The cast of Bling Empire is stunning, but the crown jewel is the one-and-only grande dame Anna Shay. The woman who made her reality TV debut at age 60 nearly broke the internet when she came onto the scene out of seemingly nowhere and made quite a splash, garnering thousands of devoted fans overnight. As remarkable a feat as that is, it's almost more remarkable that Anna Shay was able to remain reclusive for six decades prior to her natural foray into fame. An even more intriguing question lies in just exactly why the heiress was so reclusive in the first place.

Anna Shay, as Bling Empire fans mostly all now know, is the daughter of late billionaire Edward Shay. The American defense contractor and founder of Pacific Architects & Engineers met Anna's mother, Ai Oizumi Shay, who is part-Japanese and part-Russian, while living in Japan. Anna spent the first eight years of her life in Tokyo, under the protection of security guards and doting, protective parents. Those parents ingrained in her a sense of privacy and an urgency for safety. When traveling, Anna went with her father. Her brother, Allen Shay, went with their mother. Then, they all met at their destination.

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Though Anna dreamed of one day taking over her father's company, Edward had other ideas and handed the reins over to Allen instead. So Anna got married four times, had a son, and dedicated her life to her family's foundation and her actual family, with the most important people in that unit being her father, her mother, and her son, Kenny, who is a notorious collector of glass pipes. For decades, she's made a point of keeping her internet footprint untraceable in an effort to protect her family's valuable privacy. But when her father passed in 1995, and then her mother in 2015, she figured it was time to try doing something for herself.

Anna tears down the walls of her closet

Jeff Jenkins, the famed executive producer of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, was introduced to Anna ten years ago through a mutual friend. As a producer worth his weight in gold, Jenkins pursued a relationship with Anna and learned even more about this wildly wealthy, but even more outrageously generous heiress. He learned about how she often gets whatever she's buying for herself for the salesperson as well, and about the time she encountered a homeless man named Elvis at the flower market at 4 a.m. and wound up securing him with an apartment and a stocked pantry.

Generosity is perhaps Anna's most defining characteristic. She's eccentric and wise, and operates in a world where the rules don't apply. For instance, there are no Gucci store hours for Anna. If she wants to shop, they'll keep the lights on. But there's not even a hint of arrogance there, because of that overwhelming sense of generosity and kindness. Her instinct is to give back, and the Bling Empire fans love her for it.

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