After being approached by the chaos-plagued reality show’s producers, former Vanderpump Rules star Kristen Doute is considering making a return to the show to discuss the huge cheating scandal that broke over the weekend, with the condition that jilted star Ariana Madix approves of Doute’s inclusion, People reports.
Madix’s now-ex boyfriend of nine years, West Hollywood bar owner Tom Sandoval, was accused on Friday of conducting an affair with fellow series regular, former beauty pageant queen and model Raquel Leviss.
The affair was reportedly discovered by Madix accidentally last Wednesday, when she saw a sexually explicit video of Leviss on Sandoval’s phone.
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TMZ first broke the news of the still-spiraling accusations, which have it that Sandoval and Leviss, who herself was previously engaged to firebrand Vanderpump DJ James Kennedy before returning her ring on camera in December of 2021, have allegedly been carrying on their secret relationship behind Madix’s back for “upwards of six months,” one source told People.
On Tuesday, TMZ reported that sources close to both Sandoval and Madix say that neither has any interest in reconciling.
In 2020, Doute and fellow former cast member Stassi Schroeder were fired from Vanderpump Rules when, as part of a racist prank, they reportedly called the police on a Black cast member for a crime she hadn’t committed. If Doute does indeed return to the show, it remains to be seen whether she’ll discuss the racist incident that got her fired.
But as any seasoned Vanderpump fan knows, Doute is also intimately familiar with Tom Sandoval’s alleged inclinations towards infidelity, the subject at the center of the present-day scandal.
Some of the most volatile drama that propelled the first few seasons of the show was driven by Doute’s attempts to determine whether her then-boyfriend of several years had indeed cheated on her, first with a “bottle service skank” in Vegas, and then with Madix, a then-new bartender at SUR (it stands for Sexy Unique Restaurant), the restaurant around which the show is based.
After snooping through Tom’s phone and finding suspicious communication between the two, Kristen became convinced Tom and Ariana had kissed years before, and while the two denied it for a while, eventually, they confessed.
Tom and Kristen broke up at the end of season two, which aired around 10 years ago, and Tom and Ariana got together shortly afterwards. Kristen absolutely refused to let it go.
Kristen spent, it cannot be overstated, hours and full seasons’ worth of television directing sheer hatred towards both Tom and Ariana, refusing to drop her campaign to out him as a cheater. In Season 3, she facilitated an infamous workplace confrontation between Tom and “Miami girl,” a woman who claims she and Tom slept together early on in Ariana and Tom’s relationship. (“We had sex!” “No we did not!”)
In the present day, seemingly by the hour, more and more details of Tom and Raquel’s alleged affair are emerging, which, if true, cast a whole new light on Kristen Doute’s early Vanderpump behavior.
There are claims Tom and Raquel wore matching lightning bolt necklaces to signal their love to one another. Another source told RadarOnline that Ariana believes Tom slept with Raquel in the bed he shares with Ariana in their LA home.
TMZ also claimed Tuesday that Leviss’ lawyers have sent her fellow cast members legal notices warning them against possession of a recording of an intimate video of Leviss. The video that Madix allegedly found on Sandoval’s phone, thus exposing his affair with Raquel, is “nonconsensual pornography,” TMZ reports Leviss’ lawyers said.
Kristen and Ariana’s formerly mutual hatred, it seems, had long since evolved into a mature adult friendship, and now, anti-Tom Sandovol solidarity. “I stan Ariana. This is in real time,” Doute said, in a video posted to Instagram on Saturday, planting a kiss on Madix. “I love you so much. I love you more than anything in the whole wide world, and I’ll kill people for you.”
