Wow, Rachel Leviss has gotten close enough to look accountability in the eye… and run the other way!
During this week’s episode of her Rachel Goes Rogue podcast, the reality star formerly known as Raquel answered some fan questions — and ended up leaning hard into the narrative that she and Ariana Madix are both the victims of an evil mastermind of a man. At least, that was kind of our read!
Related: Rachel Leviss Puts 1-Year Moratorium On Dating
She’s said for months Tom Sandoval talked to her (and also to bestie Tom Schwartz) about telling a version of the cheating story that didn’t look quite so bad during the Vanderpump Rules Season 10 reunion. So how did he coach her into “sticking to the story” he’d concocted? Easy — by being her only lifeline:
“The last five minutes of Season 10, you see me break down because I want to come clean and I’m still holding things back because I don’t want to betray Tom because he is the one person I have left. In my world, it seemed like he was the only person. He got me. He understood me. He was there for me in all of this time — or so I believed.”
Rachel has also claimed she wanted to tell Ariana about the cheating right away — but Sandoval told her not to. She continued:
“[Sandoval] asked me to lie when he knew that I wasn’t a good liar and I expressed to him that I don’t like lying. He put me in a really bad position with my friendships, and this placement of being on this international reality TV show… my reputation was on the line.”
She wasn’t a good liar, but again — she did keep a full-on relationship with him secret from her so-called friend Ariana’s back for seven months. That means successfully lying for a year to the girlfriend (who was also her friend), to viewers of the season, AND to the show’s producers and crew, who were apparently clueless.
But she wasn’t doing anything wrong because he was pulling the strings their entire relationship!
The 29-year-old explained how she first realized how she’d been the one manipulated the whole time — just like Ariana — during a session with her therapist. She explained how she was feeling guilty about betraying Sandoval during her VPR interviews:
“And my therapist was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — but didn’t Tom betray you first?’”
By… cheating on her with his girlfriend? No, she’s saying she now feels he manipulated her all along by seducing her when she was still vulnerable after her breakup with James Kennedy. She explained:
“He knew I was going through this heartbreak, and I’ve heard him say on his interviews ‘Oh, Raquel really was coming into her own.’ And that’s what attracted him to me.”
That sounds like it means he was attracted to her after she shed her vulnerability, but we guess she doesn’t see it that way? She says now she looks back with nothing but fury:
“I’m like, ‘You a**hole. You could have just let me be. Like, let me live. Why can’t you cheer me on as a friend?’”
Well, it certainly sounds like she’s done taking any accountability for her role in engaging in an affair with her friend’s longtime boyfriend. After all, if she was his victim all along, she really didn’t do anything wrong at all!
Obviously Ariana was a victim, too, but just of Sandoval. She says he used her “mental health against her”:
“It’s very manipulative and messed up I think he could have gone about it in a much more mature way.”
Well, no argument with that. But someone else could have been more mature, too. Obviously Rachel is a lot younger, and there are a lot of things to consider here. We aren’t going to argue that Sandoval didn’t tell her not to come clean, that he wasn’t more responsible than anyone for what happened. But is Rachel actually being really unhealthy by dodging all responsibility for her part in Scandoval?
What do YOU think, Perezcious relationship experts? Is she right that the whole affair is 100% on Tom? Or has she slipped into a space where she’s no longer accepting any of the blame? Let us know in the comments (below)!
[Image via Peacock/YouTube/Tom Sandoval/Instagram.]