Sophia Michaels
“Vanderpump Rules” co-stars Tom Sandoval and Raquel Leviss may have hooked up long before their months-long affair was revealed.
In the latest episode of Page Six’s “Reali-Tea” podcast, podcaster Tracie Morrissey of “Pot Psychology” explained why she believes the secret lovers first got physical with each other in the summer of 2019.
Morrissey pointed to a scene in “Pump Rules” Season 8, Episode 9, that saw Leviss folding napkins with two former SUR employees: Dayna Kathan and Danica Dow.
Leviss told them she had gone out with the girls the night prior, saying she got so drunk that she came home, left her purse on the counter and went to sleep.
She said her then-boyfriend, James Kennedy, was furious he couldn’t get in touch with her and that she woke up to “rage texts” from him calling her names like “slut” and “whore.”
During that scene, Bravo flashed back to the night in question.
“They showed this really fast montage of Raquel being wasted, like, dancing and out with people,” Morrissey told podcast hosts Evan Real and Danny Murphy.
“And it’s just such a quick flash, but if you pause it, you’ll see that it’s actually Tom Sandoval [taking the] selfie video. You see half of his face, and it’s 100 percent him. It’s very obvious it’s him. And she’s leaning on him and stuff.”
A few episodes later documented Ariana Madix’s birthday party. (Madix dated Sandoval for nearly a decade until she learned about his dalliance with Leviss in early March.)
“And James is talking to Raquel about the [‘rage text’] incident, and he mentions — and she almost talks over him when he does it — he’s like, ‘But you don’t turn your phone off. You shouldn’t turn your phone off,’” Morrissey said.
“So her phone was turned off. It wasn’t on the kitchen counter in her purse; it was turned off.”
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Morrissey felt Leviss’ explanation to her co-workers “sounded a little too rehearsed” and “very deliberate,” suggesting she spent the night with Sandoval and that he coached her on how to spin the story.
Morrissey went on to say that she first noticed Leviss using the lightning bolt — a secret symbol of her love for Sandoval — on Instagram about two weeks later.
During the Season 10 reunion, which was filmed shortly after everyone found out about Scandoval, the bar owner, 40, kept insisting that he and Leviss had a one-night stand and then didn’t have sex again for a while.
However, both he and Leviss, 28, claimed that the initial tryst happened in August 2022.
“I think there’s like a nugget of truth there where it did happen once and then it didn’t happen again for a long time,” Morrissey told us, but she thinks that length of time was actually years and not weeks.
She also pointed to the Season 9 reunion in late 2021, during which Leviss called off her engagement to Kennedy, 31. (Sandoval had spent thousands of his own dollars helping Kennedy plan an elaborate proposal.)
“They actually panned to Sandoval, and he’s just scared,” Morrissey noted. “And then he just starts laughing, like, really giddy. … And [his castmates] were like, ‘Why are you laughing about this?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know, I’m just thinking about the engagement.’”
It came across to Morrissey like Sandoval was “trying to play it off,” hypothesizing that he “couldn’t contain” how “happy” he was that the former beauty pageant queen was single.
