Vanderpump Rules star Raquel Leviss can proceed with her eavesdropping and invasion of privacy claims against co-star and ex-boyfriend Tom Sandoval after a judge ruled Friday that her lawsuit adequately alleges she considered their intimate FaceTime communications “contemporaneous” and “confidential,” meaning she never expected him to record and save them.
Sandoval had challenged the claims in a demurrer motion, arguing that Leviss made the videos herself and voluntarily shared them with him during their secret affair while he was living with his then-girlfriend Ariana Madix, another cast member of the show. According to Leviss’ complaint, Sandoval kept the NSFW recordings on his phone, where Madix retrieved them before allegedly sharing them with others in an act of “revenge porn.” (Madix, a co-defendant in the lawsuit filed last February, denies the revenge porn claim and has filed her own challenge to the lawsuit due for a hearing in July.)
On Friday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Daniel M. Crowley said he planned to uphold the eavesdropping and privacy claims against Sandoval but was open to hearing arguments. Sandoval’s lawyer, Tiffany Krog, said she believed Leviss had failed to show Sandoval intruded into a place that was private to Leviss. “This is a situation where Leviss made videos of herself with her own phone camera and intentionally shared those videos with the defendant. He was not eavesdropping,” she argued.
“Her sharing of the video was a contemporaneous sharing, as opposed to an understanding that they could be recorded, true? Isn’t the intrusion the recording?” Judge Crowley asked.
“I would say (Sandoval) merely saved a copy of these videos that Leviss was making with her own camera, pointing it at herself and sharing with the defendant,” Krog replied.
“If she were doing so with the understanding that this was going to evaporate into the ether as soon as they were viewed, that’s different from doing so with the understanding that they were being recorded and potentially subject to dissemination, isn’t it?” the judge asked, turning to Leviss’ lawyers for a response.
“There were no videos except for the ones that Sandoval recorded,” Leviss’ attorney Jason Sunshine told the court. “This was a videoconference conversation, a FaceTime conversation, and he was secretly recording them for his own personal sexual gratification. It’s clearly invasion of privacy.”
In his final decision upholding the two claims, the judge also ruled that Leviss did not include enough facts to proceed with a third claim against Sandoval for intentional infliction of emotional distress. He gave Leviss 20 days to amend her complaint to revive the claim. Leviss’ lawyers tell Rolling Stone they plan to remedy the issue by filing a new complaint that alleges that both Sandoval’s recording of the call and his subsequent “failure to secure” the intimate video were reckless acts that led to their client’s emotional distress.
“We feel like the judge got it right. Sandoval’s argument that this illegal recording, made without her consent, is not an invasion of privacy is an argument that strains credulity. It feels like the very definition of what an invasion of privacy is,” lawyer Bryan J. Freedman tells Rolling Stone.
“The court order recognizes that turning someone into an unwilling porn star violates California law,” Sunshine added, speaking after the hearing.
In her original 19-page complaint, Leviss, whose real name is Rachel Leviss, claimed that Sandoval “surreptitiously recorded” her “in a state of undress and engaged in sex acts” as they embarked on a romantic relationship purportedly behind the back of Madix while they were all still cast members on Vanderpump Rules. The lawsuit alleged that back in March 2023, Madix took the “sexually explicit videos” obtained from Sandoval’s phone and “distributed them to others” in the alleged act of “revenge porn.”
As fans of the highly addictive Bravo reality show know, the video of the Facetime call is credited with exposing Sandoval and Leviss’ affair, spawning the pop culture phenomenon known as “Scandoval” and leading to sky-high ratings for the show. According to Madix and her lawyers, she found the video on Sandoval’s phone after his device slid out of his pocket while he was performing with his cover band at a club in West Hollywood, Calif. She wrote in a previously filed declaration that someone handed her the phone for safekeeping and that her “woman’s intuition” led her to check the device, which she easily accessed because she already knew the code.
Madix says she was “shocked” to find a recording of the call while scanning the phone alone in a bathroom stall. “I hurriedly took out my own phone and made two recordings of the Facetime video. Prior to that moment, I considered (Leviss) a friend and did not know that she and Mr. Sandoval were having an affair,” Madix wrote.
In her lawsuit, Leviss said she found the story of how Madix obtained the video suspicious, but either way, she believes Madix shared the videos with members of the Vanderpump Rules cast as well as people working for the show. “Leviss has suffered grave emotional, psychological, financial and reputational harm as a result of Madix’s distribution, dissemination, and publicization of the illicit videos,” the lawsuit said. Leviss said she was “humiliated and villainized” thanks to the actions of Sandoval and Madix. She accused the pair of acting with “malice,” meaning they should be held liable for punitive damages “to deter such conduct in the future.”
“To be clear, Leviss has repeatedly acknowledged that her actions were morally objectionable and hurtful to Madix. She has offered numerous apologies. There is more to the story, however,” Leviss’ lawsuit said. “Lost in the mix was that Leviss was a victim of the predatory and dishonest behavior of an older man, who recorded sexually explicit videos of her without her knowledge or consent, which were then distributed, disseminated and discussed publicly by a scorned woman seeking vengeance, catalyzing the scandal. Leviss ultimately checked herself into a mental health facility and remained there for three months while Bravo, Evolution and the cast milked the interest her excoriation had peaked.”
Leviss further claimed that she was in a “vulnerable state” while filming for the show and that she was “encouraged” by producers to drink alcohol. Leviss said in her suit that she started sleeping with Sandoval in August 2022, and she claimed that Madix knew about it before she found the video on Sandoval’s phone. She alleges Vanderpump Rules was on the verge of being canceled around this time, as prior plots had “grown stale,” and that Sandoval and Madix “had every incentive” to “leverage” the affair into “the storyline that Vanderpump Rules so desperately needed.”
Lawyers for Sandoval did not immediately reply to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment Friday.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
