Andy Cohen, Scheana Shay and ‘Vanderpump Rules’ Execs Break Down Raquel’s Shocking Reveal and That Horrific T-Shirt Line: ‘I Screamed’

SPOILER ALERT: This video and story contains spoilers from Part 3 of Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules” reunion.

In the end — in the very end — Raquel Leviss decided to try to come clean about the #Scandoval.

Six days after March 23’s fiery taping of the “Vanderpump Rules” reunion, Leviss — at the center of the show’s cheating scandal because of her affair with fellow cast member Tom Sandoval, which led to his breakup with Ariana Madix, his partner of nine years — sat down with showrunner Jeremiah Smith for her final interview of the season.

During that conversation, which provided the coda for the show’s third and final reunion episode, Leviss tearfully confessed some of the secrets she and Sandoval had not only deliberately withheld from the group (and the public), but had actively lied about to Madix and to the show’s cast. Leviss’ admission had been teased as a bombshell by “Vanderpump Rules” executive producer Alex Baskin in a May 17 Variety story about how Bravo had captured the #Scandoval: He’d said there would be “new information” and that were “revelations,” and that the whole cast should see all three reunion episodes before Season 11 began production later in June.

After the publication of the Variety story, the internet became a wildfire of speculation about what Baskin might have meant: Was Leviss pregnant? Had star and executive producer Lisa Vanderpump known of the affair as it happened? Had Leviss slept with Scheana Shay’s husband Brock Davies also? TikTok, Reddit and Instagram were alight with theories, all of which have turned out to be vastly overblown.

What Leviss did say to the cameras — during a breaking-of-the-fourth wall moment, as the audience heard Smith pressing her for more details — added up to an adjusted timeline of the affair. “I think it’s important to me to tell the truth,” she said to Smith at the interview’s start.

She went on to admit she and Sandoval had sex for the second time in Mexico at Shay’s August wedding, and that it hadn’t just been the one-night stand they’d claimed they’d before things picked up again after the show stopped filming. In fact, Leviss said through tears, she and Sandoval had sex in his and Madix’s home when Madix was away because her grandmother had died. That, Leviss said, is “the one story that we agreed on keeping straight,” because “it’s a really bad look” to hook up in someone’s house — especially when they’re not there because they’re at a funeral. She also said she’d proposed that she, Madix, and Sandoval enter into a throuple, but that Sandoval had shot the suggestion down. Leviss had even gone home to St. Louis with Sandoval for the holidays.

And so ended a season of television so explosive that it garnered global headlines, and has brought in series-high ratings. It was a long road for Bravo and “Vanderpump Rules” producers to get to the reunion and its postscript, as we detail in Variety’s Making a Scene, presented by HBO/Max.

The Season 10 reunion of “Vanderpump Rules” was complicated because of emotional reasons — and logistical ones. Leviss and Shay appeared together on Andy Cohen’s late-night talk show “Watch What Happens Live” in New York City on March 1, which was the very night Madix (in Los Angeles) discovered Sandoval and Leviss’ affair. According to Shay, when Madix called Leviss to confront her, the two of them ended up in a physical scuffle.

“I may be a pusher — I’m not a puncher,” Shay explained on Variety‘s “Making a Scene” (who also provided exclusive clips from her vlog).

Regardless, a few days later, Leviss filed a temporary restraining order against Shay, claiming that she’d been physically assaulted in the altercation. The court hearing for the TRO was to take place on March 29, which was after the already-scheduled reunion taping of March 23. After considering a number of options, Baskin and executives such as Erica Forstadt, the SVP of Unscripted Current Production at NBCUniversal, came up with the solution that Shay and Leviss would be kept 100 yards apart during the taping, with each of them going into a separate trailer when the other was on stage in the group conversation.

After “a thousand conversations with attorneys,” Baskin told Variety, the trailer set-up “was a reunion first.”

Cohen said he considers protecting the cast to be part of his purview as the reunion’s host. “Certainly, if there are two people on a reunion stage who are not getting along, I view it as my personal job to not let anything happen.” Cohen cited his “pretty good reaction time” to cast member James Kennedy going after Sandoval more than once, though he mentioned “my cards didn’t do so well.”

Cohen’s separate one-on-one interviews with Sandoval, Madix and Leviss were edited into all three reunion episodes, an idea born from the fear that once the group got together, they wouldn’t let “Tom and Raquel finish any sentences or speak or get a thought across,” Cohen said. There was also a fear, he added, that “Raquel or Tom was going to walk off, and not return.”

Shay, who in the latter part of reunion was sitting in the trailer watching it on a monitor, described Leviss’ entrance. Calling Leviss by her given name, Rachel, which Madix’s allies have taken to doing as shade, “That look on Ariana’s face? Hoo, you could feel it,” Shay said. “I would not want to be on her bad side.”

For Cohen’s part, he called Madix “poised” in how she handled “her rage.” “She was pretty amazing,” he said.

As for Sandoval, Cohen said: “This was a redemptionless situation for him, I think really. In terms of how he did —” Cohen paused, and shook his head. “Not great.”

Viewers have noted Leviss’ affectless demeanor during the reunion, and both Shay and Cohen commented on it. “For her to sit there and see me sobbing, and to just be buckling her shoe,” Shay said. “And watching — blank stare, vacant. Light’s on, no one’s home. I mean, bizarre.”

Cohen expressed concern about Leviss, and was similarly confused by her reaction to Shay’s tearful account of how the restraining order had affected her and her family. “I was worried for Raquel’s mental health going into the reunion — I mean, I still am,” he said. “But when I saw how unemotional she was, it made me think she was either really medicated, or really out of touch with maybe her role in everything.

“I didn’t understand.”

Baskin described to Variety the episode’s afterword with Leviss. “It contradicted the story that she and Tom had told us at the reunion,” he said. “And we knew that we to play that, because it was important, new information. But there was no question that it had to be the coda of the reunion. So to us, it was the final capper on a season that was full of unexpected developments.”

Forstadt said: “I think what she did was incredibly brave and scary and surprising — I think it shocked all of us. It certainly shocked me.”

With Season 11 starting production soon, Shay said “producers have their work cut out for them” as far as group events go, since Madix has said she won’t film with Sandoval and Leviss. Shay also wonders whether Leviss really will return.

Baskin, however, didn’t sound worried. “As far as we’re concerned, at this point, the entire group will be back.”

And Cohen mentioned that Madix aside, this is a group that has forgiven one another for quite a bit in the past — especially when it comes to infidelity. “Look, Ariana’s one thing,” Cohen said. “But I don’t know that they’ll have nothing to do the principles. I also don’t think that a lot of these folks can help themselves from another opportunity to yell at Tom Sandoval and Raquel.”

Variety’s “Making a Scene” is presented by HBO.