Rachel Leviss has won a mostly favorable ruling in her challenge to a motion by Tom Sandoval to dismiss most claims brought by the former “Vanderpump Rules” cast member, who alleges Sandoval and Ariana Madix produced and distributed revenge porn involving the plaintiff.
In a ruling Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Daniel M. Crowley said Leviss, 29, can proceed with her claims for eavesdropping and invasion of privacy, but will have to shore up her cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress to proceed.
“Plaintiff fails to allege her emotional distress was proximately caused by Sandoval’s conduct,” said the judge, who gave Leviss 20 days to file an amended complaint.
The 40-year-old Sandoval’s motion did not challenge Leviss’ revenge porn claim.
“These arguments are offensive, legally meritless and wholly unpersuasive,” Leviss’ attorneys state in their court papers responding to Sandoval’s motion. “It is beyond reasonable dispute that Sandoval’s conduct … gives rise to liability under California law.
In their dismissal motion, Sandoval’s attorneys argued that after “thrusting the vicissitudes of her life into the limelight for ongoing public consumption and critique from 2016-23, Leviss has now filed the instant action against Sandoval and Madix,” who is Sandoval’s 38-year-old former girlfriend.
In reality, Leviss’ complaint is a “thinly veiled attempt to extend her fame and to rebrand herself as the victim instead of the other woman while denigrating her former friend Madix as a scorned woman and her former paramour Sandoval as predatory,” Sandoval’s lawyers further stated in their court papers.
According to Leviss’ suit filed Feb. 29, she was “a victim of the predatory and dishonest behavior of an older man who recorded sexually explicit videos of her without her knowledge or consent, which were then distributed, disseminated and discussed publicly by a scorned woman seeking vengeance, catalyzing the scandal.”
“Sandoval’s irrelevant characterization of the affair itself as sordid and salacious, less than clandestine and open and ostentatious does not change the fact that … the communications in question were confidential and that Sandoval recorded them intentionally and without the consent of all parties,” Leviss’ attorneys contend in their court papers.
“Leviss had every reason to believe and did believe that her private communications with her secret lover would be confined to the parties thereto and did not reasonably expect that the communications may be overheard or recorded,” Leviss’ lawyers further argue in their pleadings.
Leviss, who was “humiliated and villainized for public consumption,” is a shell of her former self and both her career prospects and reputation have been damaged, the suit alleges.