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Exclusive DetailsAriana Madix Headed to Trial With Raquel Leviss After Judge Shuts Down Her Plea in Invasion of Privacy Case
Raquel Leviss scored a huge victory in court after a judge shut down her former costar Ariana Madix in the lawsuit accusing her of invasion of privacy, In Touch can exclusively report.
According to court documents obtained by In Touch, the court denied Ariana’s plea to dismiss all claims against her in the case, where her ex-boyfriend Tom Sandoval is also a defendant.
Raquel, 29, had an affair with Tom while he was with Ariana, 39.
In her lawsuit, Raquel accused Tom of secretly filming their explicit FaceTime chats.
Ariana found the videos on Tom’s phone, which led to their breakup.
In the lawsuit, Raquel accused Ariana of sharing the videos with others and potentially sending it to third parties. She sued Tom and Ariana for unspecified damages.
Tom and Ariana denied all allegations of wrongdoing. In her motion, Ariana claimed she never sent the video to a third party.
She said Raquel had presented no evidence to back up her claim. “I did not send the videos to anyone else. Nor did I share, display, or show the videos to anyone else,” Ariana said. “To be clear, I only saw the video of [Raquel] … in places secluded from others.”
Raquel’s legal team fired back at Ariana’s motion.
Her lawyer wrote, “Although [Ariana] attempts to recast the lawsuit as an attack on her right to speak freely on matters of public concern, it is no such thing.”
They added, “[Ariana] does not have a free speech right to break into the phone of her boyfriend and siphon away nonconsensual pornographic materials. Nor does she have a legal right to disseminate such material to menace and terrorize.”
In a declaration, Raquel told the judge, “It is not just that [Ariana] had discovered the recordings and confronted me about their contents. If that were all that happened, [Ariana] would not have been named in this lawsuit. But that is not all that happened.
In her own sworn testimony, [Ariana] acknowledges that she stole and disseminated them. She distributed the recordings from their original source on Sandoval’s phone to herself and to me at a minimum.”
At a recent hearing, the judge sided with Raquel by allowing her claims against Ariana to move forward.
The order read, “Here, the gravamen of [Raquel’s] causes of action against [Ariana] arise from [Ariana’s] alleged theft and distribution of private and sexually explicit recordings of [Raquel]. [Ariana’s] conduct is not protected under the anti-SLAPP statute because the alleged conduct was illegal as a matter of law.”
The judge found, “Here, [Raquel] has conclusively demonstrated [Ariana’s] conduct alleged in the three causes of action was illegal. [Ariana’s] declaration establishes that she accessed [Tom’s] phone without [Tom’s] knowledge and consent. Her declaration indicates that she had previously accessed [Tom’s] phone with his knowledge and consent, but makes no reference to her having [Tom’s] consent to do so on this occasion.”
The order continued, “Here, [Ariana] declares that she accessed [Tom’s] phone surreptitiously and made a copy of the data from the phone—the FaceTime videos—without [Tom’s] authorization in the privacy of a women’s bathroom stall. [Ariana] declares she accessed data on [Tom’s] phone that [Tom] did not intend for her to access.”
The judge set a trial date for November 3, 2025.
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