Proof Vanderpump Rules Is Actually Fake

In today's world, reality television shows are a pop culture staple. Whether cast members are searching for romance, competing for cash prizes, or they're entertaining enough to have their lives filmed — their drama is our guilty pleasure. There is something undeniably addicting about watching other people's lives play out before us — from falling in and out of love to navigating the ups and downs of personal life. But while many reality shows want us to believe that what's unfolding on screen is authentic, it's long been questioned how much of what we see is real, and what is manipulated with editing and production.

Bravo's hit TV series "Vanderpump Rules" has been one the most popular shows on the network since its debut in 2013. The show originally documented the lives of a group of attractive 20-somethings who worked at Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood hotspot SUR Restaurant & Lounge. In the decade since its inception, cast members have grown up, with many becoming entrepreneurs who no longer work for "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" alum. Though they're no longer chain-smoking cigarettes and having massive fights in the back alley of SUR, the show continues to draw viewers with the cast's tumultuous interpersonal relationships. 

In 2023, "Vanderpump Rules" was the most-watched cable series for viewers aged 18-49 ... and it's easy to see why. Endless scandals, breakups, and backstabbing controversies make this show as addicting as fried goat cheese balls. However, it begs the question: How much of the drama is real? We're giving you all the proof that "Vanderpump Rules" might actually be fake.

Jax Taylor is without a doubt one of the most controversial characters on "Vanderpump Rules." The reality star was one of the show's original cast members, and his tumultuous love life and quick temper played out on the show for years until he was fired from the series following Season 8 in 2020. His storyline was characterized by multiple cheating scandals and ill-fated relationships until he finally tied the knot with his wife, Brittany Cartwright, in 2019. 

Since Taylor moved on from reality television and entered fatherhood, he's opened up about his time on the Bravo show. In 2021, the former reality star told Us Weekly, "I was 100 percent checked out at the end. ... I was just very irritable on the show. It was getting a little bit too scripted for me and I just couldn't do it anymore." He added, "It wasn't fun." Taylor also admitted that his views on reality TV shifted after he and Cartwright became parents to their son, Cruz, that April. "There's no way we could have done this with a kid," Taylor said. 

While Taylor claimed that "Vanderpump Rules" is scripted, he was telling a different story just a few years prior. In a 2018 interview with In Touch, Taylor said: "Just because there are cameras I'm not going to be like, 'Oh, I'm going to do this and act like this.' That's just not how our show works. I think that's why our show works so well — because we are a real show."

Lala Kent and Katie Maloney have come a long way in their on-again, off-again friendship. The castmates clashed for years while starring on "Vanderpump Rules" together, with insults being thrown from both sides. Their feud began shortly after Kent debuted on the show in Season 4, which aired in 2015. During the Season 5 reunion, Kent accused Maloney of slut-shaming her, and Maloney claimed Kent belittled her for her weight and her relationship with her former husband, Tom Schwartz. 

Though their relationship had its ups and downs through the years, the women ultimately put their drama behind them and became friends. In March 2023, Maloney told Us Weekly that they bonded in 2018 after years of tension, saying, "We're so much more alike than we ever realized we were, so I think that's kind of like where we fault sometimes." 

Although the two are in a good place these days, Maloney has previously claimed that Kent was not the same person behind the scenes as she'd appear on camera. In an interview with Galore magazine in 2016, she said: "I felt pretty provoked so it is a little hard when people come up to me and tell me I'm so hard to Lala. I'm like, you have no idea actually how this person is. You want to tell them what you're seeing is not the whole thing because what she was doing was not on-camera. They do stuff off-camera and then on-camera they are completely different."

For "Vanderpump Rules" viewers, nothing seemed more fake in Season 10 than Raquel Leviss' relationship with her so-called best friend, Ariana Madix. The two co-stars were friends for years before a shocking cheating scandal severed their close friendship. In the most shocking controversy to hit the show since its debut, Tom Sandoval — Madix's partner of nearly 10 years — was caught having a six-month-long affair with Leviss. 

TMZ first broke the news of "Scandoval" in March 2023, and the controversy captivated the nation. News of Madix and Sandoval's split even made it to Washington, D.C., with Madix invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner that April as host Roy Wood Jr. referenced "Scandoval" in a bit. But nothing was juicier to viewers than the shocking confrontation between Madix and her former bestie during the Season 10 reunion. In part three of the reunion special, Leviss apologized for her actions, saying, "I have been super, super selfish." But Madix cut her off with, "Selfish does not f***ing cover it, b***h. Diabolical, demented, disgusting, sub-human — start getting a better vocabulary to describe your f***ing actions."

While their affair allegedly began in August 2022, Leviss revealed shocking details about the timeline of her relationship with Sandoval in that season's "Vanderpump Rules" finale. Admitting through tears to sleeping with Sandoval while Madix was away following her grandmother's death, Leviss said, "It's a really bad look to hook up with someone's boyfriend in their own house when they've gone out of town, especially for a funeral of all things."

