Ariana Madix Is a Woman Vindicated

By Perrie Samotin

Photography by Celeste Sloman

It's far better for a man to live on the roof than with a contentious woman. Bible scholars might recognize this (shamelessly) paraphrased adage from Proverbs 21:9, while the rest of us might nod knowingly because we recognize its point from simply being alive. It's been roughly 1,007 years since that particular portion of the Old Testament was said to have been written and precisely 97 days since the modern world was given a new chapter in a different kind of bible, the Book of Bravo. And in the story of Scandoval, the woman—not contentious but not servile either—has a name, and it's Ariana Madix. The man in question wasn't living on the roof of the Valley Village farmhouse he shared with her but decided to fuck her best friend in order to escape his reality. The more things change, as they say.

It's here we must pause and wonder whether anyone reading this really needs a comprehensive rundown of the Vanderpump Rules drama that has captivated everyone from a roomful of politicians to Jennifer Lopez. You already know the players, you’ve already pored over the timeline. What you do need to know is that Madix, a 37-year-old former bartender, had a partner in work and in life for nine years before he cheated on her with their 28-year-old dear friend and costar Rachel Leviss. Madix's sex life and sexuality has since been publicly scrutinized, her known apathy toward marriage and procreation is now a thing to be reexamined, her struggles with mental health have been weaponized by someone she once trusted. A less enterprising woman might have done nothing but shriek into a pillow for the last 97 days, but Madix has chosen to leverage her pain and lend some of it to Bic. And Uber 1. And Lay's. And Bloomingdale's. And finance app SoFi. And Nutrafol. And the custom merch for Something About Her, the sandwich shop she's about to open with costar Katie Maloney, which has brought in around $200,000. All in, Madix has reportedly netted upwards of $1 million on the back of her breakup. Having a boyfriend is great, but have you ever had corporate money hurtling into your checking account?

Good American tank top. Mother denim jeans. Azlee jewelry.

Madix used to be one half of a brand, a fact her ex-boyfriend valued and claimed was partially why he stayed in the relationship. She is now a brand of one, barely checking the rearview mirror on the way to the bank. She has said yes to almost every sponsored opportunity that has come her way and will continue to do so with the goal of financial independence. "We have no generational wealth in our family," she says. "I want to make enough money to be able to take care of my mom and my brother and any other family members who may or may not need it. I never want to worry about it ever, ever, ever. So I will work as much as possible to not have to." She's lived out of her car before and never wants to go back. She's rumored to have snagged a spot on Dancing With the Stars. And the press! The New York Times, the Today show, Call Her Daddy, this cover story. Why, yes, she's totally open to a spin-off with Maloney—she's open to everything. She is the moment, and she is a woman vindicated. Somewhere in the great beyond, Mary Wollstonecraft is beaming.

Ariana Madix tells me her favorite part of reading a magazine profile is when the writer describes the subject's clothing. "Like when they say, ‘She sauntered in wearing….’" She was already seated at a table on the patio of a private club in Hollywood when I arrived—not only a resilient queen but a punctual one!—so there was no saunter to speak of, but I managed to clock the ’fit for this very reason. Black jeans, white ribbed tank, black blazer, high-top Jordans, and a white mini backpack I found out later was 50 bucks. Because she said she likes when writers do this, I’ll go on. Her makeup was natural, her skin glowing, her icy blonde hair pulled back in a low bun with a part more centered than a Vanderpump Rules fan after a yoga retreat.

Here before me is a woman who looks entirely at peace with the garbage hand she has been dealt—a hand that has, for better or worse, turned a fun but somewhat deflated 10-year-old reality show into must-see TV. Literally: The May 17 season 10 finale drew a combined audience of 4.1 million viewers across Bravo, on-demand, and the Peacock streaming platform within three days, more than double the amount of people that tuned in for last season's finale. The May 28 series finale of HBO's prestige drama Succession, by the way, drew a combined audience of 2.9 million.

Good American tank top. Mother denim jeans. Azlee jewelry.

I’d argue that the Scandoval, as it's referred to for obvious reasons, has reached Aniston-Pitt-Jolie levels of public fervor despite the fact that nobody involved would be classified as global superstars. Why, oh why, do people care this much?

