Chrishell Stause Thinks Tom Sandoval Made First ‘Attack’ on ‘The Traitors’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This story contains spoilers from season 3 of The Traitors.

Chrishell Stause stayed “faithful” to her friend, Ariana Madix, while filming the The Traitors alongside Madix’s ex-boyfriend, Tom Sandoval.

Stause, who was one of 24 contestants on the third season of The Traitors, spoke to PEOPLE about the castle dynamics and the tension between her and the Vanderpump Rules alum, 42.

The Emmy-winning show puts an unlikely mix of reality TV stars competing to solve a murder mystery game in exchange for $250,000. At the start of the season, host Alan Cumming picked three traitors at the roundtable, and immediately, Sandoval suspected Stause — quickly causing tension between the two.

But Stause, 43, tells PEOPLE before Cumming, 60, picked the traitors, she and Sandoval had a quick conversation off camera about their shared connection in Madix, who happens to be a friend of Stause.

“I basically just said, like, ‘Oh, hey. Hope this isn’t awkward.’ I just kind of said, ‘Love Ariana,’ something like, ‘I’d been friends with her.’ So I guess I was kind of making conversation, like, ‘Hope this isn’t you know anything’ and he just kind of laughed it off. He was like, ‘No, of course not. Of course not,'” she recalls.

Stause then assumed it was “anecdotal at the time.” But “it wasn’t until after the round table — with nothing to go off of  — that he was telling everyone I was traitor,” she tells PEOPLE.

“That I really felt like that was a personal attack,” she explains. “I had made that comment about Ariana, and being friends with her. So I just felt like, after that moment on, it was personal.”

The Selling Sunset star was referring to Sandoval’s immediate reaction at the first roundtable, citing his conversation with Dylan Efron when he speculated that Stause was a traitor. Once Efron, 33, informed Stause, she asked him, Nikki Garcia and Traitor Danielle Reyes: “Do you think it’s because I’m friends with Ariana and he knows that? That’s sabotage!”

She tells PEOPLE that since watching the show, Sandoval has insisted he “wasn’t playing personal,” but Stause quips, “In my opinion, he started it.”

Noting that “it is hard” for her to move past his personal attack, she adds, “After that, I was done with him. But, it’s a game, so it’s all good.”

Stause says it was never her intention to bring up her friendship with Madix to her game. “I honestly didn’t even mean this to be a storyline,” she explains. “The fact that it played into everything. It was not my intention whatsoever.”

“I only brought it up because I was trying to make the point that he has nothing to go off of,” she reiterates. “This is the only reason he’s saying this. Truly, he had that.”

Stause’s feelings on Sandoval seemed to have extended past filming. When she posted the cast’s official photos on Instagram in November, she blocked out the image of the Bravo star. Fans speculated in her comments section about why she left him out, assuming she did it intentionally due to some bad blood between the reality stars.

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New episodes of The Traitors stream Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on Peacock.