Cross-legged on the floor, palm pressed to her heart, Rachel Leviss, the former reality star whose television career exploded when it was revealed that she’d been the third party in a cheating scandal so calamitous it forged a new vernacular, soothingly instructs me to breathe. A small group of strangers and I have gathered by Zoom on an afternoon in March to participate in a sound bath Leviss is leading, her neck draped in dainty gold chains, her other hand swirling to rebalance the energy in her midst. In an upright, teacherly posture, surrounded by quartz crystal vessels, she conducts a tonal symphony with a hum-producing rod.
For six and a half years on Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, Leviss assumed the role of a pageant queen turned flighty waitress turned damsel in distress, before her final act, in season 10, as a homewrecker. Now, three years later, her life has taken a decidedly different turn. As a certified sound bath practitioner, she is the maestro of a soft-girl orchestra, and glisteningly pearlescent singing bowls are her ensemble.
I’d expected Leviss’s sound bath to be full of reality TV obsessives, the sort of voyeurs who might purchase ironic Cameos for their friends’ birthdays or make pilgrimages to the West Hollywood restaurants and bars where she and her castmates worked. But no one in the group appears to fit the bill of a Vanderpump Rules fan—we’ve all seemingly come seeking solace, not a celebrity sighting. The frenzied intoxication, dysregulated screaming matches, regrettable hookups, and performative dim-wittedness demanded by Leviss’s former job on television are worlds away from what she wants to offer now. Restoring balance to our nervous systems, finding quiet inner calm—pursuits that would eradicate reality television entirely—are our intentions for the hour.
“I am worthy just the way I am,” Leviss says, holding court over her participants, all of whom have logged on to hear pure tones vibrating at frequencies meant to heal us. “I am deserving of peace and happiness. I allow myself to let go of the things that I cannot control. I am doing my best, and that is enough.”
To understand the significance of Leviss’s journey to sound healing, let us remember March 2023, the month she suddenly became a villain, a victim, and, some might argue, a fall guy. (She went by Raquel back then, as she had on the show, and since first grade, when she asked her mom if she could change her name—hoping to be viewed as more special than a “Rachel.”) As the now-infamous “Scandoval” saga goes: For several months, Leviss engaged in an affair with her castmate Tom Sandoval while he maintained a nine-year relationship with Ariana Madix, another castmate and then one of Leviss’s close friends. Madix discovered the affair when she found an intimate video of Leviss on Sandoval’s phone, which Sandoval is alleged to have recorded without Leviss’s knowledge or permission. (Leviss is now suing Sandoval for revenge porn, eavesdropping, and invasion of privacy; in a legal filing, his lawyers have said any damages alleged by Leviss were caused by her own “negligence, breach, and fault.”)
The backlash against Leviss, from spectators and the show’s cast, was immediate and extreme. A delirium of hurried merchandise, podcast appearances, and TMZ fodder followed, with castmates cashing in however they could. Lala Kent, for example, promptly began selling “Send it to Darrell” sweatshirts, a reference to how Leviss had her lawyer send letters to the cast directing them to delete the intimate video of her, if indeed they had access to it, which they said they did not. (Leviss’s lawyer had apparently sent letters directly, and Kent responded that correspondence should go through her attorney, Darrell Miller.) Those merch sales reportedly covered the down payment on Kent’s home in Palm Springs. Another castmate, Scheana Shay, made an estimated monthly six figures by talking about the scandal on various podcasts, including her own. “It has been better than ever, from a business sense,” she said at the time.
Monetization at Leviss’s expense wasn’t limited to people who knew her. Béis, a handbag company, made fun of her on its Instagram account when she was spotted carrying one of their pieces. “We provide the bag, not the baggage,” the brand captioned a post before sending its entire collection to Madix. Madix also benefited financially, though as the wronged party, it was not at Leviss’s expense; she secured a load of brand deals, including with Uber, Lay’s, Duracell, and Bloomingdale’s, and she was cast in a Broadway show, on Dancing with the Stars, and hired to host Love Island USA. Meanwhile, in the cultural sphere surrounding reality entertainment, Leviss had become persona non grata.
Filming for the season had wrapped before TMZ broke the news of the affair, but producers decided to shoot additional episodes, in order to capture cast reactions at their most volatile. Audiences tuned in voraciously, knowing the extended season would deliver chaos—viewership rose by 83 percent over the show’s previous season, according to Nielsen data. The show was later nominated for two Emmys, its first-ever nominations since debuting in 2013.