"There are layers to it," Madix says after we order a smoked salmon flatbread and a round of spritz-y cocktails. "The best-friend layer, the fact that [he] 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." She also acknowledges the impact social media has had on what ordinarily might seem like a shitty but not unheard-of situation. When you’re on a reality show and your relationship has played out in real time for more than a decade, it's easy for amateur sleuths to go back to the beginning and look for signs that things were amiss and post their theories to Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. But: "I can get bogged down in scrolling," she says.

One of the phrases Madix uses when describing the moment she found out her ex-boyfriend was cheating is "women's intuition." Despite being a "snooper" in past relationships, she says she made a conscious decision to not be that version of herself when she started dating her ex nine years ago. How she discovered his betrayal has been well documented—she was holding on to his phone for safekeeping while he was performing with his band one night, when something made her punch in the (unchanged) passcode. One sexually explicit video later, here we are. "I think the shock prevents you from being sad immediately," she says when I ask what she felt at that moment. "It was like the air was sucked out of my lungs. It was shock, disbelief on some level, but then also anger." And his reaction when she confronted him? "When you've been caught red-handed like that, there's no denying it," she says. "It's cold, hard evidence. So I think he was struggling. I think he was really mad that his little house of cards was crumbling."

According to Madix, her ex promptly changed his phone passcode as soon as they got home that night and generally would hide proof of the affair in innocent-seeming apps—vault apps made to look like the iPhone calculator, or the Notes app, which she says was synced to their shared laptop—just in case she did ever peek.

"A few weeks after all of this [broke], I was just doing stuff on the laptop," Madix says. "I bought it, so it's mine now—and I found all kinds of stuff in the Notes app. It would be a note labeled ‘restaurant,’ but then way down at the bottom there's screenshots of text messages and things like that."

A woman would never be that dumb, I tell her. "No," she says.

She admits it's occasionally been hard seeing the man she shared her life with for nine years become the internet's collective punching bag, but the reality of what he did erases any lingering empathy. It's difficult, as a woman, to watch the current season of Vanderpump Rules and not be slightly sickened by the ex-boyfriend's self-pity, the pouty schtick he puts on to justify his actions. It's familiar territory for any woman who has been cheated on: You weren't giving your man enough time, you always talked down to him, you never wanted to have sex, you weren't supportive enough. It's unfortunate that it went down the way it did, but surely Madix has got to feel some sort of relief, a little bit of weight being lifted? "I definitely feel this sense of freedom because I was the adviser," she says, "the sounding board. And he didn't like that he wasn't getting constant validation from his adviser. Now I feel like I don't have to worry about anybody but myself."

Cynthia Rowley sweater.

The narrative around sex—or rather, the lack of it—is particularly hard to watch. "I feel like I'm someone who craves intimacy outside of just penetrative sex," Madix says. "And that was something that I was deprived of for so long. As women, we might bring something up a bunch of times and then we just stop. That's where I was at. I was like I cannot keep nagging this man to want to come home and spend time with me."

I nod, and then she says: "The way that so many men act like they are entitled to your body and entitled to sex because you're in a relationship with them. I am not your Fleshlight. I spelled out what I needed, but hello. It's a two-person situation."

Madix wasn't able to confront Leviss in person that night, as she was in New York for Bravo's Watch What Happens Live, but she did send her a succinct text message—"You’re dead to me"—before calling her up and demanding answers. "She was somewhat emotionless," she says of her former friend's reaction, a word that's become synonymous with Leviss during the last 97 days. "And I was devastated."

Public humiliation is the lifeblood of reality television. If fans wanted prize-winning narrative arcs or themes worthy of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Goethe, we’d have The Sopranos or The Wire or even The Simpsons on loop. No, we want table flipping, we want catchphrases, we want proposals and retracted proposals, we want Scary Island, we want shocking exits. We don't so much want jail sentences, fake cancer diagnoses, or genuinely horrific monsters, but we understand those are often by-products of a genre that exists without scripts. We aren't watching idols or finely drawn characters dreamed up in the writers room. These are real people who, as we love to point out, signed up for—gestures wildly—all of this. Maybe we won't admit it, but we enjoy feasting on the bones of other people's poor choices. Even the people who try to do the right thing on reality TV are often considered jesters, jokes, sad sacks. Almost everybody appears to have an unquenchable thirst for fame or infamy and it shows. But Ariana Madix, as fans of Vanderpump Rules will surely attest, always seemed a little bit different. More content being her actual self, less me, me, me!

