One observer’s take. Some Vanderpump Rules viewers thought Tom Sandoval was jealous when he saw Raquel Leviss kiss Tom Schwartz, but Lala Kent believes something very different was going through his mind.
“I didn’t take it as, like, a jealousy thing,” the Give Them Lala Beauty founder, 32, said during the Wednesday, April 19, episode of her “Give Them Lala” podcast. “I took it as like Andy [Cohen] said — gleeful [that attention was drawn away from their affair]. Because everyone was fixated on it.”
The Utah native was referring to the April 12 episode of Pump Rules, which depicted the aftermath of Leviss and Schwartz’s makeout at Scheana Shay‘s August 2022 wedding to Brock Davies. In one scene, Sandoval’s then-girlfriend, Ariana Madix, yelled at the bartender, 40, to stop screaming the word “Raquel” in her ears at a pre-wedding party.
“It’s like the grossness gets him off,” Kent said on Wednesday. “Where it’s like, ‘Oh, my girl, we’re f–king behind the scenes and now she’s making out with my best friend.’ It’s so sick.”
Earlier in the episode, Schwartz, 40, and Leviss, 28, kissed at Shay’s white party while in Cancun, Mexico. When the group moved on to a welcome event inside the hotel, Sandoval told Madix, 37, that he was yelling Leviss’ name because she’d just hooked up with Schwartz.
Sandoval then handed Leviss what he claimed was Schwartz’s room key. Seeing his action, Madix responded, “Tom, get the f–k out of here. … Tom, you’re the worst. Get out of here.”
Us Weekly confirmed in March that Madix and Sandoval had called it quits after the TomTom co-owner was caught having an affair with Leviss. The former couple had been dating since 2014.
During an interview with Howie Mandel earlier this month, Sandoval claimed that he and the former pageant queen hooked up for the first time in early August 2022 but didn’t begin their full-on affair until later in the year. Some of their costars, however, believe their relationship was happening during the trip to Mexico.
When asked on Wednesday whether Sandoval and Leviss hooked up during the wedding events, Kent replied, “Will they admit that? No. But I also think that there’s a lot that they’re not sharing.”
Sandoval, for his part, told Mandel, 67, that he tried to push his Schwartz & Sandy’s cofounder toward Leviss amid Schwartz’s divorce from Katie Maloney. “I thought [Raquel] was so awesome. She’s so kind, she’s smart, she’s witty, she’s beautiful,” the Missouri native explained. “I was like, ‘Schwartz, dude, what do you think of Raquel? Dude, she’s freaking awesome.'”
The Tom Sandoval & The Most Extras frontman went on to say that he was a little envious when his BFF kissed Leviss at the wedding, but he wasn’t upset. “I was a little jealous, like, a little bit,” the former SUR employee recalled, noting that Schwartz didn’t yet know his business partner had hooked up Leviss earlier that month. “But I was not questioning our connection and I was more proud of them for saying, ‘F–k you’ to [our castmates who were upset about a potential romance between Schwartz and Raquel].”
The Fancy AF Cocktails coauthor claimed he spoke to Schwartz about Leviss after they returned home from Mexico and asked whether their kiss meant anything. “[Schwartz said] it meant nothing,” Sandoval recalled. “So then I told him what happened.”
Leviss hasn’t yet commented on the timeline of events that led to her affair with Sandoval, telling TMZ in March that she and her costar aren’t “labeling” their relationship at this point. Earlier this month, a rep for Leviss confirmed that the California native checked herself into a mental health facility.
“Raquel and her family decided before the relationship was discovered that she would enter a voluntary facility for mental health counseling,” the rep told Us on Friday, April 14. “Raquel had planned to admit herself before the VPR reunion was taped on March 23. She was scheduled to go in pre-reunion but decided she wanted to finish her filming commitment. Bravo and production were aware and in support of her journey towards better mental health.”
