Ananda Lewis, former MTV video jockey and television show host, has died at 52 after a years-long battle with breast cancer.
Lewis rose to fame on BET’s “Teen Summit” and hosted “The Ananda Lewis Show” in the early aughts, before being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019.
Her sister, Lakshmi Emory, broke the news of Lewis’ death in a Facebook post, writing, “[S]he’s free and in His heavenly arms. Lord rest her soul.” Emory told TMZ that Lewis died Wednesday morning from Stage 4 breast cancer while in hospice care at her Los Angeles home.
Lewis grew up in San Diego and graduated from Howard University in 1995. She began her entertainment career as the host of “Teen Summit,” where she discussed issues affecting teenagers and interviewed then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
MTV then hired her to be a VJ in 1997 and she quickly gained popularity hosting shows such as “Total Request Live” and “Hot Zone.” In 1999, the New York Times called her “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.” She left the network in 2001 to host her own talk show and later worked as a correspondent for entertainment news show “The Insider.”
She revealed her cancer diagnosis in a 2020 Instagram post, saying that she had not been getting mammograms due to her fears around radiation and urging her follows to make sure they are staying on top of their breast exams.
“This is tough for me, but if just ONE woman decides to get her mammogram after watching this, what I’m going through will be worth it,” she said.
She spoke at length about her battle with the disease in a 2024 roundtable discussion with CNN correspondents Stephanie Elam, who was one of her close friends, and Sara Sidner, a breast cancer survivor.
Lewis described first discovering a lump in her breast in 2019 and said that, although doctors recommended a double mastectomy at the time, she opted to pursue alternative therapies and focus on cleansing her body of toxins and emotional stress.
She later relocated to Arizona, where she combined holistic and conventional treatments through approaches such as insulin-potentiation chemotherapy — where patients take lower chemotherapy doses because of a theory that insulin lets more of the drug enter cells. She said she encountered financial difficulties that made it challenging to keep up with her holistic regimen of treatment.
By October 2023, her scans showed that the cancer had metastasized in her spine, through her hips and into her lymph nodes.
During the roundtable, Lewis highlighted the fact that Black women are at a disproportionately high risk of dying from breast cancer, attributing that, in part, to a mistrust of the medical system.
“Our inability to be comfortable with doctors goes way back,” she said. “We have a rightful distrust of the medical industry that we need to get over, but we are not going to negate that it came from somewhere and that it’s real.”
Although Black women and white women are affected by breast cancer at similar rates, Black women are around 40% more likely to die from the disease, according to data compiled by the American Cancer Society.
Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report
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