Madix was born in 1985 and raised on Florida's Space Coast, a 72-mile stretch along the Atlantic Ocean that's home to orbital-launch stations like Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and describes her upbringing as "pretty great." Her late father was a commercial roofing contractor, and her mother is a project manager who deals primarily with space-related companies. "My parents both worked really hard," she says. "We weren't rich by any means, but we certainly had the best that they could have given." Growing up as a ’90s kid, Madix became infatuated with horses and begged her mom for lessons, something she says her mother never got growing up and wanted to give her daughter. At the age of six, she started riding and also got into theater. "Horse girl, theater kid. Those were the two things," she says. She was also an exceptional student—the phrases "big overachiever" and "teacher's pet" get thrown around—excelling mostly at math and science. By high school she was in AP classes and had added cheerleading to her list of extracurriculars. "I think my senior year, I was in eight or 10 different clubs," she says.

I ask whether her parents ever pushed her and she says no, but she does have some newfound realizations that came from doing inner-child work in therapy as an adult. "My dad would not come home," Madix shares. "He's no longer with us and I love him and feel like he was going through some stuff and doing his best in a lot of ways, but he would have a tendency to be done with work and be at the dive bar as opposed to helping us with our homework. And my mom did everything." Therapy has helped her realize that maybe her overachieving was a coping mechanism. "If I’m perfect, then he’ll want to be there."

A point of contention with both parents after high school centered around the fact that she got accepted to an acting conservatory in New York, but no matter how prestigious, programs like that don't come with a bachelor's degree—something that seems to possess an almost mythic importance to some Gen X and boomer parents. "They said, ‘No, you need to get a real degree,’" Madix says. And so off she went to Flagler, a small private college in Saint Augustine, Florida, where she says she's made lifelong friends. "Looking back, I would never change it, but in the moment, I was begrudgingly going because I wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway."

She did make it to New York. After college and summer programs at NYU, she packed all her shit and moved into an apartment on Manhattan's East 13th Street. She stayed for five years during what the internet now calls the "Indie Sleaze" era, hostessing and bartending at Butter, an exclusive restaurant and lounge that helped usher in the city's early-aughts nightlife resurgence. There was no social media, only digital cameras to capture, as Madix puts it, "late nights at Home Sweet Home just pouring sweat or The Box." She bartended at a touristy Western-themed bar near Rockefeller Center with a mechanical bull, she go-go-danced at clubs in the Meatpacking District, she promoted cigarettes. "I was a hustler," she says, matter-of-factly. The hustling was warranted: Everyone knows you do what you can to get by in a prohibitively expensive place like New York if you’re not a trust-fund kid or a finance bro, especially if you want to be an actor.

Like many aspiring performers during the dawn of social media, Madix gravitated toward indie web series and College Humor videos. "I was doing acting stuff, but I couldn't push past whatever [I needed to] because I didn't have legitimate television credits or anything to be able to move into the next level," she says. Los Angeles was never on her bucket list—she says she imagined a world in which she’d find success without ever having to move to Hollywood—until she and a friend made a list weighing the pros and cons of leaving New York for California. The pros were bountiful, she says, and so in October of 2010, she headed west and picked up a bartending gig at a glitzy Beverly Hills restaurant called Villa Blanca, owned by entrepreneur and newly minted Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump. Madix—having come from New York with no cable—never heard of the show. When a spin-off was floated that would focus on Vanderpump's attractive young staff, her coworker and friend Scheana Shay convinced her to take part, but she was hesitant.

Eventually, it was her acting teacher who convinced her to try it out. She was featured sporadically in early seasons after hooking up with her now ex-boyfriend—who was in a relationship with another castmate at the time, Kristen Doute, it should be noted—and became an official cast member in season three and emerged as a cooler-headed foil to everyone else's hysteria. Madix's storylines tend to carry more gravitas than others and often center around her struggles with mental health, body image, and personal losses. The deaths of her father, her grandmother, and her beloved dog Charlotte, were all heavily documented. And then came the Scandoval. Suddenly the cast member with the least proclivity for drama is the reason that people who have never seen a single episode of VPR were starting from season one just to join the cultural conversation. Still, she hopes the worst is behind her. "Sometimes I’m like, Can't I just have a really fun summer where nothing bad happens, where I’m great, you know?" she says. "Maybe this is the year."

