At long last, Rachel Leviss is telling her side of #Scandoval. In the first episode of her new podcast, Rachel Goes Rogue, the Vanderpump Rules star, who became a tabloid fixture last year after her affair with co-star Tom Sandoval, spills on the “bad” and “embarrassing” first time they hooked up.
On her podcast, which debuted Monday morning, Leviss’ producers asked her whether she had made the first move on Sandoval, as he recently claimed in a podcast interview of his own.
“We can get into it,” Leviss replied, before diving into the story. According to her, after a day of filming the show at SUR (Sexy Unique Restaurant) with owner Lisa Vanderpump, she met up with Sandoval at the bar. He suggested they go to The Abbey, a nearby bar in West Hollywood, instead of joining their coworkers at Beaches, where everyone else was planning to link up.
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“I think then, I was starting to feel a certain way,” Leviss said, describing her growing attraction to Sandoval, who was in a relationship with Ariana Madix at the time. “The attention he would give me felt good.”
After having drinks at The Abbey, Leviss said she offered Sandoval a ride home, which he accepted.
“We get to his house, and we’re sitting in my car, just chatting for 20 minutes,” Leviss said, adding that cameras weren’t present. “And then he’s like, ‘Do you wanna come in for a nightcap?’ And I was like, ‘Ugh, twist my arm, why don’t you. Yeah, of course I do.’”
But Sandoval, as Madix also confirmed in Season 10, had locked himself out of the home he shared (and still shares) with Madix that night. Madix was “sleeping upstairs,” Leviss said, as her podcast producers groaned in response.
“He’s like, ‘Oh I’m locked out, let me try the back door, come with me around back,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool,’” Leviss said. “We go in the back, and the sliding door isn’t unlocked, so he was like, ‘Well, we’ve got the fire pit here,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, the fire pit’s cool, we can just keep talking.’ We’re chatting, and then he says, ‘You know what the best thing about this pool is?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And then he says, ‘That it’s heated.’”
Leviss says she suggested that they get in. “I took my jeans off, and I had this corset top on, so I left that on, and I was in my underwear, and I went in his pool,” she said. “And it was heated.”
Sandoval joined her in the pool wearing his boxers, she said.
“He came swimming over to me and he was like, ‘Turn that down,’” Leviss said, referring to the music she had started playing on her phone. “He looked at me a certain way, and then he like, grabbed me, spun me, and kissed me. I was surprised, but like, happy. Ugh, god. So bad, so embarrassing.”
She continued, “I knew it was wrong; Tom knew it was wrong. Because right after Tom kissed me, he sat on the stair of the pool and he was like, hands on his face. His mind must have been running a million miles a minute contemplating what to do.
“I was like, ‘I should go,’” she said. “So I got my towel, dried off, I got my pants on. And he was like, ‘No no no, don’t go, just sit down.’ So we moved to the couch by the fire pit and he was like, ‘Hang on, I just need to think for a second. I just don’t know what to do right now, because I really like you, but, you know.’ I was like, ‘OK, well, I feel weird sitting here. Would you rather go talk about this in my car?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’ So, we go to my car.”
“What happened in there? Did you hook up?” a producer asked Leviss.
“Yeah, we did,” she said.
“Everything?” the producer followed up.
“It was very bad,” Leviss replied.
Her producers allowed that the situation was “blurry.”
“Does it even matter who made the first move?” Leviss asked. “Because it was like, I feel like I’m in this, like, romantic...I feel swept off my feet, I feel so infatuated and like, loved.”
Earlier in the episode, Leviss told her producers that she’s no longer in contact with Sandoval and doesn’t want to be with him, but that part of the reason why she didn’t return for Season 11 of Vanderpump was because she didn’t want to risk falling back under his sway.
Sandoval “could get in my ear,” Leviss explained.
