By: Jerome Brookshire

By any measure, the American home-shopping industry has lived through a half-century of spectacle and excess: rhinestone glitz piped through cathode-ray tubes, smiling hosts hawking trinkets into the night, a peculiarly intimate bond between seller and sofa-bound buyer. Yet beneath the familiar choreography of charm and urgency, a darker drama is now unfolding. According to a months-long investigation by The New York Post, ShopHQ — once a pioneer of the genre — has become the epicenter of a bitter financial controversy, as suppliers allege that the network sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods without paying for them.

At the center of the storm is billionaire Manoj Bhargava, the reclusive founder of 5-Hour Energy and majority shareholder of the Arena Group, the media company that briefly published Sports Illustrated before an infamous upheaval in 2024. Bhargava’s name, already indelibly associated with the mass firing of senior journalists and with accusations from the magazine’s brand owner that he behaved like a “gangster,” is now being invoked again — this time by jewelers and beauty wholesalers who claim they were stiffed after trusting ShopHQ with their merchandise.

The allegations, detailed in a report on Thursday in The New York Post, are as sobering as they are intricate. For decades, ShopHQ — formerly known as ValueVision, ShopNBC, and EVINE Live — was a fixture of American retail culture, broadcasting into 80 million homes at its zenith and racking up annual revenues approaching half a billion dollars. Today, the same company is accused of vanishing in the middle of the night, only to reemerge months later, selling inventory that suppliers insist they were never paid for.

Nowhere is the fallout more acute than in New York City’s Diamond District. There, David Yeroshalmi, owner of the boutique jewelry brand Morris & David, says he shipped roughly 500 pieces — diamond bracelets, rings, and necklaces valued at nearly $200,000 — to ShopHQ’s Minnesota headquarters in early 2025. His designs were paraded across the channel’s broadcast platform, fetching thousands of dollars per item.

Among them: a $9,995 tennis bracelet, heart- and clover-shaped diamond rings priced at $1,795, and a constellation of gold-mounted necklaces that glinted on-air under studio lights.

Yet, as Yeroshalmi told The New York Post, the checks never came.

“I was very angry to see they are selling my goods but refusing to pay me,” he said. “I look at the site every day.”

The anguish is not merely emotional. Yeroshalmi’s 37-year-old business, whose clientele once included the former Shah of Iran, is now, he says, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. He owes money to manufacturers, to cutters, to shipping firms — obligations incurred on the assumption that ShopHQ, a household name with three decades of history, would honor its contracts.

Instead, Yeroshalmi and his attorney spent months calling and emailing ShopHQ after its abrupt April shutdown, only to be met with silence. According to The New York Post report, as of this week only 14 Morris & David pieces remained on ShopHQ’s relaunched website — relics of a relationship that has since curdled into litigation threats and despair.

ShopHQ’s implosion was not a sudden bolt from the blue. Industry observers had watched with growing unease as the network’s fortunes waned in the shadow of e-commerce behemoths.

Last spring, the company began laying off hundreds of employees in what turned out to be its final days on cable television. This followed a desperate pivot to digital formats: video-on-demand clips, live streams, influencer-hosted shopping segments — an awkward hybrid that one blogger likened to “Instagram mashed with shopping cart pop-ups.”

Sophia Reynolds of Business Divers summarized the effort with merciless precision: “Social selling is brutal when you’re up against Amazon Lives and TikTok shops with Gen Z hosts who grew up on this stuff.”

By April, ShopHQ went dark altogether. No bankruptcy filing. No formal restructuring. Just silence — a move that left suppliers in legal limbo, uncertain whether their merchandise was lost, sold, or simply trapped in a warehouse.

Then, in October, ShopHQ resurfaced. Control of the company was quietly transferred from IV Media — a Bhargava-owned entity that had shuttered the network — to the Arena Group, the publicly traded media conglomerate in which Bhargava holds a commanding 65% stake.

The transaction’s terms were not disclosed. Arena Group and Bhargava did not respond to repeated inquiries from The New York Post. What is known is that Arena Group also owns TheStreet, Parade, and Men’s Journal, and had already made headlines for its chaotic stewardship of Sports Illustrated.

To Yeroshalmi, the maneuver felt less like a rescue than a sleight of hand.

“It’s the same owner,” he told The New York Post. “He’s just hiding from us.”

The network’s relaunch came with a cruel irony: ShopHQ began selling goods again — including Morris & David jewelry — even though Yeroshalmi insists he still has not been paid for the items already moved through the channel before its shutdown.

Morris & David is not alone. Samuel Behnam, the Great Neck-based founder of Samuel B, has been on air with ShopHQ for 25 years, generating more than $150 million in sales over that span. His testimony to The New York Post reads like a lament for an era that no longer exists.

“I’ve been on the air with them for 25 years and had a good run,” he said. “Over the last few years, we had to insure our merchandise. If we didn’t, we would have added 5% to 10% to the cost of our jewelry.”

Behnam estimates he lost $30,000 — a comparatively modest sum next to Yeroshalmi’s losses, but still enough to sour a relationship forged over decades.

“There were late payments over the years,” Behnam added, “and some of the management changed, but in most cases it was a good business.”

That good business, it seems, has disintegrated.

In Georgia, beauty wholesaler Y&E Enterprises took the matter to court, suing IV Media in August for $51,000 in unpaid fees for products sold through the ShopHQ network. IV Media denied wrongdoing in its filing, according to documents reviewed by The New York Post.

Distressed-asset expert Adam Stein Sapir, speaking to The New York Post, warned that the reputational damage could be severe.

“There are consequences when word gets out in the vendor community,” he said.

In the tightly knit world of jewelry and specialty retail, trust is currency. Suppliers ship goods worth six figures on consignment, relying on handshake reputations built over decades. Once that trust erodes, the business model itself becomes untenable.

ShopHQ, after all, was once the American archetype of home shopping. Founded as ValueVision in 1990, it evolved into ShopNBC, then EVINE Live, and finally reclaimed the ShopHQ moniker in 2019. It rivaled QVC and HSN at its peak, embedding itself into the cultural fabric of late-night television.

Today, it survives as a spectral digital presence — a YouTube channel here, a social-media feed there, and a website where jewelers like Yeroshalmi watch their unsold dreams flicker across a screen.

For critics, the ShopHQ debacle fits a pattern that began with Sports Illustrated. In 2024, Arena Group’s tenure as the magazine’s publisher was marred by mass layoffs of veteran journalists, a move that stunned the industry. The brand’s owner publicly accused Bhargava of running the enterprise “like a gangster” — a charge that reverberates now as ShopHQ suppliers voice eerily similar grievances.

The New York Post report noted the irony: the same billionaire who dismantled one of America’s most storied sports publications is now accused of presiding over the silent dismantling of a home-shopping institution — with small vendors paying the price.

The story of ShopHQ is, in many ways, the story of American retail’s last half-century: a rise fueled by spectacle, a peak defined by ubiquity, and a decline accelerated by digital disruption.

But for Morris & David, Samuel B, Y&E Enterprises, and countless other vendors, this is not an abstract narrative of technological change. It is a ledger of unpaid invoices, of diamond bracelets that vanished into a corporate labyrinth, of late-night phone calls unanswered.

As Yeroshalmi told The New York Post, his business now hangs by a thread.

“I owe a lot of people money for that merchandise,” he said.

Those words — stripped of glitter, stripped of bravado — may ultimately define the ShopHQ saga: not as a tale of billionaires and boardrooms, but as the quiet devastation of families and firms who believed in a network that once promised them the American dream, only to leave them clutching the bill.