Planning for the future? Tom Sandoval claimed Ariana Madix brought up freezing her eggs after he tried to call it quits amid his affair with Raquel Leviss.
The 40-year-old Bravo star shared his side of the cheating scandal during the Tuesday, April 11, episode of the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast. While breaking down the timeline of the end of his relationship with Madix, 37, Sandoval alleged that the pair had already split before she found evidence of his infidelity in March.
“We didn’t tell anybody, but she knew,” he claimed. “She was trying to, like convince me not to be broken up … but that was not the case. She asked me that day as we were leaving about, like — because we had talked about fertilizing [her] eggs, which I never did. She was like, ‘So, what do you think about doing a sperm check to fertilize my eggs?’ And I’m like, ‘What? We’re broken up.’ … I was like, ‘We’ll talk about this later, I gotta go do my show.'”
Us Weekly confirmed on March 3 that the Vanderpump Rules stars had called it quits. However, Sandoval argued on the podcast that he and Madix broke up on Valentine’s Day — but she was “fully in denial” about it.
“It scared me. It really scared me,” he said. “That’s why, like you say, ‘Why didn’t you just break up with her then?’ It’s because of the threat of … self-sabotaging. And you know how f–king — how much that hurts me?”
Sandoval alleged that he “had already broken up with” the Florida native “two weeks” before she found his phone at his show and learned of the affair. “I told her, ‘Listen, we don’t have to post anything on social media. Let’s talk through this.’ … Like, ‘We can keep this between us,'” he recalled. “Obviously she was very upset, she freaking punched me and all this s–t.”
According to the former SUR bartender, Madix was “in denial” about ending their relationship. “I sit down to talk with her again and she’s like, ‘I’m not letting you leave me. You’re gonna have to force me out of this relationship,'” he claimed, noting that he expressed concerns about his ability to “be faithful” to his then-girlfriend of nearly 10 years but hadn’t yet confessed to his affair with Leviss. “She’s like, ‘If you break up with me, you will effectively be ending my life.’ … I didn’t know what to do. She was completely in denial and not accepting it.”
Sandoval continued to assert that he and Madix “weren’t in a relationship” by the time she discovered that he had been cheating. “Close friends did see the issues [in our relationship],” he claimed. “I don’t know, I think [the breakup] was just really shocking.”
Bravo cameras were picked up again after news broke of the cheating scandal in March, continuing to film scenes for season 10. The cast gathered to tape the reunion special on March 23 — and Sandoval faced the heat from his ex in front of their costars.
“I have never seen such a ruthless denunciation of two human beings in my life,” Tom Schwartz teased on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen earlier this month. “Ariana had a fire in her. I mean, she eviscerated those two and I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t know she had it in her.”
Pump Rules alum Jax Taylor, for his part, alleged that Sandoval refused to own up to his mistakes. “From what I heard, he was going in on [Ariana] and deflecting,” he claimed on his “When Reality Hits With Jax and Brittany” podcast after the taping. “He didn’t just tuck his tail between his legs and say, ‘You know what? I screwed up. I made a bad decision and I am sorry.'”