When the cast filmed a reunion episode shortly after the scandal broke, tensions were high. Madix, still processing the undeniably cruel betrayal, told Leviss to “fuck [herself] with a fucking cheese grater.” Leviss says a producer even came to her dressing room to coach her toward hysterics. “We want to see tears. We want to see you stating your case. Get passionate about it,” she says the producer told her, long before she’d learned the grounding techniques of sound healing.
During the taping, Leviss went quiet on-screen, seeming almost numb. Page Six published a roundup of viewer reactions to Leviss’s perceived emotionlessness. “It kills me to see that almost everyone on the panel is crying, yet #Raquel sits there stone-faced,” one fan posted online. “Her lack of tears or ANY emotion speaks VOLUMES.” In actuality, Leviss tells me a mental health crisis had begun to take hold. “I think for any normal person, it would be hard not to dissociate,” she says when we meet for an interview following the sound bath. “I was also dealing with the video that was taken without my knowledge, and that could still possibly resurface. I was just trying to survive.”
Leviss’s television career ended with her sobbing, alone, in a separate segment appended to the reunion episode. “You seem like you’re in a lot of pain,” a producer is heard saying in the clip. He interrogated her as her eyes welled up, trying to get her to admit she slept with Sandoval at the home he shared with Madix. “You ripped the Band-Aid off. What’s one more detail?” Leviss says she requested a mental health professional to provide support at the reunion, but says the network rejected the idea. (In an email to ELLE, a Bravo representative said, “The production company received one formal request from Rachel and her team: that her publicist attend the reunion. Customarily, PR representatives are not present on reunion sets. No one was advised of her requesting a specific mental health professional be on set with her.”)
At home and at ease now, with the sun beaming in, Leviss speaks of reality TV’s machinations with the wisdom one can only gain by leaving it. “I have a therapist who specializes in narcissistic abuse,” Leviss says. “And she helped me to view Vanderpump Rules as a narcissist—the network and production are narcissistic. They will use you and get what they need out of you, and then discard you.”
Leviss grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, where as a teenager she competed in beauty pageants, eventually earning the titles of Miss Sonoma County and Miss Malibu in her twenties, and going on to compete in the Miss California USA pageant. She earned a Bachelor of Science in kinesiology, with a concentration in occupational therapy, from Sonoma State University in 2018, and thought she’d work with kids with developmental delays and behavioral disorders.
Growing up, the dynamic in her household was such that she “couldn’t make noise or rock the boat,” Leviss says. “That’s where I really learned to be this good girl and do as I was told and not act out.” The cheating scandal shattered her social relationships, but it also forced her to reckon with a long-held fear: She had done something bad, people knew about it, and now she was in trouble. In April 2023, Leviss checked into an Arizona mental health facility, where she stayed for three months.
Early in her treatment, Leviss tells me she experienced suicidal thoughts. Even without phone access, she continued to hear through the grapevine how intensely the public had turned on her. “It was stressful and embarrassing and I felt a lot of shame,” she says of the affair and its aftermath. “I have a history of wanting people’s validation, so this was my ultimate nightmare, basically. My world was in shambles and I didn’t see a way forward.” (Her relationship with Sandoval had dissolved by then; while she was in treatment, he toured with his eponymous tribute band, performing karaoke-style covers of popular songs, occasionally changing lyrics to make jokes about their affair.)
Through daily therapy sessions, Leviss came to identify as a love addict, and she says she’s still in recovery. Love addiction is a clinically recognized behavioral pattern that operates in phases of compulsion and distress. Oxford University’s Centre for Neuroethics describes it as “cycles of alternating ecstasy and despair, desperate longing, and the extreme and sometimes damaging thoughts and behaviors that can follow from love’s loss, bearing a resemblance to analogous phenomena associated with more ‘conventional’ addictions like those for drugs, alcohol, or gambling.”
When it comes to the Scandoval, when asked, Leviss doesn’t say whether she’s remorseful, exactly, but she cites love addiction as a partial explanation for her actions. “That need for validation goes hand in hand with love addiction,” Leviss explains. “This person of interest is validating you and telling you you’re worthy. I realized I needed to validate myself from within, and I needed to find my relationship with God, with the higher power, because that is ultimately who I should be looking to for guidance, instead of another human being.”
In her most dire hours, she prayed, despite not yet being religious. (She has since become a regular churchgoer, attending a nondenominational Christian church.) “I didn’t know the proper way to pray, maybe there isn’t one, but I asked for help,” Leviss says. “I was holding onto this vision that if things could get this bad, and this destructive, and this crazy and dysregulated, that there had to be an opposite, a polarity, and I prayed that God would help me to get through it. It was a full surrender, actually. Like, I have no power. You have the power, I’m putting the power in your hands.”
