What Happened to Aaron Hernandez’s Wife?
The saga of the Jenkins sisters, Shayanna and Shaneah, offers a grim case study in how codependency, misplaced loyalty, and the corrupting proximity to NFL wealth can utterly destroy a family. When the body of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd was discovered in a North Attleborough industrial park in June 2013, riddled with bullets from a .45-caliber firearm, it didn’t just end a life—it ignited a toxic civil war between two sisters that remains entirely unresolved.
The structural hypocrisy of the situation is staggering. Shaneah Jenkins was dating the victim, a man executed less than a mile from Aaron Hernandez’s mansion. Shayanna Jenkins was engaged to the prime suspect. Yet, rather than uniting in a shared pursuit of justice or truth, the sisters immediately split down a predictable fault line of self-interest and denial.
The Basement, the Box, and the Courtroom Betrayal
During the 2015 first-degree murder trial, the courtroom was transformed into a theater of familial estrangement. The sisters sat on opposite sides of the aisle, refusing to lock eyes, embodying a permanent rift built on a foundation of perjury and secrets.
Shaneah took the stand to deliver damning testimony about her sister’s behavior in the hours following the homicide. While Shaneah was upstairs mourning her murdered boyfriend, Shayanna was downstairs in the basement, acting under encrypted directives from Hernandez to covertly remove a mysterious trash-bag-covered box. Prosecutors fiercely argued this box contained the elusive murder weapon—a gun that was never recovered because Shayanna admittedly drove it to a random location and dumped it.
Granted immunity to testify, Shayanna played the role of the oblivious, intensely loyal partner to perfection. She claimed under oath that she never looked inside the box and had no idea what she was destroying. While she managed to have her subsequent perjury charges dropped, her actions cemented a grotesque reality: she prioritized protecting a millionaire athlete over securing justice for her own sister’s slaughtered partner. On April 15, 2015, the jury saw through the defense’s deflections, convicting Hernandez of first-degree murder and handing him a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
The Trust Fund Feud and the Illusion of Work
Even after Hernandez’s high-profile suicide inside his cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center on April 19, 2017, the culture of deception surrounding his legacy persisted. Shayanna went to extraordinary lengths to insulate their daughter, Avielle, from reality, weaponizing a bizarre narrative that her father was simply “at work” during their weekly prison visits.
This commitment to keeping up appearances eventually manifested as financial opportunism. Because Hernandez died without a valid will and the couple was never legally wed, Avielle became the sole legal heir to his estate. A trust fund containing roughly $700,000 was established, set to mature when the child reaches age 25. Concurrently, Shayanna was granted an annual payout of approximately $150,000 from Hernandez’s NFL pension and Social Security benefits, explicitly earmarked for the child’s upbringing.
The illusion of selfless motherhood cracked wide open in September 2022. Shayanna petitioned the court-appointed trustee, David Schwarz, to release an additional $10,000 from the baseline trust to fund Avielle’s competitive dance lessons. Schwarz flatly denied the request, pointing out the mathematical absurdity of needing to dip into a child’s future inheritance when a $150,000 annual allowance was already coming through the door.
When Shayanna attempted to have Schwarz removed for his refusal, the trustee retaliated with financial receipts that exposed a pattern of rampant personal spending. The court filings detailed over $100,000 in highly questionable expenditures attributed to the allowance account:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| EXPOSED EXPENDITURES (COURT FILINGS) |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| * Clothing Purchases : $36,858 |
| * Home Goods & Decor : $39,347 (Including $12K at single|
| HomeGoods store) |
| * Online Shopping Portals : $25,577 |
| * Personal Self-Care : $11,792 (Gym, hair, and nails) |
| * Luxury Retail & Entertainment: $4,800 at Harrods / $10,000 misc. |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Shayanna fiercely denied the accusations of financial mismanagement, claiming every dollar spent ultimately benefited her children. While she managed to retain her status as conservator amidst the lack of a formal judicial restructuring, the ledger painted a vivid picture of someone utilizing an inheritance as a personal piggy bank for retail therapy.
A Contentious Reset: The Locker Room Connection
Perhaps the most scrutinized chapter of Shayanna’s post-Hernandez life was the sheer velocity with which she transitioned into a new relationship. In late 2017, less than a year after burying her “soulmate” and while still actively sporting her massive diamond engagement ring on national television tours, Shayanna moved into a Rhode Island home with Dino Gilmet.
The tabloids feasted on the details. Gilmet was an amateur boxer and entrepreneur with a checkered legal past, including a prior felony conviction for assault with a dangerous weapon and bankruptcy filings. More suspiciously, he had briefly been teammates with Aaron Hernandez during their collegiate careers at the University of Florida.
April 2017 Late 2017 May 2018 June 2018
|----------------------------|------------------------|---------------------|
Hernandez Suicide Meets Dino Gilmet Announces Pregnancy Gives Birth to
Jazelle Gilmet
The timeline was tight enough to spark fierce public blowback and baseless paternity rumors. In June 2018—just 14 months after Hernandez’s death—Shayanna gave birth to Gilmet’s daughter, Giselle. Critics pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of weeping on Dr. Phil over an unbreakable bond with a deceased fiancé while simultaneously starting a brand new family with his former locker-room associate.
The Status Quo
The manufactured chaos of the early tabloid years has settled into a quiet, lucrative status quo. As of 2026, Shayanna and Gilmet remain engaged after nearly nine years together, raising their blended family in New England. Shayanna has successfully rebranded herself away from the true-crime circuit, carving out a career as a licensed insurance broker with Symmetry Financial Group and launching a family-oriented event-planning business called Mommy and Me.
Yet, the ghost of Aaron Hernandez is never entirely absent. Shayanna still maintains his innocence, occasionally uploading photoshopped family portraits and annual tributes on the anniversary of his death to her 280,000 social media followers. Avielle, now 13, is thriving in the competitive dance circuit and accumulating victories under the high-profile Hernandez surname—a moniker she carries into a world that will never fully decouple it from the industrial park in North Attleborough.
Meanwhile, the silence between the branches of the Jenkins family remains absolute. Shaneah and Shayanna have formulated no public reconciliations, offered no olive branches, and shared no holidays. One sister chose a wealthy perpetrator; the other chose a discarded victim. The resulting divide is a permanent monument to the collateral damage caused when a professional athlete operates above the law.