During a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, which took place the day after the second installment of the Vanderpump Rules reunion, our server checks in on us no less than six times and the restaurant not only sends over free dessert but also picks up a round of drinks. The reservation wasn't made in her name and the venue isn't open to the public, so this speaks to the power that Vanderpump Rules has and the visibility it's given Madix. Unlike with some traditional celebrity interviews, she didn't decline to answer questions, giving quick and candid replies to anything I ask. No, she did not threaten to kill herself if her ex-boyfriend dumped her, which is the narrative he's been pushing. Yes, she did say that if they split she probably wouldn't do the show anymore. "He was very offended by that idea," she says. "He's like, ‘I helped you build this whole brand and this Instagram following [but] who the fuck cares?" Did she ever have an inkling he was capable of this, or maybe turned a blind eye? "No. I literally thought he was a completely different person than he is." She still has not heard from her ex's family. Is she still friends with Tom Schwartz? That's a no. "He was very instrumental in all of it. And I was not aware of that at the time. He knew about all of it since August, at least."

L’Agence dress. Azlee rings.

I imagine starring on TV as yourself has its ups and downs. It's an odd sort of fame, one that opens the door for people to say whatever they want about you because they feel like they know you. Like most female reality personalities, Madix says her face and body have been relentlessly scrutinized—too skinny, not skinny enough, too natural, too injected. This is something she's come to terms with, although for someone who has struggled with disordered eating and anxiety, it's hard to shake. Another downside for some might be fans assuming you’re always game to chitchat and take photos when they see you out and about—she claims her ex-boyfriend would go out, get recognized by a bunch of girls, and complain about it when he got home—but she just won't go out if she's not in the mood to engage because she says she never wants to be rude to anybody. For the most part, though, the direct line she's able to have with fans is sacred. And that's part of the reason she's so willing to let us in on this painful chapter in her life.

"I feel close to a lot of people who watch the show or who will come to BravoCon or who I'll message with on Instagram," she says. "I know maybe it sounds silly—we're strangers—but I do feel close to them." She says many have thanked her for openly talking about her struggles with mental heath and loss. "I feel like we're a community. And so with this, I hope that in talking about it and allowing [Bravo] to capture it, maybe I’ll be able to connect with a community of people who will be able to say, ‘This is how I got through this. This is what worked for me.’"

Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules starts shooting this summer. Madix is still in the same house as her ex, though she's looking to move, so we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. She's dating someone new. She's not totally sold on the idea of marriage, but you never know. "I still wouldn't want a wedding," she says. "For me, it's about the marriage. There's something about weddings, and the fanfare, and the bachelorette. I just don't want any of that. And I think that's a big part of it for me."

She's looking forward to diving headfirst into her new business venture, the sandwich shop, with her friend and costar. "I feel really, really confident about it," she says. "It looks amazing inside. The design is pretty much finished. We're working on the menu, and then hiring." What should I order? The Greek salad sandwich, Madix's favorite.

Before we part, I have to ask her about the circulating theory that Scandoval is fake, that Bravo manufactured the drama for ratings or profit or whatever. She says it's frustrating, but she kind of understands where people are coming from: "If I was not a fan, like I wasn't really paying attention, I might think that about any given show at any given time." Would anyone really blow up their life for a television show? Maybe, but not Madix. "If someone says that on my page, they get blocked immediately. If they tag me in a comment that says that, I'll block them immediately. I'm kind of like, ‘Fuck off, this is my real life.’"

Madix sometimes fantasizes about leaving Los Angeles and disappearing into the French countryside and working at a shop or something romantic like that. I ask her if she realistically thinks she could do that, not logistically—anyone can buy a ticket to France—but could she really leave the spotlight behind? Wouldn't she miss the fame she's cultivated? "I think I love change," she says. "I picked up and moved to New York with no friends and no job. I moved from New York to LA with no friends, no job, no money. If I picked up from LA and I moved…. It's like being a new version of myself."

Perrie Samotin is Glamour's digital director and host of Glamour's What I Wore When podcast. Follow her @perriesamotin.