Good women

Throughout this piece, I refer to Vanderpump Rules cast members in two different ways: by their first names when discussing their actions and statements on the show, and by their last names in reference to statements made off the show (social media, podcasts, interviews, Watch What Happens Live, etc.). This is to distinguish between Katie Maloney the Vanderpump Rules character, and Katie Maloney the human. Because there are two Toms, I call their on-screen characters “Tom Sandoval” and “Tom Schwartz” on first mention and “Tom” thereafter unless it’s unclear who’s being discussed. I refer to Rachel Leviss as “Rachel,” even though she went by “Raquel” on the show, because that is how Leviss refers to herself today.

It’s summer 2022, and Lala Kent is at Villa Rosa, Lisa Vanderpump’s Beverly Hills manse. An LA Times exposé of Lala’s ex-fiancé Randall Emmett has just gone to print, accusing Emmett of sexually abusing young women, using employees to run drugs, and paying hush money to cover up his sins. Lala and Lisa sit across from one another in the gleaming kitchen, sipping from gold-rimmed mugs and cups adorned with little painted dogs. Almost right away, Lisa brings up the revelations about Emmett.

“I have people coming to me daily, and it gets more disturbing with every person that calls me,” Lala tells her.

Lisa considers for a moment. Leans forward. “If you’re totally honest, you must have known there was something was going on. Think back.”

Lala physically recoils. She looks like she’s been slapped. “Think back?” she asks, dissolving into tears. “Do you think that for the last nine months I have not been spiraling, thinking, ‘How the fuck did you not see it?’ Don’t you think I do that daily? Don’t you think I wish I would have taken a moment? I was 25. I met someone who was like, head over heels for me.”

Lisa gets up to fetch Lala a paper towel, but continues, “You’re smarter than that. I think you didn’t want to see it.”

“I know how this looks,” Lala says, still weepy. “I know what the outside world thinks of me. I just didn’t know that like, you were thinking that way about me.”

Kent’s breakup with Emmett was, even by Vanderpump Rules standards, horrific. After photos of Emmett with two women in Nashville surfaced, other women began messaging Kent to share details of other affairs. When she confronted Emmett about his infidelity, Kent says he attacked her, knocking her to the ground to get his phone. Emmett threatened Kent with the police if she left the couple’s home with their daughter Ocean, and would send people to check on Kent at random times to make sure she was still there. For two weeks, Kent bided her time, trying to make Emmett believe she was “sticking around and everything was going to be good.” It wasn’t until Emmett boarded a flight to Miami that Kent escaped with nothing but “clothing and a couple tables.” Two years on, she is still embroiled in a custody battle with Emmett.

I begin with this story because even though it is clear from the LA Times article that Emmett had a history of preying on young women and Kent was only 25 when they met, even though Emmett paid the woman he was using as a couple’s therapist with his ex-wife Ambyr Childers to lie to Kent about his marital status, even though a Hulu documentary featured numerous former employees of Emmett’s testifying to his frightening power, even though rapper 50 Cent referred to Emmett as “little Harvey [Weinstein],” the prevailing attitude among the Vanderpump fanbase is that Kent deserved exactly what she got. That, as Tom Sandoval said, she “should’ve known to not get knocked up by a fucking dude like that.” 

Look at any Reddit thread, Twitter discussion, or Instagram comments section, and you will see legions of people calling Kent a whore. A homewrecker. A slut. A gold-digger who is bitter she chose the wrong whale. When the Season 11 trailer was released, featuring a clip of Lala saying of Ariana Madix, “I’ve never experienced someone who gets cheated on and suddenly she becomes God,” fans rushed to call her jealous. (For the record, Kent is right. Not since Nora Ephron have we seen such a post-cuckolding comeup, and Ephron was far better-known and had already built herself a career before she discovered Carl Bernstein’s affair with her friend while pregnant with their second child.)

Does a woman ever deserve her own abuse? Prior to the aptly-named Scandoval — the bombshell affair between Tom Sandoval and Rachel Leviss, Madix’s then-close friend and castmate — it seemed that the collective view of the Vanderpump audience was yes. Not until March 2023, when the affair broke, did the viewers unite behind a woman.

