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Ananda Lewis, the former MTV video jockey and talk show host, has died. She was 52.
The Los Angeles-born presenter and born announced in October last year that her breast cancer had spread and progressed to stage 4.
Her death was announced in a Facebook post by her sister Lakshmi, who wrote: “She’s free, and in His heavenly arms. Lord, rest her soul.”
Lewis was born on March 21, 1973. While a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she featured prominently as the love interest in the hit music video for “Baby, I’m Yours” by R&B group Shai, which was filmed on the campus.
In 1996, while the host of BET's Teen Summit, she interviewed then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
The following year, she shot to mainstream fame when she was hired as one of the hosts of MTV’s Total Request Live and Hot Zone. In 1999, she was described by The New York Times as “the hip-hop generation's reigning It Girl.”
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In 2001, Lewis left MTV to host her own talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show. The show aired on some WB and NBC stations before being canceled after one season. Producers later blamed the fact that the show first aired on September 10, 2001, the day before New York City was hit by devastating terror attacks.
In 2004, Lewis started hosting CBS show The Insider, a spin-off of Entertainment Tonight.
In an Instagram post in 2020, Lewis announced that she had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She encouraged women to receive annual mammograms because she had avoided them due to a fear of radiation exposure.
In 2024, Lewis appeared during a round-table discussion on CNN where she admitted her doctors recommended she receive a double mastectomy after her diagnosis, but she refused.
“My plan at first was to get out excessive toxins in my body. I felt like my body is intelligent, I know that to be true. Our bodies are brilliantly made,” she told the hosts.
“I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way. Looking back on that, I go, ‘You know what? Maybe I should have.’”
She added of her decision not to undergo surgery: “My quality of life was very important to me… I want to want to be here. So I had to do it a certain way, for me.”
According to the CNN segment, Lewis’s methods of treating her breast cancer included medication, radiation, and improving her sleep and diet. Despite a period of improvement, she discovered in 2023 that her cancer had spread.
“My lymph system really flared up,” she explained. “It was the first time I ever had a conversation with death because I felt like, this is how it is.”
Lewis is survived by her son, Langston, who was born in 2011 to Lewis and Harry Smith, brother of Will Smith.
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