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‘Frivolous’: ‘Vanderpump Rule’s Alum Raquel Leviss Slams Ariana Madix Over Her Attempt to Escape Invasion of Privacy Lawsuit
Vanderpump Rules star Raquel Leviss fired back at her ex costar Ariana Madix’s plea to be dismissed from her shocking lawsuit over invasion of privacy and revenge porn, In Touch can exclusively reveal.
According to court documents obtained by In Touch, Raquel, 29, filed an opposition to Ariana’s recent motion seeking dismissal of all claims against her. Raquel [real name: Rachel Leviss] sued Vanderpump Rules star Tom Sandoval and Ariana, 39, earlier this year.
Raquel explained she had an affair with Tom while he was dating Ariana. She claimed Tom recorded explicit FaceTime chats they had without her consent. Ariana found the videos on Tom’s phone. Raquel claimed Ariana texted her after finding them telling her she was “DEAD TO” her.
Raquel said she believed Tom and Ariana shared the video with third parties.
At the time, Raquel’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, said, “This lawsuit is squarely about illegal behavior and those who traffic in it and enable it. Rachel has apologized for her part in an affair. That’s not a crime. Tom and Ariana are alleged here to have engaged in criminal acts. They then doubled down and used those actions to shame, bully, belittle, and intentionally try to destroy Rachel’s mental health.”
He added, “The law makes it clear that recording someone without their consent and distributing that illegal recording is punishable by law; however, doing so while knowingly enticing them to engage in sexual acts deserves the harshest of penalties allowable under the law.”
Tom denied all allegations of wrongdoing in the suit.
His lawyer accused Raquel of bringing the suit to stay relevant. His attorney called her lawsuit a “thinly veiled attempt to extend her fame and to rebrand herself as the victim instead of the other woman while denigrating her former friend [Ariana] as a ‘scorned woman’ and her former paramour [Tom] as ‘predatory.’”
Ariana asked the court to dismiss her from the suit. She denied ever sharing the video with anyone. “I did not send the videos to anyone else. Nor did I share, display, or show the videos to anyone else,” Ariana added. “To be clear, I only saw the video of [Raquel] masturbating in places secluded from others.”
Now, Raquel’s lawyer asked that Ariana’s motion be denied. They called her filing “frivolous.”
They added, “Indeed, the conduct at issue is not Madix’s exercise of free speech but instead her unlawful theft and distribution of sexually explicit videos of [Raquel.].”
“Although Madix attempts to recast the lawsuit as an attack on her right to speak freely on matters of public concern, it is no such thing. Madix does not have a free speech right to break into the phone of her boyfriend and siphon away nonconsensual pornographic materials. Nor does she have a legal right to disseminate such material to menace and terrorize,” the motion read.
“If all Madix had done was angrily confront [Raquel] for betraying her trust or publicly discuss her discovery of [Tom’s] affair, she would not be a defendant in this lawsuit. But that is not what is at issue. Her actions went well beyond protected speech, and her anger — however understandable — provides no legal cover for lashing out at Plaintiff in violation of multiple criminal laws,” her lawyer added.
Raquel filed a shocking declaration with her motion.
She said, “Sandoval never asked my permission to record them, and I was not aware he was doing so. Had he asked, I would have said no. If I had known he had done so anyway, I would have been furious and demanded he delete them. Under no circumstances would I have consented to being recorded naked and masturbating.”
She said on March 1, 2023, she received a series of text messages from Ariana while she was out with costar Scheana Shay. She said, “Madix sent me three messages. The first two were video recordings, and the third stated: ‘you are DEAD TO ME[.]’ Immediately, I looked at the video recordings, which did not look familiar, and I saw that they depicted me undressed and masturbating, with Sandoval’s face visible in the comer of the screen. I realized that these recordings depicted my private, intimate video calls with Sandoval, which he had evidently recorded without my knowledge or consent. These particular recordings were captured in or around February 2023 while I was in a private residence. Given Sandoval’s apparent practice of secretly recording me, I have every reason to believe that he captured additional sexually compromising videos and/or images of me.”
She added, “None of these intimate conversations were part of Vanderpump Rules. They were private communications reflecting a clandestine affair; neither their contents nor their existence were ever supposed to see the light of day. I had every expectation of privacy and remain appalled that Sandoval has put me in this position.”
Raquel said, “I reacted to Madix’s messages with shock and alarm. Because the recordings were sent from her phone, not Sandoval’s, I knew that she had somehow taken possession of them. This made an already difficult situation decidedly worse. From the tone and tenor of Madix’s messages, it was clear that she was furiously angry. Given the circumstances, I was not surprised at her anger, but I was extremely alarmed and fearful about her intentions given the course of conduct she had evidently embarked on.”
She continued, “It is not just that Madix had discovered the recordings and confronted me about their contents. If that were all that happened, Madix would not have been named in this lawsuit. But that is not all that happened. In her own sworn testimony, Madix acknowledges that she stole and disseminated them. She distributed the recordings from their original source on Sandoval’s phone to herself and to me at a minimum.”
“Without conducting discovery on third parties, it is difficult for me to determine whether Madix distributed the videos more widely than she acknowledges. However, there is every reason to believe that she showed the recordings to others and may have sent them to others as well. It is undisputed, however, that as a result of Madix’s actions, the circle of possession widened from Sandoval alone to Sandoval, Madix, and me,” she added.
A judge has yet to rule on Ariana’s motion.
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