Overnight, Madix went nuclear. She was everywhere — here in a Duracell ad that mocked Tom Sandoval’s insistence that he provided all the batteries and toilet paper for the couple’s home, there in an Uber Eats spot soundtracked by a remix of Scheana Davies’ ‘Good as Gold,’ here as a guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, there as a host on Love Island USA. She racked up ad spots with Bic, Lay’s, Bloomingdale’s, SoFi, Nutrafol, Red Robin. She was invited on Good Morning America and The View. She was on the cover of Glamour. The New York Times published a Q&A. She was booked on Dancing With the Stars and a Broadway production of Chicago. Celebrity brand expert Bernt Ullmann estimated to TMZ that Madix could be pulling $200K per deal. 

Bravo made money hand over fist as well. 4.1 million people watched #Scandoval, which depicted the days after the affair came to light. 11.4 million people watched the season, viewership comparable to the heyday of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Season 10 was Vanderpump’s highest-rated ever and set multiple consecutive series records. Ad spots, which by the later seasons were for sad companies no one had ever heard of, were supplanted by commercials for summer blockbusters, major credit card companies, and Ozempic. The show was even nominated for its first-ever Emmy Awards. 

In her Glamour interview, Madix was asked why her breakup resonated with so many, and she was ready: “There are layers to it. The best friend layer, the fact that [Tom Sandoval] and I were together for so long and so many people, including myself, saw us as endgame. It’s the deception, the trying to manipulate a narrative, the fact that so many people have been through this themselves and they recognize parts of it.”

I have media trained many people throughout my career, and I can tell you this is a very good answer. It works across all demos. It universalizes Madix’s situation: She’s just like us. It makes clear who the villains are — the best friend and the boyfriend — even to the casual reader who has never heard of SUR. It reinforces that Madix was devoted to the relationship, that it was a good relationship, a relationship the audience was rooting for.

But as someone who has watched Vanderpump Rules from the start, I can tell you something else — it’s not even close to the whole story.

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The mythology of Ariana is tailor-made for our times. It is 2024, and it is no longer chic to admit you hate women. Cool girls are out. Girl’s girls are in.

The prevailing explanation for why Ariana received an explosion of support goes something like this: She deserved it more. She was “a step above the rest,” Megan Willett-Wei wrote in Business Insider, “the lone rational voice in a chorus of bad decision-makers or outright narcissists.” She was the fan favorite. She was classy, above her castmates’ petty drama. She was a mental health advocate, an “actual ally,” a “girl’s girl.” She was manipulated by an evil, cunning man she was “always too good for,” and her “diabolical, demented, subhuman” friend (her words).

Some of this is true. Where many in the group fly off the handle and become incoherent with emotion, Ariana is highly controlled. She tends to steer clear of fights that do not involve her and can see both sides of conflicts. She has been vulnerable about her own body image issues and struggles with depression, revelations that have doubtless helped those in the audience fighting similar battles feel seen and validated.

But the rest? 

Ariana has a capacity for remarkable cruelty. In her second scene ever, she smirks that Kristen Doute is too unattractive for Tom Sandoval to date, a sentiment she repeats the next season in her insistence that he wouldn’t have slept with Annemarie Maldonado, dubbed “Miami Girl,” who Ariana called “ghetto” and not Tom’s type. She repeatedly accused Kristen of having bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder, needing medication, and called her a “kangaroo pouch, piece-of-shit whore.” She seemed to relish colluding with Tom to ostracize, gaslight, and discredit Kristen as “crazy” for years after, knowing full well that Kristen’s core suspicion — that Ariana and Tom had been more than just friends — was true. 

She has lied to protect her and Tom’s reputations. Her first big lie was that their friendship never crossed the line of propriety. To this day, she sticks by the story that they only shared a single kiss at the Golden Nugget. It is telling that her denial that anything more transpired rests on the audience’s belief in her superiority: “I think it’s really easy to stop at a kiss.” Even Doute, who is unequivocally #TeamAriana, thinks “we’ll all just die not really knowing” whether Madix and Sandoval are telling the truth. Her second was that Tom had never slept with Miami Girl, a lie she repeated for years on the show, to media, on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, and even in a histrionic thousand-word rebuttal of rumors she knew to be true. 