For a show built around the drama at Lisa Vanderpump's restaurants, it seems ironic that most of the cast members no longer work for her. Earlier seasons of "Vanderpump Rules" focused on drama occurring at SUR Restaurant & Lounge, where many of the stars worked as bartenders or servers for years as they dabbled in acting, modeling, or fashion. But throughout the decade that the show has been on television, several of its cast members have no longer needed serving jobs given the fame and fortune they've achieved as reality stars.

The former bartenders and waitresses, then, have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs with the platform "Vanderpump Rules" has given them. Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz are co-owners of their bar TomTom, Ariana Madix and Katie Maloney co-own the sandwich shop Something About Her, and Lala Kent founded Give Them Lala Beauty. While many of them are no longer frequenting SUR to clock in, Vanderpump explained that if any cast members are featured on the show working — it's not a lie. "Part of the deal is if they're working at the restaurant on the show, they have to work there legitimately," she told Thrillist in 2016.

Former original cast member Stassi Schroeder seemed to refute that claim, however, on a 2019 episode of her "Straight Up with Stassi" podcast. "Those of us who were pretending to work at the restaurant aren't really having to," she said. "They are showing what's really actually going on, and Ariana doesn't have to pretend to go clock in order to go to Mexico."

As expected about reality TV series, cast members are subject to their storylines being crafted — and sometimes manipulated — by the production team. Whether scenes are chopped into a more dramatic cut, or castmates' words are minced, most reality stars have little to no creative control. Whether they are dubbed villains or saints typically depends on those working behind the scenes.

No one knows this better than "Vanderpump Rules" star Katie Maloney. The Something About Her co-owner admitted in her 2016 interview with Galore magazine that not everything is how it appears to be on-screen. "It's pretty not-scripted, you see our relationships are real. We all have our history. There are plenty [of] shows out there that are kind of casted [sic] in ways where people don't have any kind of history prior," Maloney revealed. "But it's also hard when making a show as they can't show everything and they don't show everything that's positive, but they definitely show everything that's negative and that can paint people in certain lights that aren't true to form but [it] still is real."

In 2020, former "Vanderpump Rules" editor Bri Dellinger admitted just how manipulated these storylines can be in a since-deleted episode of the "Twisted Plot Podcast." In a clip that resurfaced on Twitter, Bellinger said: "If Scheana [Shay] knows what's good for her, she'd befriend me, because my favorite game is finding all the embarrassing things that Scheana does and putting them all in."

There's no shortage of drama anytime the cast members of "Vanderpump Rules" take a trip together. During Season 10, tensions ignited during a girls' trip to Las Vegas when Raquel Leviss hooked up with Oliver Saunders, who worked for Lisa Vanderpump's restaurant Vanderpump à Paris. After Kristina Kelly, Lala Kent, Katie Maloney, and Leviss returned home from the night out, a drunken conversation had the women questioning Leviss' intentions. "You asked me, and I ... said, 'You go for it.' But I will say, you drinking? I would never trust you around my man — never," Kent told Leviss during the March 2023 episode. Leviss responded with, "Thank God you don't have a man to like f***ing have around." 

On the "Straight Up with Stassi" podcast that June, Kelly claimed that following this conversation with Leviss, producers showed her footage of her co-stars gossiping about her to stir the pot. "We were like, 'This is changing the narrative because you're messing with [filming].' I feel like they were really trying to give [Raquel] a storyline where we were these bullies," Kelly claimed. "So, they were like, 'This needs to make sense so she needs to know what was said that night in Las Vegas.'" 

Kelly further claimed that the production team edited scenes to make it look like Leviss was crying over a subsequent argument with her co-stars, when she was supposedly really upset over Ariana Madix's dog dying. However, an insider close to production denied this production-meddling incident ever happening to Us Weekly.

It was the scandal heard around the Bravo universe — infamously dubbed "Scandoval." As previously mentioned, Raquel Leviss and Tom Sandoval's secret affair was exposed in March 2023, ending his nearly decade-long relationship with Ariana Madix. While "Vanderpump Rules" has seen its fair share of cheating scandals throughout the years, nothing compared to the illicit details of this Season 10 one. The controversy continued to shake the internet, with new info emerging each week after the initial news broke. In May 2023, for example, Madix claimed on an episode of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast that Leviss and Sandoval hooked up in their guest room while she slept in the next room. 

Part one of the three-part reunion special became the most-watched episode on the Bravo network in nine years. With the ratings setting new records, fans speculated if there might be more to the affair than meets the eye. "I personally feel like they were mapping this out," claimed "Vanderpump Rules Party" podcaster Hollie Bohorquez to Insider. Katie Cee, who co-hosts the podcast alongside Bohorquez, seconded that notion, alleging: "Production at least knew there was a strong flirtation. I think they were trying to milk it." Podcaster Lara Schoenhals similarly told the outlet that she felt the scandal could have been manufactured by production due to the show's viewership suffering a decline, claiming, "They needed something to get shaken up, to get people's interest back."

Despite these allegations, Bravo and "Vanderpump Rules" cast members alike have claimed that producers didn't know about the affair beforehand.