After an eyebrow-raising diss on the Vanderpump Rules Season 10 Reunion, Tom Sandoval insists he meant no harm to ex girlfriend Ariana Madix. “I’ve never body-shamed Ariana,” Tom told TMZ during impromptu comments on Wednesday, June 14. “I don’t know if that was taken out of context. I think people added their own context to it.” For the uninitiated, Tom was slammed by fans and co-stars alike when he griped about sex with Ariana during episode 3 of the reunion for wearing her t shirt during the act — seemingly both shaming her and blaming her for his affair with Raquel Leviss.
“You know who he did sleep with after him and Raquel started sleeping together,” Ariana said during the reunion when the topic of who Tom might have slept with came up. “Me.” “Yeah, she kept her t-shirt on, it was really hot,” Tom told the cast. The reality star’s deadpan comment was immediately met with ire from costars including Lala Kent, who warned a stunned Raquel that her future with Tom would be the same. “This is your future, Raquel!” she shouted. “I just want you to know. He’s gonna talk like this to you, too. Just so you know!”
But the bar owner and musician doubled down on his assertion that the infamous diss wasn’t about Ariana’s body. “If somebody, like, wanted to have sex with me and I, like, unzipped my zipper and said like, ‘Oh, hurry up. I gotta meet somebody for lunch,’” he explained to TMZ, adding that “it was more about the unenthusiasm.”
Tom and Raquel’s affair rocked the cast of the reality hit after Ariana found a seductive selfie video of Raquel on Tom’s phone. The couple of nine years split in early March as rumors of a full-blown affair between Sandoval and the Sur waitress intensified. Tom publicly apologized to his ex via Instagram on March 7. “Most of all, I want to apologize to Ariana,” he wrote in part. “I made mistakes, I was selfish, and made reckless decisions that hurt somebody I love. No one deserves to feel that pain so traumatically and publicly.”