It seems she is still lying. In Season 10, she tells Lala she was “fine” with Tom’s choice to attend a Labor Day party instead of being with her after her grandmother passed. But Kent later shared that her mother overheard Madix screaming at him on the phone. Ariana claims that she covered up Tom’s Miami indiscretion because it happened before they were exclusive, an odd juxtaposition with her past statement that she and Tom “never started dating, we just stopped not dating.” 

If she is an ally, it has mostly been to Tom. Ariana has historically taken his side or stayed silent as he picked one fight after another with the female cast; when Lala pointed out Tom’s tendency to explode at women, Ariana flatly replied, “That’s what I like about him.” When Lala shared how shell-shocked she was by the revelations of Randall’s infidelity at the Season 9 reunion, Ariana rolled her eyes and scrunched her face in disbelief. Shortly after Katie Maloney got divorced and was feeling ostracized from the group, Ariana snarked her decision to bring on Kristina Kelly as a friend to the show, calling the choice “so obvious.” She flat-out refused to acknowledge her brother Jeremy’s harassment of multiple women at Katie and Tom Schwartz’s wedding, even though it was caught on tape. She brushed past a claim in the Season 10 reunion that James Kennedy drunkenly smacked a waitress on her behind. Ariana has spoken up on behalf of the LGBTQ community, but it’s a community she herself belongs to, and her unwillingness to confront her loved ones’ bad behavior makes it seem that her principles only go so far.

Even now, Ariana seems hesitant to acknowledge past missteps. When asked on the Call Her Daddy podcast how she feels now about the way her and Tom Sandoval’s relationship began, Ariana said that he fed her lies about Kristen. Fair enough. But she made a point to remind listeners that Tom and Kristen’s relationship was “extremely toxic,” even as she reiterated that Tom’s claims that their own relationship was rocky wouldn’t justify infidelity.

None of this means Ariana is a villain. Many of her worst moments seem rooted in a combination of insecurity and self-loathing, and she has shown growth over her run on Vanderpump. Nor do I think Ariana would describe herself as squeaky-clean; in her New York Times interview, she expressed anxiety at being placed on an unrealistic “pedestal.” Every cast member has been cruel, every cast member has lied, every cast member has been hypocritical. This is reality television, after all. 

But comparison is core to the Ariana mythos, and her defenders have thoroughly laundered her history as key evidence that she did not deserve what happened to her. So where does the legend come from, and why are we so dedicated to it?

~

If art is a mirror, then reality television is a disco ball. Works of fiction leave much to the imagination, but possess a single canon. There is no ‘truth’ other than the text. We see only what the narrator sees, hear only what they hear. Some are more reliable than others, but even then there is no concept of objective truth, only the gap between their perception and ours.

Not so in reality television. Here, we cannot count on the truth either, but we cannot deny it exists. Something happened, and if it happened while cameras were down then we have only the cast to tell us their fractional, conflicting truths, each the hero of their own story. When narratives clash, it is up to us to decide who and what to believe. In-group dynamics and side agreements reshape the reality we see, especially when supported by excellent liars. And like the documentarian who alters the scene as soon as she steps foot in it, the show itself is an electric fence that herds cast members into artificial proximity with one another. 

The business of reality television adds another layer. Social media, podcasts (there are six hosted just by current or former Vanderpump cast), or even Patreons — such as the one Robyn Dixon (Real Housewives of Potomac) used to let slip that she self-produced a storyline about her husband’s infidelity — reveal more of the truth of who a reality star is. Or at least, the truth of how they hope to brand themselves. And any star worth their salt has a public relations team, a media coach, a lawyer, a manager, and an agent, all of whom come together to construct the image we believe to be the person.

Even when the truth is filmed, it undergoes “the edit,” a process accompanied by choices invisible to the audience.

In 2020, Bri Dellinger, a former Vanderpump editor, revealed on the Twisted Plot podcast that ahead of Season 8, Bravo “decided Stassi [Schroeder] and [then-boyfriend, now-husband] Beau [Clark] were special heroes,” and that her “favorite game [was] finding all the embarrassing things that Scheana does and putting them all in.” (Dellinger was fired shortly after the podcasts went viral, and pointed out, probably accurately, that her dismissal would not change a thing about the craft of reality television.) 

