Rachel Leviss’ lawsuit can move forward against her former “Vanderpump Rules” reality television castmate Ariana Madix, after a California appeals court rejected Madix’s bid to strike the suit that stems from the “Scandoval” controversy.
Leviss had an affair with their fellow former castmate Tom Sandoval, who was Madix’s boyfriend at the time. Madix found sexually explicit videos of Leviss on Sandoval’s phone. Madix then recorded the videos and sent them to Leviss, who sued Madix in turn.
Wednesday’s appeals court ruling against Madix upheld a trial judge’s rejection of her motion to strike. The appeals court said Madix failed to meet her burden of showing that Leviss’ claims against her arose from constitutionally protected activity.
Madix had argued that her alleged conduct concerned an issue of public interest about an individual in the public eye. But the appeals court said Leviss’ status as a public person doesn’t make every aspect of her personal life a matter of public concern.
The court noted that the case was about video recordings of Leviss engaging in a private sexual act at a private residence during a private FaceTime call with Sandoval. Even if the affair was known at the time, the court said public interest in it wouldn’t extend to private recordings depicting the most intimate aspects of the relationship.
The appellate panel cited another celebrity sex story that made its way into a California court, from the 1990s, when Bret Michaels and Pamela Anderson Lee tried to block an adult entertainment distributor from publishing a videotape of them having sex. In that case, the court rejected the distributor’s argument that their public statuses as a rock star and sex symbol, respectively, made the video a matter of public concern.
Applying that logic to the current situation, the appeals court said the fact that Leviss and Sandoval were romantically involved “may have been an issue of legitimate public interest, but the secretly recorded videos of their sexual activity were not.” Therefore, the court concluded that Madix’s alleged conduct wasn’t in furtherance of the public interest.
In upholding the trial court’s rejection of Madix’s motion to strike, the appeals court emphasized that it wasn’t deciding whether Leviss’ suit would ultimately succeed. “In particular, we express no opinion as to whether Leviss can prove that Madix distributed the videos to anyone other than Leviss, or whether Leviss can prevail on her causes of action if, as Madix asserts, Leviss was the only person to whom Madix sent or showed the videos,” the appeals court said.
The ruling was not unanimous because one of the justices wrote a brief dissent that observed, among other things, that although the trial court denied Madix’s motion on the grounds that she broke the law by searching Sandoval’s phone, it’s possible that he had given her consent to look through his phone.
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