Slowly, she learned about healthy attachment. She also tried meditation, unsuccessfully at first, until she started to learn she could quiet the noise. “It was really difficult. I was in my head a lot,” Leviss says. “But one day, they had us visualize a scent. I imagined myself in this orange grove, and I could smell the oranges. It was a profound out-of-body experience.”
She made two big decisions: to go back to her given name, Rachel—a way to assure her inner child that she was interesting enough without a pseudonym—and to leave television entirely. “I’m not cut out for reality TV the way the other cast members are,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about making merch and how I could spin the situation into a brand deal. I was genuinely concerned for my well-being.”
When she got her phone back at the end of treatment, she unfollowed her old castmates and the gossip sites that hadn’t let go of the scandal, and deleted her text messages. Once her algorithm figured out that she was on a recovery journey, an image of iridescent crystal bowls came across her feed. “I was no contact, not drinking, going to therapy and meetings, but I still couldn’t sit down and meditate in total silence,” she says. “I clicked on the page and saw that the bowls were essentially musical instruments,” which appealed to her as a piano player.
In 2024, Leviss hosted a 65-episode podcast called Rachel Goes Rogue, intended to demystify the manufactured storylines of reality television. When she received her first paycheck, she splurged on a set of sound bowls, hoping to incorporate them into the meditation practice she’d resolved to keep attempting. Finally, she felt something like peace. “It helped me find more clarity and slow down,” she says of finding sound healing. “I felt more centered.” That’s when she decided to go to Mexico to become a certified sound healing practitioner.
The course Leviss enrolled in taught her about the resonant frequencies of crystal singing bowls, and how to arrange layered harmonies in different octaves to guide participants into calmer states—a welcome shift after years in the “fight-or-flight” tumult of reality television. She’d made the decision to quit TV, but she still had fans, and Leviss realized she could turn the level-two practitioner certification she’d earned in Mexico into a business. “I saw this as being something where I could connect to other people in a positive way,” she says.
She now leads around three sound baths each week, virtually and in person, usually by request, traveling to far-flung locales so frequently she says she’s rarely home. (Leviss now divides her time between Arizona, Texas, and northern Idaho.) When we Zoom again for a follow-up conversation, Leviss has just flown to South Florida, where she led a group of women through a sound bath on the beach at sunrise. Wellness retreats book her often, and she’s starting to get inquiries for bachelorette parties, too.
In college, Leviss was diagnosed with inattentive attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Despite this, and despite being one of the few cast members with a degree, she was made out to be the ditziest of the Vanderpump women. She spoke more slowly than the others and rarely bit back as aggressively. (Even in our interview, when emphasizing a point, she softly says “eff” instead of the F-word.) In one of her final episodes, before the scandal broke, as things escalated at a pool party and she took a beat to decide what to say, another cast member teased her for not replying fast enough. “Put a thought together,” the woman says sarcastically. “I know you can do it.”
Moving thoughts around without rushing them is encouraged in Leviss’s practice now. There’s no competition of beauty or wit or who can be the most cutting. “When I’m leading a sound bath, my words flow from a place that’s not so overly self-critical,” she says.
Someday, though not anytime soon, she says she might consider returning to reality TV, perhaps on a competition-based show. She is clear she wouldn’t return to the kind of program she was on before. “I wouldn’t be in integrity with who I really am,” Leviss says. “I know the name of the game now, and I know how to play. But that didn’t feel like the healthy option.” While she was in treatment in 2023, a producer from the reality show Special Forces, which puts celebrity contestants through military-style challenges, reached out to see if she’d like to join the next season alongside Sandoval. She declined.
Leviss is no longer in touch with her former castmates. She has a boyfriend, a mechanical engineer, who doesn’t read TMZ. They met at a Fourth of July party in 2024. “It is so soul-filling, and drenched, and gushy, and airy, and full of love,” she says of leaving television and becoming a sound healer. “Whereas the other choice would have felt like I was selling my soul. I would have had to continue to dissociate to survive, and who knows where that would have led?”
Back amid the sedative droning of the singing bowls, Leviss says to those of us gathered before our laptops, with our eyes closed, lying on our floors, the kinds of things she might have needed to hear herself: “You are safe. You are loved…Your thoughts and opinions matter.” She instructs us to wrap our arms around ourselves, as she, too, gives herself a hug.
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