In her first post-Scandoval interview, Leviss said Sandoval admitted that he recorded an explicit video of Leviss without her knowledge in violation of California Penal Code Section 647. According to Leviss, Sandoval was upset she had mentioned the video while cameras were rolling, and threatened to stop filming unless production kept the revelation out of the episode. ET had previously reported on Sandoval’s (rejected) request to re-film the scene, but without additional detail. Though Bravo denied Leviss’ allegations, there is no mention of this violation in the final cut.  

On her podcast, Schroeder said she believes Leviss.

“That happened all the time on Vanderpump Rules when I was there,” Schroeder said. “There were so many times that I remember crying to producers and being like, ‘You guys have covered for certain people that have done really dark things. Men. I can’t even be in the same room as some of these men and I’m getting less screen time because of it. I’m willing to get less screen time because of it, I’m willing to film less, because this is so unfair and this is so wrong.’ But at the same time, I thought about it and was like, ‘Would I ever want to go public with this sort of thing?’ And I was like, no, because I wouldn’t want to ruin everyone’s jobs. I wouldn’t want to shut down the show. It’s not just the cast. It’s the crew, it’s producers — there are so many people that work on it and love it. It will trickle down to so many people that I was like, ‘I am tougher than this. I can heal on my own.’ And I did. There are so many other female cast members on Vanderpump Rules who have gone through the same thing where production has covered for the dudes, and we just had to heal ourselves. So that was a straight-up truth I know that Rachel told, because it’s happened before.”

What could Schroeder be referring to? One possibility is a Season 3 scene at Scheana’s first wedding where Kristen hit James in the face while he tried to physically block her from leaving the reception. Last June, a Bravo gossip account (see @yourmomsarewatching’s Justice4Kristen highlight) posted allegations that Doute had once slept at a mutual friend’s house because Kennedy had hit her, which Doute confirmed in a private message. When the allegations were shared, one Instagram user commented, “Didn’t Kristen punch James in the face at the wedding…” to which Doute responded, “He shoved me into the bushes. It was cut out. I’m so tired of the narrative that I was abusive because that’s what aired.” It’s unclear whether the alleged incidents of abuse occurred on the same night, but the account went on to claim that Vanderpump “protected [Kennedy] because she is friends with his parents,” and “perpetrated the Crazy Kristen narrative…so nobody would believe her if she decided to talk.” Though the allegations are unverified, Lisa never shied away from belittling Kristen on the show, and Doute has long hinted that a “dark truth” about Kennedy will come out.

We know that what we watch on TV is only so real. We know the truth lies somewhere in between the personas the cast projects on camera, the footage left on the cutting room floor, and the things festering in the dark places nobody sees. We know producers and editors need to reduce full humans to archetypes and tropes, heroes and villains, in order to extract a coherent story from the mess of real life. And yet the audience remains certain that we can intuit what is Really Going On.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in ‘The White Album.’ “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

This desire to find coherence in chaos is part and parcel of reality fandom. Whether you believe producers kept out Tom Sandoval’s admission so he would film, whether you believe that Lala should have known what she was getting into with Randall, whether you believe James abused Kristen or vice versa, all depends on your projections. And though we bring our own biases to the table, the assumptions we make are inextricable from the terms the cast and production set for us.

On Vanderpump Rules, the men — chronic philanderers and quite convincing liars — have always set the terms. They anchor the friend group, far more loyal to each other than to their girlfriends. Jax Taylor’s casting tape sets the tone: “[Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz] don’t even wanna date their girlfriends,” he says. “Tom can’t stand his girlfriend. They both can’t, and they’re both cheating! I’m the only one that knows it.” 

When the men do spar, it’s almost always because one has violated their pact of mutually-assured destruction: Thou shalt not tell your friend’s girlfriend that he cheated on her, lest he take revenge by telling your girlfriend that you cheated on her first. Even as they tell the audience and their girlfriends that the infidelity never happened, they ask each other, “Why did you throw me under the bus?” When these betrayals occur, they are quick to kiss and make up. This solidarity means it is usually the women who are ostracized from the friend group, as Stassi was when she believed the rumor that Jax had cheated on her (which, of course, he had).

