monica Garcia says that Jen asked her, “‘Do you want to be rich? Do you want to make $600,000 a year? All you have to do is put this, this and this in your name.’” Monica was “weirded out” by this and contacted “a friend in the Secret Service,” who told her to “get the [expletive] away from Jen Shah. She’s going to prison.’ And Jen was arrested two months later. And that is how I became a witness with the federal government in her trial.”
(Well, there was no trial, because Jen pleaded guilty just before it was to begin.)
Monica, 38, who runs a baby products company, is the mother of four daughters and is getting divorced for the second time from the same husband. She was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
(Presley Ann | Bravo) Meredith Marks and Mary Cosby on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Mary is back
After getting fired at the end of Season 2 — for skipping reunion episodes, not for all her racist comments — Mary returns as a “friend” of the Housewives, and she doesn’t come in humbly. “You better buckle up,” Mary says with her signature, smug smirk in a confessional, “because here I am.”
Lunching with Meredith Marks, Mary weirdly says she’s in “dinosaur mode.” (Huh?) Mary is not eating her salad because it’s “too spicy. And whenever I do spicy, it comes out the other end spicy. … Ouch, ouch, ouch.” (Ick.)
Mary says that she’s happy that her husband, Robert Sr., spent the past six months in Las Vegas while she was in Salt Lake City. (That’s not the way to quiet gossip about the state of her marriage to her step-grandfather.) And Mary looks less than happy when, in a confessional, she says her son, Robert Jr., has a girlfriend, “but everyone’s telling me it’s his wife.” She does not explain this. When asked by a producer if she’s asked her son for an explanation, Mary says, “I haven’t had a chance.” The producer points out, “You live in the same house.”
(Presley Ann/Bravo) Lisa Barlow in an upcoming episode of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Mission impossible?
Lisa and her husband, John, just found out their 18-year-old son, Jack, is planning on going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Lisa gets teary and laments that “the hardest part is that Jack hid this from John and me for almost a year. And I’m, like, ‘Why don’t you tell us?’ And he literally said, ‘Because you and dad are different than me.’”
Jack is likely referencing the fact that his parents are not temple recommend-carrying members of the church — they drink alcohol, among other things — and Jack is rejecting that to go on a mission.
“It hurts,” Lisa says. “Like, what else don’t I know about Jack? Am I so disconnected from my son that he doesn’t want to tell me this? Am I, like, a bad mom?”
(Brett Colvin | Bravo) Heather Gay on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Heather on the move
What with the success of her best-selling autobiography, “Bad Mormon,” Heather Gay is ready to “venture out” and “start a new life.” She’s bought a new house ... three blocks from her old house. And, she says, there has been some “fallout” from the publication of her book from Latter-day Saints.
By the way, none of the other Housewives or their friends admit to having read “Bad Mormon.” Mary (clearly unaware the book is a best-seller) sourly says, “No one’s reading that book.” Angie Katsaneva (clearly unaware how rude she’s being), upon learning that Heather mentions Lisa in the book, says “I want a signed copy of the book from Lisa. She’s a star.” You cannot blame Heather for mocking Angie about that in a confessional. “That is exactly why you’re not in the book and never will be,” she says.
(Randy Shropshire | Bravo) Whitney Rose and Meredith Marks on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
The Big Bathtub Battle
Meredith tells Heather she’s mad at Whitney for an interview in which Whitney suggested that a Season 3 scene of Meredith and her husband, Seth, together in a bathtub might be unsanitary. Heather at first wonders if Meredith is kidding, but she’s not.
“Don’t come after my bathtub,” Meredith says, going hyperbolic. “Does she not know me? You don’t go after my marriage. You don’t go after my bathtub. I mean, the only thing she left out was my children. ... It was a dig on my marriage and a dig on my bathtub. Like I have a dirty house.”
When Meredith confronts Whitney about it, Whitney says it was just “a shady joke.” She apologizes, but she says in a confessional, “I am never going to live down ‘creepy bathtub.’ She’ll be bringing this up five years from now.”
Detente?
Meredith, who has been holding a grudge against Lisa, her former BFF, since the end of Season 2, proposes they meet one-on-one and hash things out. Lisa accepts.
The big snowball fight
Heather hosts a get-together at The Lakehouse at Deer Creek. “I’m hoping we can really mend and start fresh,” she says optimistically. She’s also planning a snowball fight for later in the afternoon. “I want everyone to get out their aggression.”
“Nothing says ‘fresh start’ like an activity filled with aggression,” jokes Dre, Heather’s friend and business partner.
There is a decided lack of enthusiasm among the Housewives and friends. No ones is less enthusiastic than Mary, who sourly refuses to participate. When a guy blows a whistle, the women run to buckets filled with premade snowballs and start throwing them at each other. It’s low-level mayhem.
“It’s like ‘Lord of the Flies,’” Heather says in a confessional. “Which is probably a book they haven’t read, either.”
The next episode of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” airs Tuesday, Sept. 11 on Bravo — 7 p.m. on Dish and DirecTV; 10 p.m. on Comcast. Episodes start streaming on Peacock the day after they air on Bravo.
Read the full recap of this week’s episode here.
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