Tom Sandoval, 39, gave his side of the story when it comes to his shocking cheating scandal with Raquel Leviss, in a new interview. The Vanderpump Rules star appeared on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast on Apr. 11, and one of the big claims he made was that his ex Ariana Madix, 37, allegedly “punched” him after he initiated their split on Valentine’s Day of this year. That also makes their actual breakup two weeks before his affair news went public at the beginning of March, which debunks the original claim that Ariana broke up with him once she found out about the affair around that same time.
“So obviously she was very upset, she punched me and all this sh*t,” he said on the episode. “But after she calmed down, we started talking, and a couple days later I sit down and talk to her again and she’s like, ‘I’m not letting u leave me. You’re gonna have to force me out of this relationship.’ I was like, ‘I don’t think I can be faithful in a relationship with you right now.'”
“I hadn’t told her about Raquel yet but I was saying all these things,” he continued. “She’s like, ‘If you break up with me, you will effectively be ending my life.’ And I didn’t know what to do. She was completely in denial and not accepting it.”
Tom went on to say he then went to Miami, FL without her and they “didn’t talk the entire time” and “weren’t in a relationship.” When he got home, he claimed they were distant. “We weren’t kissing or anything like that. Nothing was happening,” he said.
After explaining he and Ariana went to couples therapy and he tried to break up with her during a session, he described how the actual breakup in Feb. went down. “I actually did break up with her on Valentine’s day. So I had already broken up with her two weeks [before the affair news broke],” he explained. “I told her, ‘We don’t need to put anything on social media.’ We were on hold for a big brand together. So I was like, ‘We can keep this between us like we always have kept stuff between us and figure out a way to navigate this that helps us both out and makes it easier.'”
“But we were broken up,” he added, referring to the time his affair with Raquel, which was reportedly going on since last summer, went public. “She knew we were broken up. We didn’t tell anybody, but she knew. She was trying to convince me not to be broken up, but that was not the case. She asked me that day as we were [going to the show] – we had talked about fertilizing eggs and she was like, ‘What do you think about getting your sperm checked to fertilize my eggs?’ And I’m like, ‘What? We’re broken up. We’ll talk about this later.’ She was fully in denial. And it scared me.”
Tom and Raquel’s affair news got a lot of attention and both of them took to social media to apologize, but they were spotted still hanging out just days later. Tom also confirmed that he was “seeing Raquel as often as” he could and “FaceTiming all the time,” during his romance with Ariana, but she “just didn’t even notice.” That’s how separate our lives were,” he added.