As partners, the men’s behavior is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s judgment of male lovers: “Even on their knees before a mistress…[men] wish to integrate her into their existence and not to squander it entirely on her.” 

Unfortunately, the women’s primary loyalty, at least in the first few seasons, is also to the men. They seem to view themselves as de Beauvoir describes the woman in love, “endowed with a high and undeniable value, at last allowed to idolize herself through the love she inspires.” The women introduce themselves vis-a-vis their boyfriends: “I’m Kristen, and my boyfriend is the hottest bartender at SUR.” When Scheana is the first to get engaged, she jokes-but-not-really that, in comparison to her castmates, she is “winning.”

This attachment to being seen as a woman who inspires a worthy love fuels the archetypal battle between “good” and “bad” women encoded in Vanderpump’s DNA. After all, the show originated with a chilly meet between Brandi Glanville (Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), and Scheana, who dated Brandi’s husband while Brandi was pregnant with their second child. And in the pilot episode, Lisa quipped that Villa Blanca, another restaurant she owns with her husband Ken Todd, “is where you take your wife, but SUR is where you take your mistress.”

Early dynamics between the women mirror the tension of the wife-mistress relationship. Stassi, who has been cheated on by every boyfriend she ever had, spends Season 1 taking out these insecurities on Scheana, who she dubs a “fame-whoring, husband-stealing piece-of-shit homewrecker.” Scheana is made both less and more than she is — all Scheana-ness stripped away, reduced to a mistress, simultaneously elevated to archetypal stand-in for all the bad women who snake into a good woman’s life and steal what is hers. 

The “cheating whore” label is passed around like a hot potato, assigned next to Ariana, then to Kristen. When Lala joins the cast, Scheana leaps at the opportunity to brand someone else the whore du jour, insinuating that Lala trades sex for trips, cars, and other perks — a narrative that Katie, reeling from revelations of Tom Schwartz’s infidelity and her own insecurity around Lala’s sexual confidence, is all too happy to propagate.

The men also organize the women into the hierarchy of good vs. bad, but they are concerned less with husband-stealing and more with subservience. De Beauvoir posited that “man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” For the men of Vanderpump Rules, their desires are the starting point, and the women are punished or rewarded for their willingness to fulfill them. 

In other words, the guys want Rules girls.

‘The Rules’ is a book series written to help women become “irresistible to desirable men.” Its authors, Ellen Fein and Sherri Schneider, believe that men are biologically wired to be the “aggressor,” and opine on how women can appeal to “male ambition and animal drive.” Fein and Schneider construct a rather bleak vision of womanhood that evokes de Beauvoir’s observation that women in pursuit of romantic partnership want to be seen as “spontaneously offered prey.” According to the Rules: “Gratification is a man calling you, pursuing you, and asking you to marry him.”

The actual Rules are a mixed bag. Some are cartoonish, such as the suggestion to get rhinoplasty if you have a “bad nose.” Some are depressing: Never speak to a man first, always let him lead, never tell him what to do, never try to change him. Some accidentally stumble into insight, such as the reminder not to write off someone who pursues you because it is “too easy,” or the caution not to project romance onto someone who has never expressed interest in you. And some of the advice is downright horrific, like the reassurance that “abuse doesn’t happen in a Rules relationship because when you play hard to get and he works like hell to get you, he thinks you’re the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world, even if you’re not. He treats you like a precious jewel.”

The prevailing directive of the Rules is that a woman ought to flatter a man’s preference to take charge in the relationship so she will be seen as “a creature unlike any other.” The men crave this deference. We see Jax berate then-girlfriend, now-wife Brittany Cartwright for not making him sandwiches (yes, literally). Tom Sandoval jabs at Ariana when she is working on a cocktail book proposal, insisting that “everyone” has asked him why he isn’t involved, since he is a better bartender than she is. When James sends Rachel a series of rageful texts calling her a “slut,” a “whore,” and a “slut whore,” he says in a confessional that he wouldn’t have done it had she just picked up her phone.

