Tom Sandoval is remorseful and vows never ‘Never to “cheat in that way again” his future partner as he did with Ariana Madix.
The Vanderpump Rules star, 40, appeared on Nick Viall’s The Viall Files podcast on Tuesday, along with his friend and costar Tom Schwartz, to talk about the lessons he’s learned from his cheating scandal with his costar Rachel ‘Raquel’ Leviss, while he was in a nine-year relationship with Madix.
Schwartz confessed that he was afraid to set Sandoval up with anyone he cared about, and Viall wondered if Sandoval was “ready to protect someone’s heart” after what happened in Scandoval.
‘I regret it’: Sandoval
“Am I ready to protect somebody’s heart? Yes, of course I am,” he answered.
“I don’t know what to say except I f***ed up, and I know that I did that. It doesn’t matter the scenario, it doesn’t matter. I f***ed up, and I do know that. I do love hard, I really do.”
Sandoval said that he was in a “vulnerable” state and ignored both “logic” and “people’s feelings and Ariana’s feelings.”
Later in the podcast, Sandoval revealed that he “acted out because I have such low self-worth.”
He went on, “Somebody like Raquel – somebody who’s in her 20s, like, doin’ essentially the f***in’ whipped cream f***in’ bikini thing like in Varsity Blues – like, I couldn’t f***ing like, I was like, ‘Wow, really? Oh my God, like, I’m attractive to somebody?'”
“And I regret it, hardcore, I really do,” he said, adding that the only way he could fix the situation was to “learn from it.”
Sandoval, What do you mean ‘cheat that way’?
Viall asked him to explain what he learned, but Sandoval said it was difficult to express the lessons he’s learned from the experience, but assured him that he was trying to improve himself.
“I don’t know, dude. I’m just trying to be a better person, I swear to God, like I really am,” he said.
“Like, I don’t know what to say. What have I learned? What have I learned?! To not ever do that again. To not ever be in a nine-year f***in’ relationship and end it that way. To not ever, like, cheat that way. Like, dude, I’m never gonna do that. That’s never gonna happen.”
“What do you mean ‘cheat that way’? When you say ‘cheat that way,’ it implies that you might cheat a different way,” Viall questioned him with a skeptical look, to which Sandoval responded, “To have an affair, to have an affair!”
In March, Leviss and Sandoval’s affair became public when Madix found a intimate video of the former SUR waitress on her then-boyfriend’s phone as he was performing.
