A California appellate court has refused to overturn a July 2024 ruling that kept Ariana Madix in Rachel Leviss’ invasion of privacy and revenge porn lawsuit, a decision that leaves the case alive after more than two years of delay.
The ruling matters now because the appeal had frozen the case while Leviss waited for a hearing on allegations that sexually explicit videos of her were made and shared without her consent. The next court date is set for Aug. 11, and that hearing is now the first clear step forward after the long pause.
Leviss filed the lawsuit in February 2024, saying Tom Sandoval made intimate recordings without her consent and that Madix improperly obtained and shared sexually explicit videos she found on Sandoval’s phone. In July 2024, the lower court said Madix’s conduct was not protected speech and was not a matter of public interest, which is why her attempt to knock the case out early failed then and failed again on appeal.
Madix has said she secretly accessed Sandoval’s phone without his knowledge or permission, copied the FaceTime videos while inside a women’s bathroom stall and sent snippets directly to Leviss the night she found them. She has also said she did not send the videos to anyone else, that Sandoval later grabbed her phone and deleted them, and that she texted Logan Cochran minutes later to say she no longer had the videos.
That split between the two accounts is what has kept the case so combustible. Madix says she limited the material to Leviss and then lost it almost immediately. Leviss says the videos were retrieved and shared as revenge porn. The appellate court’s refusal to intervene does not decide the full case, but it does leave Madix in it and clears the way for the lawsuit to move toward the Aug. 11 status hearing.
For Leviss, the decision ends the latest effort to stall a case that has been on ice for more than two years. What happens on Aug. 11 will not resolve the dispute, but it should determine whether the lawsuit finally starts moving on the merits instead of on appeal.