This entitlement extends to the women’s bodies. In Season 4, Brittany undergoes a breast augmentation, paid for by Jax. While she tells the surgeon she wants a “full C” cup, Jax interrupts that he prefers double Ds: “If I’m going to finance them, I want them how I want them!” Brittany winds up with double Ds, and though she says at the reunion that she came to the decision on her own, it’s difficult to forget Jax’s sweaty-faced insistence. When Rachel considers a second nose job to correct aspects of her first, James protests: “I’m the one who is going to have to look at your face, I’m the one waking up next to you.” He insinuates he would leave Rachel if she “botches” her nose, a jab he unconvincingly tries to walk back. In the end, Rachel’s nose stays as is.

The women are punished for responding to provocation, as if their grievances are innate personality flaws. The focus is always on their reactions and never why they are angry. The philosopher Marilyn Frye writes that “to be or be perceived as wronged, you have to be or be perceived as right. Anger implies a claim to such rightness or propriety.” Because the men never accept the women’s claim to “rightness” in the first place, they view the women as “mad, for [they] seem to have [their] values all mixed up and distorted.”

Jax says Stassi is “jealous” as if he hasn’t cheated on her throughout the relationship, then gets upset when Brittany “airs [their] dirty laundry” by telling her father that Jax has been unfaithful. Tom Sandoval calls Kristen “crazy” while he and Ariana gaslight her. When Katie takes Tom Schwartz to task for sleeping with another woman, he lashes out and tells her she was a “nightmare” in their relationship’s early years, knowing perfectly well that Katie’s anger issues can be explained in part by the fact that she is mired in a yearslong recovery from a traumatic brain injury, which can cause severe mood swings and emotional dysregulation.

In researching this essay, I read Lundy Bancroft’s ‘Why Does He Do That?’, which breaks down the behaviors of angry and controlling men. Bancroft outlines the control tactics these men wield in conflict, which include: Ridicule, distorting earlier interactions, laughing at the woman’s opinion, harsh criticism, playing victim, shouting, swearing, name-calling, eye-rolling, insults, and put-downs.

The men use all these tactics and more to cast the women as overemotional, prone to hyperbole, and above all, irrational. As insurance, they attempt to sow internal discord. We first see this when the women ostracize Scheana, who is then anointed as “one of the guys.” The men weaponize Scheana against their partners (“Why are you so mean?”), which also has the meta effect of pushing Scheana further into the “guys’ girl” archetype, a persona she may have genuinely resonated with but also had to adopt in order to get screen time. Ariana gets this treatment as well, her calm demeanor wielded against Katie by Tom Schwartz. Or consider Ariana’s vitriol toward Kristen, fueled by lies Tom Sandoval fed her, which dissuaded the cast from defending Kristen against their harassment long after she was accepted back into the fold.

The women, unable to gain ground with their partners, attempt to reclaim power by turning their sights on one another. Unfortunately, this plays straight into the men’s hands. Perhaps the worst example of this misdirected anger was the racist harassment of Faith Stowers, a SUR waitress who Jax slept with while he was dating Brittany.

Jax’s infidelity united the women of the cast for the first time in the show’s history. Predictably, this unity was immediately turned against Faith, the only Black person to ever appear on the show. On a since-deleted episode of The Bitch Bible podcast, Schroeder spoke at length about how she and Doute called the police to accuse Stowers of committing a number of robberies, false allegations they repeated on social media. Schroeder recounted that Kent, who had been Stowers’ roommate for some time, used to “plant things in her apartment to see if Faith stole it,” and said Kent pulled a knife on Stowers during filming, footage which never aired. Cartwright and Davies called Stowers on the phone repeatedly to scream that she was a “stupid ho,” a “side chick” and a “slut,” and on at least one occasion Cartwright called Stowers “nappy-headed.”

Taylor, whose infidelity started this shitstorm in the first place, jumped on the bandwagon with multiple social media posts accusing Stowers of “grand theft auto” and being AWOL from the military. And Sandoval, in a deleted episode of the Pump Rules podcast, painted Stowers as “desperate” to stage scenes for the show, and fueled the rumors that she was a thief. Women have been harassed before, like Laura-Leigh Moser in Season 1, but none as intensely as Stowers, and it is hard to see this racist campaign as anything other than an excuse for a group of disempowered women to slap down someone they viewed as beneath them, which in turn empowered abusive men to rebrand Stowers as the bad one.

