Ariana Madix broke her silence on Tom Sandoval‘s problematic commentary about the widespread attention surrounding his cheating scandal with Rachel “Raquel” Leviss.
“I was just blown away by how anybody could say something so awful,” Madix, 38, told the Los Angeles Times in a profile published on Thursday, February 29.
Earlier this month, Sandoval, 41, was asked why he thought his infidelity became so big in the media. (News broke in March 2023 that Sandoval and Madix called it quits after nearly a decade of dating due to his affair with their now-former costar Leviss, 29.)
“I’m not a pop-culture historian really but I witnessed the O.J. Simpson thing and George Floyd and all these big things, which is really weird to compare this to that, I think, but do you think in a weird way it’s a little bit the same?” Sandoval told New York Times Magazine on February 20.
In a separate portion of the interview, Sandoval added: “I feel like I got more hate than Danny Masterson. And he’s a convicted rapist.”
Masterson, 47, is currently serving out his 30-year sentence for rape while Simpson, 76, was famously acquitted on charges of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Floyd, meanwhile, inspired Black Lives Matter protests around the world after former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered him during an arrest in 2020.
Madix, for her part, questioned Bravo’s response to Sandoval’s controversial behavior, telling the L.A. Times, “It was interesting how much Bravo was trying to cover for him.”
According to the New York Magazine journalist behind the Sandoval profile, Irina Aleksander, a representative from Bravo was not present during her initial conversation with Sandoval. Representatives for the network later allegedly attempted to prevent Aleksander from speaking with Sandoval again by offering other stars from Vanderpump Rules. When Aleksander ultimately reunited with Sandoval for another conversation, a publicist was present.
Sandoval issued an apology hours after his comments made headlines. “My intentions behind the comments I made in New York Times Magazine were to explain the level of national media attention my affair received. The comparison was inappropriate and ignorant. I’m incredibly sorry and embarrassed,” he wrote via Instagram Stories.
Ahead of Madix’s profile, Sandoval addressed the drama again, saying in a pre-recorded introduction to his “Everybody Loves Tom” podcast on Thursday, “Before we get into this podcast I wanted to again apologize for the comments I made in the New York Times article. I stupidly was trying to make a comparison at the absurd amount of national media that my affair received. And the comparison I made was stupid and ignorant and I’m really embarrassed. And I’m really really sorry.”
Sandoval went on to slam his separate feature in Interview Magazine. (He posed for several photos with cake in an article that ran one day after his NYT Magazine interview went live.)
“They’re like, ‘We want to do a thing where you have cakes.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t know,'” Sandoval added on Thursday before joking that he was on an “indefinite” press hiatus. “[The] Interview Magazine [piece] wasn’t grilling me about the show, so I accepted it with open arms. I didn’t really like any of the cakes. They all tasted like s—tty in their own way.”
