Scandoval couldn’t come to an end without one final epic merch drop.
Ariana Madix fired back at ex Tom Sandoval after he took a dig at their sex life during the final part of the Vanderpump Rules reunion, which aired on Wednesday, June 7.
When asked whether Sandoval, 40, had slept with anyone else amid his affair with Raquel Leviss, Ariana, 37, who started dating him in 2014, quipped: “You know who he did sleep with after him and Raquel started sleeping together? Me.”
“She kept her T-shirt on. It was really hot,” Sandoval responded.
While Lala Kent called him a “f—king d—k” on the show, Ariana took to Instagram in real-time to drop a shirt that reads: “F—k Me in This T-Shirt.” The tee is being sold through Ariana and Katie Maloney’s upcoming sandwich shop, Something About Her, for $34.99.
The three-part reunion documented Ariana slamming both Sandoval and Raquel, 28, for their months-long affair. Throughout the episodes, the TomTom co-owner doubled down on his suggestion that one of the reasons he cheated was because the couple wasn’t happy or having sex regularly.
“Tom made the comment that he did about Ariana being intimate, but, you know, her wearing a T-shirt and how that wasn’t hot — I think he was exhausted at that point,” Vanderpump Rules executive producer Alex Baskin told Variety in a video published on Wednesday. “And I think he felt like he’d taken a lot of incoming fire. And I think he made a really regrettable, stupid comment that was bad at the time and then actually has played even worse than I remember it, which is saying something, because we all, like, you know, gasped when we saw it.”
Baskin added: “He kind of amplified everything that everyone thought anyway, and I think instead of people feeling bad for him in some way even though he, you know, put himself in this situation, I think that made him seem like an asshole.”
During the same video, Andy Cohen noted that Ariana was “poised” as she navigated her “rage” during the reunion — “She was pretty amazing” — but he couldn’t say the same for Sandoval.
“This was a redemptionless situation for him, I think really. In terms of how he did … Not great,” he said. “He was a shell of himself, really. He was shaking. I’ve never seen him in that shape. And that was a bad line.”
The special concluded with Raquel coming clean about new details of the affair via a confessional interview after confirming that Sandoval encouraged her to lie to their costars about the timeline of their romance.
“[Sandoval] feels like it would be less hurtful to say that, you know, this wasn’t going on for so long. [But] the second time was actually during Mexico [at Scheana Shay and Brock Davies’ August 2022 wedding],” she admitted. “He is my one person that I do have and if I just went and betrayed him then I’d really have nobody.”
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