Leave It to Rachel Leviss to Rub Salt in the #Scandoval Wound

On Monday, Rachel (formerly Raquel) Leviss debuted her podcast, Rachel Goes Rogue, and go rogue, she most certainly did.

Fresh off an extended stay in a treatment center for trauma therapy, the former Vanderpump Rules star—and center of the pop culture phenomenon known as #Scandoval—began her new chapter sans reality television by revealing the never-before-heard details of her first hookup with Tom Sandoval. Why? Well, because her ex and aspiring rock star just told his own podcast listeners that she initiated their affair.

“We can get into it,” Leviss told her producers, referencing how the former philanderers got started. I’ll paraphrase: Apparently, Leviss and Sandoval had just finished a day of filming and were set to go to a West Hollywood watering hole, Beaches, with their coworkers to blow off some steam. Instead, Sandoval suggested The Abbey—arguably, the country’s best-known (and densely populated) gay bar—but only to her.

“The attention he would give me felt good,” Leviss recalled. Then, after a few drinks at The Abbey, Leviss offered Sandoval a ride home to the house he (still!) shares with his now ex-partner, Ariana Madix.

“We get to his house, and we’re sitting in my car, just chatting for 20 minutes,” Leviss continued. “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.’” In fairness to Leviss, we’ve all been there. Unfortunately, any empathy I have for this situation ends right here.

“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.’” That’s right. This dog pulled the old “my pool is heated, let’s go for a night swim” routine.

Naturally, Leviss relented and the pair stripped down to their undergarments. Then, she claims, Sandoval swam over to her—I’m getting the ick just typing this—and puckered up.

“He looked at me a certain way, and then he like, grabbed me, spun me, and kissed me,” she said. “I was surprised, but like, happy. Ugh, god. So bad, so embarrassing.” Immediately, Sandoval allegedly suffered a momentary crisis of consciousness and “sat on the stair of the pool” with his head in his hands.

“‘I just don’t know what to do right now, because I really like you, but, you know,’” Leviss recalled him saying. “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.” “Here,” being the backyard of the home in which Madix was unknowingly asleep, of course. So, they went to Leviss’ car parked on the street outside. Much better!

“What happened in there? Did you hook up?” a producer then asks Leviss, who confirms they did.

“Everything?” the producer clarified. “We did everything…it was very bad,” Leviss responded. What was bad exactly is never specified but let’s be clear: someone who cosplays as Freddie Mercury for half-empty venues is not bringing a woman to orgasm.

Basically, the episode—regardless of its giggle-inducing claims—confirmed what we’ve known all along: both Leviss and Sandoval were culpable in the most explosive reality television scandal of 2023. Thus, it makes perfect sense as to why they’re both currently trying to offload the accountability on the other via shitty podcasts.