Photo: Instagram
She's doing time for stealing from a man during his fatal overdose.
By Rebekah Kuschmider — Written on Nov 10, 2019
Using reality TV to launch a career is not a new idea. The Clermont twins were hoping to do just that when they went on Oxygen's Bad Girls Club in 2015. For a while, it seemed like the gambit had worked. They ran with their notoriety from the show to start working with big names like Future and Kanye West and hoped to move into a fashion design career of their own.
But they let their fame and lifestyle get ahead of their actual earnings and that's where one of them got into trouble. In 2017, Shannade Clermont was doing sex work to make extra money. She went to one of her clients and discovered that he was in no shape for their scheduled date. She then stole his debit cards, left his house, and used the cards to buy $20,000 worth of stuff. But he was dying of an overdose that night and she was caught when his family was settling his estate and realized his cards were being used after his death.
Now she's serving a 12-month prison sentence for fraud. Who is Shannade Clermont?
1. Bad Girls Club
Shannade and Shannon Clermont rose to some notoriety when they joined the cast of the Oxygen reality show Bad Girls Club. The premise of the show is that a group of "bad girls" live together in a mansion for three months, during which they had to obey specified rules. The Clermont twins were part of the season 14 cast in 2015 and they became immediate fan favorites, though they were booted halfway through the season for threatening another cast member.
The pair later said that they were using the show to raise their profile to make it in the fashion world, telling Milk: "We just wanted people to know who we are. We were doing modeling and auditions in New York, but BGC was our first response. We jumped on the opportunity to show our style and let America know who the Clermont Twins are."
Shannon Clermont went on to say "Overall, it was beneficial and gave us a platform to become more international. After the show, we got responses from all over the world.'
After leaving the show, they got their degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology and started working with various celebrities. They starred in a music video for Future and posed as Kim Kardashian clones for the Yeezy Season 6 campaign.
2. A night out with a sugar daddy
Despite the success they enjoyed during and after the show, Shannade was apparently using sex work as a supplemental income. In 2017, she went to James Alesi's apartment for a "prostitution date" according to prosecutors. Alesi, a real estate broker who the twins say was well known as a sugar daddy, overdosed while Shannade was in the apartment. She took it upon herself to steal his debit card and other information about him before leaving him there. She later said she thought he was just passed out and didn't think she needed to do anything for him so she never even called 911.
“He wasn’t asleep when I left — he was just drunk,” Shannade later told Page Six. “I have never been around people who have been on heavy drugs, so I didn’t really know. It was like, ‘Oh, he was a drunk mess.’ I was annoyed . . . [I thought] he was playing games. So I just left.”
In fact, he was suffering from an overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl and he died sometime after she left.
3. Stealing his identity
In the months that followed Alesi's death, Shannade used his debit card to do some serious shopping. According to the prosecutors with the Southern District of New York she, "used the stolen debit card information to make or attempt to make more than $20,000 in fraudulent purchases during the months following the Victim’s death, including to pay her rent and phone bills, purchase flights, and make several online purchases of thousands of dollars of clothing and other merchandise."
As Alesi's sister put it, “My brother died and she went shopping.”
4. Caught for wire fraud
In addition to all the purchases on Alesi's card, she also used his name to create a fake email address, which she then used to wire herself money via Western Union. Prosecutors eventually caught up with her and there was no way she could get out of the charges. Instead of going to trial — where no doubt a jury would look askance on stealing a credit card from a sugar daddy as he lay dying — Shannade decided to plead guilty. In November 2018, SDNY announced that she "pled guilty to one felony count of wire fraud for making and attempting more than $20,000 in fraudulent charges using the stolen debit card information of a deceased man she had visited for a prostitution date."
5. Bad Girls Prison
At sentencing, the twins hoped that Shannade would be given probation but the judge who decided the case wasn't sympathetic to her claims that she didn't know Alesi was dying when she left. After all, stealing debit cards and then using them is illegal whether the owner is alive or not.
“When faced with a real test of character, you chose to steal his debit card information,” U.S. District Judge Naomi Buchwald said before sentencing Shannade to 12 months in prison and ordering her to pay almost $11,000 in restitution, according to Oxygen.
6. Update from prison
Shannade is halfway through her prison sentence and she shared an update on her social media to let fans know how she's faring. "Hey everyone Just wanted to thank you all for the endless support and love, it means a lot to me to be growing through all this with all the unconditional love I get from you guys. This journey hasn't been easy but I’m thankful to know that I’m going on my 6th month and soon it will just be another chapter to my story," she wrote on Instagram. "God has a funny way of testing our faith but I’m doing his time. I just want to let all the people that look up to us to know that even though they are going through something hard or has done something in the past to know that it doesn't define you as a person, it's about how you pull out of the situation and change as a person. Don't let anyone tell you who you are, God will tell you and that's the only person that matters through it all. I take this all as a lesson and blessing because I know something better will come out of it all whatever it may be."
She continues, saying "Blessed to have my close friends and my family that will ride with me til the wheels fall off. This has been such a detox for me and I'm still learning so much about myself as a person and using this time to really better myself... Keep your shoulders back and your chin up high and don't let know one tell you different about yourself. Love you guys <3"
Shannade is set to be released in six more months, Shannon says the two of them have plans to keep working in fashion.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. Her work has been seen at Ravishly, Babble, Scary Mommy, The Mid, Redbook online, and The Broad Side. She is the creator of the blog Stay at Home Pundit and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.