She was the “Latina Marilyn Monroe,” and she died chasing beauty in the pink-walled sanctuary of her $4 million Malibu mansion.
Cindyana Santangelo, 58, bled out on her massage table after an unlicensed “butt lady” pumped deadly silicone into her body on March 24, 2025 — even though the same woman had already killed someone while doing the exact same procedure.
“It broke my heart,” her husband Frank Santangelo told The California Post exclusively from the sprawling home where his wife of 24 years drew her last breath.
The “Married… With Children” actress and mother of two had been getting bioidentical hormone treatments that left her backside “lumpy” and “uneven.” She was excited about smoothing things out with a $3,500 butt-lift injection.
“She wanted every part of her to be beautiful,” Santangelo said.
Dubbed the “Latina Marilyn Monroe” because of a role she had in a Jane’s Addiction music video for the song “Stop,” Santangelo found solace in her upstairs “beauty room.” The room featured a pink massage table, a wall of mirrors, and mementos of Marilyn Monroe.
Around 3:30 p.m., heavily tattooed Libby Adame rolled up to the mansion after being referred by Cindyana’s Botox beautician. The actress was so intrigued by Adame’s ink that she snapped photos of tattoos on her side and butt.
“My wife, she’s really intrigued about tattoos. So my wife took pictures of all this woman’s tattoos on her side and her butt,” Santangelo said. At 4 p.m. while in the “beauty room,” Adame, known as the “Butt Lady,” plunged the needle into Cindyana’s buttocks.
Minutes later, Adame called downstairs asking for watermelon juice.
When Santangelo rushed up, he found his wife struggling to breathe, blood dripping from her backside.
“When I got up to the room, I noticed that there was something wrong with her. She was struggling to breathe, my wife’s buttocks, there was blood dripping out of it so there was something that wasn’t right,” recalled Santangelo.
He immediately called 911. Adame told him she had something that might help her in the car, but that was a lie. She grabbed Cindyana’s phone and fled the scene, according to Santangelo.
Cindyana told her husband that she had never felt so much pain in her chest and thought she “was having a heart attack,” he told The Post.
When paramedics arrived they tried frantically to save her life as she was struggling to breathe, her husband said.
“They tried to sit her up, they laid her down, finally they put her on the stretcher and they were giving her oxygen,” Santangelo said.
She was rushed to the hospital where she was pronounced dead shortly after 6 p.m. Officials ruled that an embolism from a silicone injection caused her death.
“When I saw her she had already passed. They let my son and me go see her and I could see the imprint of the paddles on her heart — that tore me to shreds,” Santangelo said on the verge of tears.
The race was on to find “the butt-lady.” Police were able to retrieve the photos of Adame’s tattoos from iCloud that were taken on the stolen phone.
After a two-month investigation, Adame was arrested and charged with Cindyana’s murder.
The trial forced Santangelo and Cindyana’s best friend Monique Alexander to relive the horror of that fateful afternoon.
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“I mean, she was just so full of life and energy, and it’s just, it’s really strange not to have her here,” Alexander said.
It was also revealed during the trial that Adame had killed someone before while conducting the same procedure.
She was on probation, when she visited the Santangelo home, from an involuntary manslaughter case over the fatal 2019 buttocks injections that killed 26-year-old Karissa Rajpaul in Sherman Oaks, California.
Adame was convicted in October 2025 of second-degree murder and practicing medicine without a license in connection with the actress’s death. She was sentenced to 14 years to life in prison.
Santangelo’s attorney David Olan said there is a civil suit against Adame in the works.
Santangelo says there’s no sentence that will ease the pain of losing his wife, but warns everyone should check the license of anyone conducting dangerous cosmetic procedures.
“You should never have anybody who’s not a medical practitioner to give you any kind of shot in the buttocks. It’s the most dangerous beauty procedure there is.”
The post My wife got a butt injection and bled out in our $4M Malibu home — I have a tragic warning about the gruesome way she died appeared first on New York Post.