Even when their intentions are good, the women are not shy about punishing one another. Bancroft’s book includes guidance on how to support an abused woman. The overriding directive is to “be the complete opposite of what the abuser is.” Where the partner may pressure her, you should be patient. Where the partner thinks he knows better what is good for her than she does, you should “treat her as the expert on her own life.” Over and over, the women do the opposite. There is a self-protective flavor to this impulse, a fear that if the woman is not to blame for what she endures, then no amount of good behavior can ward off male mistreatment. There is also a subconscious acceptance that to be with a man is to be mistreated by him, so the focus is turned on whether a woman is “strong” or “self-respecting” enough to not get involved with him in the first place.

When Tom Schwartz throws a drink on Katie at Stassi’s birthday, a fight that continues to the next day’s dinner, Stassi lashes out at Katie for being upset and ruining the celebration. (Schroeder has since acknowledged how wrong she was.) When Kristen is unable to break up with Tom Sandoval after he cheats, Stassi and Katie tell her they have “lost all respect” for her, logic which ignores the fact that Kristen’s already-low self-esteem is a major reason she is stuck in the relationship in the first place. When Ariana begins dating Tom Sandoval, she declares she will never go through his phone, because “that’s what Kristen would do,” as if Kristen’s distrust brought on Tom’s infidelity. (In a full-circle moment, Madix found out about Sandoval and Leviss’ affair when “women’s intuition” told her to go through his phone, and she discovered the video Sandoval had recorded of Leviss.) When Charli Burnett recounts Rachel and Lala’s spat on Katie’s Lake Havasu divorce trip, she smirks that Lala is only upset because she “fucked the wrong guy for the money.” 

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It is through the lens of this misogynist muck that we must consider the legend of Ariana. She is part of a group of women who have all experienced male behavior that ranged from disrespect to outright abuse. Over the years, we have watched the female cast, who did not hold themselves in high regard to begin with, have their senses of self steadily degraded by men who humiliated them over, and over, and over. “I was rotting on the inside,” Maloney said to Kent of why she ended her marriage to Schwartz, and it is hard not to see every single woman’s experience in that statement. 

But prior to Ariana, not a single one ever received widespread sympathy. Rachel (pre-Scandoval) and Brittany were labeled “famewhores” who put up with abuse for a chance at low-level stardom. Kristen will always be dismissed as crazy, and much of the fanbase would argue even today that she was the aggressor against Ariana and Tom Sandoval. “Tequila” Katie will always be seen as just as toxic as the man who told her he hated the sound of her voice and found her unattractive. Scheana, whose pursuit of marriage feels like a pathological attempt to shake off the “mistress” label, is consistently ridiculed as desperate. Stassi, who possesses the kind of puffed-up self-confidence you only see in people who are trying to overcome deep self-hatred, will always be seen as a mean girl. And Lala, who has paid for her mistakes a thousand times over, will forever be a target of gleeful schadenfreude. It is striking how thoroughly the audience has adopted the men’s narrative.

In these parasocial times, fans have an almost rabid desire to see themselves in their “faves.” Media literacy has devolved to a point where every other week, a list of “problematic authors” that does not distinguish between an author’s actual beliefs and the behaviors of characters in their works makes the rounds on social media. Perhaps it is more comfortable to believe Ariana deserved support because she was innately “better,” than to recognize that she has gotten just as down and dirty as the women who have been excoriated for years — and choose to support her anyway.

What makes a good character, especially on reality television, has little to do with what makes a good person. Vanderpump Rules would be nothing with a cast who never raged, never lied, never cheated, never stole. What would it mean to accept that Ariana, whose relationship was rife with red flags before it even began, who participated in the red flags, still did not deserve this staggering betrayal? What would it mean to embrace that we see parts of ourselves in imperfect people?

We would have to accept that Katie’s explosions of anger at a partner who belittled and needled her as she struggled with PTSD, depression, and brain damage, were an altogether human response to extreme trauma and disrespect, and that our own pain might shoot out of us in inappropriate and sometimes unlikable ways. That Lala, who presented herself as a street-smart, savvy woman, fell for a man decades her senior’s lies, and that we might be susceptible to manipulation too. That Kristen’s volatile descent into “craziness” was an understandable, if not necessarily admirable, reaction to years of gaslighting, and there might come a time when we are very much telling the truth but nobody believes us.

