Tom Sandoval walked into Season 3 of The Traitors carrying one of the most publicly dissected reputations in reality-TV history, and his low-strategy Faithful game turned out to be the season’s unexpected comic relief.
Before any of that, Sandoval spent more than a decade building a Bravo career around West Hollywood bars and a relationship that eventually became the biggest scandal the network had seen in years.
Building a Vanderpump Rules Empire
Sandoval has been a main cast member of Vanderpump Rules since the show began, using that platform to build real businesses alongside his TV career, including ownership stakes in the West Hollywood bars TomTom and Schwartz & Sandy’s. He also fronts a band, The Most Extras, extending his reality-TV persona into a music career of his own.
Scandoval
In 2023, it was revealed that Sandoval had been having an affair with a Vanderpump Rules castmate while in a long-term relationship with Ariana Madix, a saga that played out across Season 10 of the show and became one of the most widely covered scandals in reality-TV history, extending his notoriety well beyond Bravo’s usual audience.
Comic Relief on The Traitors
That reputation followed Sandoval directly into the Season 3 castle. Multiple outlets covering the season reported that castmates including Chrishell Stause and Dolores Catania were openly wary of him from the start, specifically because of what they already knew about him. Rather than sinking his game, that dynamic turned into one of the season’s more entertaining subplots. Sandoval’s unpolished, low-strategy gameplay, including a memorable moment where he misspoke and had to correct himself mid-sentence, made him an unlikely source of comic relief in a season that needed it. He played the entire game as a Faithful without ever being suspected of secretly working as a Traitor, and was eventually eliminated by murder relatively late in the season, one of the longer-surviving Faithfuls despite the target on his back going in.
Life Since the Season
Since the season wrapped, Sandoval has continued fronting The Most Extras, including a stint on America’s Got Talent, and has been in a relationship with Victoria Lee Robinson. Between the bars, the band, and a Traitors run that turned an infamous reputation into genuine comic timing, Sandoval has kept finding new ways to stay in the conversation years after Scandoval first broke.