Overview
- The California Court of Appeal denied Ariana Madix’s appeal on Wednesday, ruling she cannot have Rachel Leviss’s 2024 revenge‑porn complaint thrown out at this early stage.
- Appellate judges made clear they were not resolving the factual disputes and limited their judgment to rejecting Madix’s free‑speech defense.
- Leviss’s lawsuit says Madix accessed and copied intimate FaceTime videos from Tom Sandoval’s phone and then distributed them, grounding claims for revenge porn, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
- Madix has publicly denied sending the videos to others and says she only showed snippets to Leviss, while Sandoval has also disputed the claims against him.
- The ruling lets the lower‑court process proceed to fact‑finding and trial, a development that could influence how courts treat privately recorded sexual material that becomes part of a public scandal.