None of the women’s pain wipes their slates clean. It doesn’t matter how many times Schroeder was cheated on; nothing justifies her attempts to sic the notoriously violent LAPD on a Black woman for revenge. But contrary to what The Good Place tells us, sins and virtues do not have point values we can tally up, resulting in a net score that tells us whether a person is “good.”

Even if we were to discuss the cast in terms of who’s “problematic” and who’s not, the fact remains that we, the audience, are the real problem. If we did not want to give attention to bad behavior, we would not watch. But we do, and so it seems silly for us to act like Vanderpump is some kind of morality play. Bravo’s purview on “problematic” cast extends as far as whose contracts get renewed or not. Schroeder, Doute, Taylor, and Cartwright absolutely should have been dismissed, and when three of the four return to our screens this spring, I hope they will have to speak frankly about why they were let go in the first place. But I also don’t believe that the three women’s actions means they deserved to be abused by white men just as bigoted as they are.

But the biggest hypocrisy in conjuring a different version of Ariana is that this impulse is not grounded in support at all. It is a defensive support, one constructed to appeal to the standards set by the male cast, which declare that a woman can, in fact, deserve her own abuse.

And it has already begun to turn on her. The Season 10 reunion episodes were filmed just weeks after the affair broke, but didn’t air until months into the news cycle. Ariana ripped into Rachel, saying things like “fuck yourself with a fucking cheese grater,” “you are nothing,” and “I wish nothing but the worst fucking shit that could ever happen to a person on you.” Immediately, fans who seemed not to understand that the Ariana on their screens had just learned about perhaps the biggest betrayal of her life, jumped down her throat, calling the remarks “ugly” and Ariana “desperate to be the number 1 girl in the group.” Look at any Page Six article about Madix and you will see comment after comment from people who are sick of hearing about her, who believe being cheated on doesn’t make her special, and who think she deserved what she got. In the end, it seems we always get here.

Rather than uplifting her, the narrative that has crystallized around Ariana has rewritten her history, so that it will be impossible for her to ever live up to the image the public created. It is a rebuke of all the other women, all of whom suffered in their own ways, the ones who, as Jamie Bliss wrote in Coveteur, we would “never take to the streets” for. It is, in other words, a false support, a woman-hating support, rooted in a rejection of all the women who deserved what was done to them.

Crucially, the obsession with Scandoval is just as much about support for Ariana as it is about having a new woman to hate. Rachel, whose years of abuse at James’ hands we witnessed, can’t simply handwave away a seven-month affair with her friend’s life partner because of past trauma. But in her deep self-loathing, her deep need to be loved, she is more similar to the other women than they might want to admit. And like them, she is being duly punished for her transgressions: Leviss received death threats from the fanbase so intense and violent (one person said they would “tear [her] limb from limb,” another that they would “un-alive [her] and dump the body”) that her family called in the FBI.

All her castmates who appeared on Watch What Happens Live after Scandoval broke were asked how they felt about the harassment. Besides Vanderpump and Schwartz, none expressed concern that things had gone too far. Go to any Reddit thread about Leviss, and you will see hundreds of users calling her “Roachel,” “Ratchet,” a piece of shit, a whore, a pathological liar, trash. Yet another thing Leviss has in common with the women of the cast.

The grand unified theory of the Vanderpump Rules women cannot rely on a brightline between “good” or “bad.” Nor should fans demand the cast welcome Leviss back with open arms. This is, after all, their real lives. But for the rest of us, the ones who have literally nothing to do with the situation (no, being cheated on does not give you any claim to this), this is a losing battle. It seems more useful to view the show’s run as a cautionary tale of the ways women suffer when they betray themselves and one another to secure romantic relationships with men — and via Kent, Maloney, and now Madix, how the world can open up once they decide to stop.

Insisting that Madix is perfect and Leviss is the devil incarnate does nothing but replicate misogynist dynamics that the male cast created all those years ago. Supporting women doesn’t require us to pretend they are people they are not, nor should we demand perfection as a prerequisite for compassion. Haven’t the women of Vanderpump Rules been through enough?

I’ll be recapping Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules on the blog, with new posts publishing on Fridays.