Former Vanderpump Rules star and current Love Island USA host Ariana Madix has lost her bid to escape the invasion of privacy and revenge porn lawsuit filed by her former castmate Raquel Leviss against Madix and her ex-boyfriend, Tom Sandoval.
A California appellate court sided with Leviss on Wednesday, refusing to overturn a lower court’s ruling from July 2024 that found Madix’s alleged conduct, as outlined in Leviss’ February 2024 lawsuit, was neither protected speech nor a matter of public interest.
The claims against Madix center on allegations she improperly obtained and shared sexually explicit videos of Leviss that she found on Sandoval’s phone. In a prior declaration filed in the case, Madix acknowledged she secretly accessed Sandoval’s phone without his knowledge or permission and copied the FaceTime videos of Leviss while inside a women’s bathroom stall.
Madix has said she only sent snippets of the intimate video directly to Leviss the night she discovered the recordings. She said she was distraught and wanted to confront her VPR co-star over her alleged affair with Sandoval conducted behind Madix’s back. The affair later became a major storyline on the reality TV show and was widely dubbed “Scandoval.”
In its July 2024 ruling, the lower court found that Madix’s conduct was unlawful and therefore fell outside the protections of California’s anti-SLAPP law, which is intended to quickly dismiss lawsuits that threaten to chill protected free speech.
Lawyers for Madix, Leviss, and Sandoval did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment. Leviss’ lawsuit has been halted for more than two years while Madix’s appeal was pending. A status hearing in the case is set for Aug. 11.
In her lawsuit, Leviss, whose legal name is Rachel Leviss, claimed Sandoval made the “intimate” recordings without her consent, and that Madix retrieved and shared them with others in an act of “revenge porn.” Madix vehemently denies sharing them with anyone other than Leviss.
“I did not send the videos to anyone else. Nor did I share, display, or show the videos to anyone else,” Madix wrote in a sworn declaration filed in 2024 with her failed motion to strike the claims against her. She recalled sending the videos with a text that read, “you’re dead to me,” and included a copy of the text chain with Leviss as an exhibit. “I did not send the videos to anyone else. Nor did I share, display, or show the videos to anyone else,” Madix wrote. She claimed that Sandoval “forcibly grabbed” her phone a short time later and deleted the videos.
Madix said that “minutes later,” she texted her friend Logan Cochran about what happened and told him she no longer had the videos. “Tom took my phone and deleted them,” she wrote, according to a reproduction of the text chain included as another exhibit.
Madix was sued with claims of revenge porn, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Sandoval is also facing the privacy and emotional distress claims in addition to a separate claim for alleged eavesdropping related to the initial recording. Sandoval filed a separate challenge to the lawsuit that also failed. He has called the claims against him “vague” and deficient, adding that Leviss’ own conduct was “open and ostentatious” in the context of a voluntary reality TV show scrutinizing her private life.
As fans of the trio’s former Bravo reality show know, the video of the FaceTime call at the center of the lawsuit was credited with exposing Sandoval and Leviss’ affair, leading to sky-high ratings for the show. According to Madix, she found the video on Sandoval’s phone after his device allegedly slid out of his pocket while he was performing with his cover band at a club in West Hollywood, California.
She wrote in her 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 said she was “shocked” to find a recording of the call while scanning the phone alone in the bathroom stall. “I hurriedly took out my own phone and made two recordings of the FaceTime video. Prior to that moment, I considered plaintiff a friend and did not know that she and Mr. Sandoval were having an affair,” Madix wrote.
