Lewis was vocal about wanting others to practice prevention.
MTV personality Ananda Lewis, who hosted shows including the popular
Total Request Live
in the late ʼ90s, before going on to host her own daytime talk show, and then to speak openly about her struggle with breast cancer, has died, her sister announced Wednesday on
Facebook
. She was 52.
“She’s free, and in His heavenly arms,” her sister Lakshmi Emory captioned a post. “Lord, rest her soul.”
No cause of death was given, but Lewis had been vocal about having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018. She broke the news in 2020, explaining that she was sharing it in the hopes it would help others.
“For a really long time, I have refused mammograms, and that was a mistake,” Lewis said then. “I watched my mom get mammograms for 30 years almost, and at the end of that, she had breast cancer, and I said, ‘Huh. Radiation exposure for years… breast cancer. Yeah, I’m going to pass. Thanks anyway.'”
Lewis said she caught the tumor through a self-exam of her breasts, and she regretted that she had not caught it sooner.
“I need you to get your mammograms,” she advised her followers.
At the time, Lewis said she had a nine-year-old son that she needed to be there for.
“I have no intention on leaving him,” she said. “I don’t want to leave any of my kids. I don’t want to leave my friends or my family. Hell, I don’t want to leave myself. I like being here. So, listen, this is not how this was supposed to go, but I’m just going to keep it real with you like I always do.”
Born in Los Angeles, Lewis graduated from Howard University in 1995. She was then hired to host BET’s
Teen Summit
, where she covered issues important to teenagers and interviewed the likes of first lady Hillary Clinton,
“That experience got me noticed at MTV,” she
told
Teen People
, “and in August of 1997, I moved to New York and started working there.”
By 1999, the
New York Times
deemed her ”
the hip-hop generation’s reigning it Girl
” in a profile.
Lewis left MTV in 2001 to host her own talk show,
The Ananda Lewis Show
, which aired for one season.
She appeared on the reality series
Celebrity Mole: Yucatán
in 2004, alongside celebrities including Keshia Knight Pulliam, Dennis Rodman, and Stephen Baldwin.
After that, she hosted shows including
Entertainment Tonight
spin-off
The Insider
, A&E’s
America’s Top Dog
, and TLC’s
While You Were Out
.
The TV star also continued to chronicle her bout with cancer. She lamented having declined a doctor’s recommendation to have a double mastectomy after receiving her diagnosis, she said in a CNN round-table discussion about breast cancer in October. She said then that the cancer was at stage IV.
In a January essay for
Essence
about the importance of prevention, she shared her philosophy on the end of life.
“We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go,” she said. “Being real about that with yourself changes how you choose to live. I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to suffering unnecessarily. That, for me, is not the quality of life I’m interested in. When it’s time for me to go, I want to be able to look back on my life and say, I did that exactly how I wanted to. We all have that right. I know I’ve done the right thing for me. It might not be the right thing for anybody else, but it doesn’t have to be.”
Following her death, MTV’s official Instagram account shared a statement: “We’re saddened to learn of the passing of beloved MTV VJ, Ananda Lewis. Through her on-air hosting and interviews, Ananda helped raise a generation of music fans. Our thoughts are with her family & loved ones.”
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