Vanderpump Rules Finale: The #Scandoval Is No Match For Ariana Maddix

Wednesday’s explosive Vanderpump Rules finale opens in medias res, with a clip from Andy Cohen introducing Scheana Shay and Raquel Leviss on the March 1st episode of Watch What Happens Live! He notes that it’s the first day of Women’s History Month. The chill of those words hangs in the air as Cohen asks Shay and Leviss which Tom— Schwartz or Sandoval, VPR’s best friend bro-duo——is hotter. Leviss’s answer—a coyly quiet “Sandoval?” —seemed innocuous at the time, even like she was choosing the lesser of two evils. But within 48 hours, TMZ would break the news that Leviss had actually been engaged in a months-long affair with Sandoval, even though he’d been dating their co-star Ariana Maddix for nearly a decade. A #Scandoval was born.

Luckily for VPR fans, as soon as news broke of Leviss and Sandoval’s affair, Bravo sprang into action, extending the season to capture the drama firsthand. That extra hour is a testament to the power of keeping the cameras rolling, capturing the fallout of a truly shocking betrayal. “Are you ready to talk about this?” a producer asks Sandoval and Maddix, seen in split screen in their separate confessionals. “No,”  they both say in unison. 

Soon enough, though, Maddix and Sandoval are chronicling exactly how their relationship ended, their interviews interspersed with footage of the night it all went down. According to both parties, Sandoval and his cover band—yes, he has a cover band—were performing at TomTom, the bar he co-owns with Schwartz, when Sandoval’s phone fell out of his pocket. Someone handed it to Maddix, unaware that they were giving her the key to Pandora’s box. “Call it a woman’s intuition, call it lightbulb, whatever,” Maddix says. “Literally in that moment I went, ‘I need to look at this.’” 

What she found was an incriminating screen recording of Leviss, one of her “best friends,” and Sandoval, her boyfriend. “I learned on Wednesday night that there are evil evil people in this world, and sometimes they are the people that are closest to you,” says Maddix. 

We then jump to the next day. Maddix sits in the house she shares with Sandoval in Valley Village, decked out in a dark sweatshirt, sports bra, and black jeans. She looks as if she’s in mourning. “I hate him, but I’m very quickly becoming completely indifferent,” she tells a friend named Meredith as the camera pans to a Lego portrait of the pair that hangs on the wall. “He gives me the ick.” It’s soon revealed that the ick is, in fact, in the house with her. Sandoval is seen brushing his teeth, and then emerges from the bathroom to join Ariana in their open concept living room kitchen. “Do you want anything?” Sandoval asks, half-heartedly. “For you to die,” she says. “Well that’s inevitable,” he replies. 

This exchange is just the tip of the iceberg. “Every time I try to apologize to you it just makes you more angry,” says Sandoval, becoming a frontrunner for the gaslighter of the year award. Maddix harnesses her righteous anger as she takes Tom back to the beginning of their relationship. “I loved you then when you had nothing,” she says. “You get a little bit of money, a little bar, a band. You want someone to just gas you up. That girl is searching for identity in men. She has no identity of her own.”

The girl is, of course, 28-year old Raquel Leviss—a former pageant queen and employee at VPR home base SUR who was engaged to their castmate James Kennedy until dramatically breaking up with him during Vanderpump Rules’s season 9 reunion. Sandoval, now north of 40 despite what he may lead you to believe, claims that he and Leviss were friends who forged a connection over the course of the season because—in another veiled attempt to blame Maddix for their relationship woes—he needed “ something that I wasn’t getting here.”

“I don’t give a fuck about fucking Raquel,” Maddix screams with all of her might. “Your friendship is fucking bull shit.” She’s right. Sandoval tries to yell back that he and Leviss “actually were respecting each other and giving each other confidence” during their affair, and that he and Maddix had no sex life. But Maddix has the ultimate trump card: “So fuck my friend, get your mojo back,” she says. That’s precisely what he did. 

Somehow, their conversation devolves from there, with Sandoval claiming that he tried to break up with Maddix a few weeks before. “If that was true, you should have never been in my bed after that night,” Maddix says. “You have to end it. You have to leave. Don’t be a fucking coward.”

Then she twists the knife further: “You’re worth nothing,” she says, whispering the last word. “I want you to feel that deep in your soul. I want you to hear those words from the woman who stood by you and loved you and was ready to build the rest of my life around you. Hear my words, and know that that’s how I feel about you. I regret ever loving you.” 

Sandoval seems less focused on her word than he is on getting himself to eke out a tear on camera. He manages to do it, letting two roll down his face without wiping them away. But cinematic as they may be, his tears are empty in emotional weight, as is his final salvo to Ariana: “I never thought this would happen,” says the man who is responsible for all of this happening. ChatGPT could never write a scene like this.