“Vanderpump Rules” star Tom Sandoval has already stuck his foot in his mouth several times on the new season of the realty show. After all, it’s the first episodes back since he gained infamy for “Scandoval,” in which he cheated on his longtime girlfriend, Ariana Madix, with one of her best friends, Rachel Leviss. But after reflecting on the incident, Sandoval offered a jaw-dropping comparison to his infidelity.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Sandoval was asked “why he thought the scandal got so big,” and gave a tone-deaf answer.
“I’m not a pop-culture historian really,” Sandoval said. “But I witnessed the O.J. Simpson thing and George Floyd and all these big things, which is really weird to compare this to that, I think, but do you think in a weird way it’s a little bit the same?”
The author of the profile, Irina Aleksander, tried to contextualize Sandoval’s answer to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“I think I knew what he meant,” she wrote. “He was trying to express the oddity of becoming the symbolic center of a nationwide discussion and a major news story; what he communicated instead was something more honest, which is just how much the experience had made him lose perspective.”
In a telling aside, Aleksander wrote that after the interview, “a Bravo publicist rang me late on a Friday. Some of what Sandoval had said had gotten back to Bravo, and everyone was concerned. What was it that he said about O.J. Simpson and George Floyd exactly?”
The fourth episode of Season 11 of “Vanderpump Rules” airs tonight on Bravo.