Vanderpump Rules Reunion Part 2 Sets the Stage for Raquel's ...

A lot of wild things have happened on a Bravo reunion stage. From Nicki Minaj popping in as a surprise Real Housewives of Potomac guest host to New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice  shoving Andy Cohen out of her way during an altercation, dedicated franchise viewers have seen it all. Yet there was something particularly chilling about one cast member serving another with legal paperwork onstage during part two of the Vanderpump Rules season 10 reunion.

In what may be a first in Bravo history, Raquel Leviss—sequestered in her trailer for the first part of the reunion, a court-ordered 100 yards from costar Scheana Shay—has Cohen distribute (potentially meaningless) paperwork declaring her request to dismiss a restraining order against Shay.

The reason for the protection order in the first place? Upon hearing the news that Leviss had been engaged in a monthslong affair with Tom Sandoval, a fellow Vanderpump Rules cast member and boyfriend of her close friend Ariana Madix, Shay allegedly punched Leviss in the face. At the time, Shay denied this incident via her attorney Neama Rahmani, who told Page Six on March 9: “Scheana never punched Rachel, period. This entire case is a fabrication by a known liar and a cheat who has betrayed everyone close to her.” (Rachel is reportedly Raquel’s legal name, as has been noted both in legal documents and an apparent resurfaced high school yearbook photo.) 

As indicated by both the folded documents Cohen passed Shay as well as Leviss’s own admittance (“I completely regret filing the restraining order,” she says at one point), the restraining order was later dismissed. 

During the reunion, Shay grows visibly emotional upon receiving the dismissal. “First of all, the betrayal of two of my best friends—that is heartbreaking in itself,” she says of Sandoval and Leviss, the two culprits in what has now been branded Scandoval. “But then to throw all of this on top of it when I did nothing but take care of her—I gave her a home to live in when she had nowhere to go. I was the sister that she didn’t have growing up. I did everything for her, and for her to do this to me? It has taken such a toll on me. I have not been able to be completely present for my daughter…I trusted her with everything.”

Watching these remarks from her trailer, which evoke tears from multiple cast members onstage, Leviss shows almost no emotion. Then she flippantly wonders, essentially, why they don’t make Hallmark cards for lifted restraining orders. “Now I’m thinking I should’ve, like, wrote Scheana a personal note,” she says, a grin painting her face. “As things are unfolding, it’s like more realizations and like more regrets.”

Leviss appears similarly obtuse in a one-on-one sit-down with Cohen. “He made me feel heard and seen, and those are feelings that I haven’t really felt, maybe ever,” she says about turning her friendship with Sandoval romantic. When asked if she honestly pictured “a path forward” for her friendship with Madix while sleeping with Madix’s longtime boyfriend, Leviss replies with a smile, “Yeah, I think I was living in my own little reality, hoping that it would work out.” She also admits it was her “mindset” at the time to blame Madix for being in denial about the affair. After Cohen levels her with a pained look, Leviss says that she and Sandoval shielded their affair from Madix for so long in order to “get [their] story straight…because he felt like it would hurt her if she knew how long this had been going on.”