Ananda Lewis dead at 52: Former MTV VJ battled stage four breast cancer after refusing double mastectomy

Ananda Lewis had died at the age of 52 after losing her nearly seven-year battle with breast cancer.

The former MTV VJ passed away on Wednesday, June 11, as announced by her sister Lakshmi Emory via a Facebook post.

Lakshmi shared a black and white portrait of Ananda with the caption: ‘She’s free, and in His heavenly arms. Lord, rest her soul [prayer emoji]’

As a fixture on MTV in the late 1990s, Ananda hosted hit shows like Total Request Live, Hot Zone and Spring Break.

Lewis was a media trailblazer who nabbed her very own daytime TV talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show, in 2001, which ran for two seasons.

She earned two NAACP Image Awards during her career and was once deemed the ‘the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl’ by The New York Times.

Speaking to TMZ, Lakshmi confirmed that her sister died at her home in Los Angeles at 11:35am on Wednesday, June 11. She was in hospice care at the time of her death.

Ananda’s untimely death fell on the same day as her 14-year-old son Langston’s middle school graduatuon.

She shares the teen boy, her only child, with husband Harry Smith, 54, who is the younger brother of Oscar-winning actor Will Smith, 56.

Lakshmi said that a memorial would be held ‘in a few weeks’ and that celebrities who Ananda previously interview have already expressed interest in paying tribute to her at the upcoming service. 

In October 2020, Ananda announced to fans that she’d been privately battling stage 3 breast cancer for two years.

She also admitted that she’d avoided getting regular mammograms due to her fear of radiation exposure.

Two years later, Ananda confirmed that her cancer had advanced to stage IV after deciding not to undergo a double mastectomy when she was first diagnosed.

She told CNN in October 2024 that she had originally planned to ‘keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.’

But when her tumor eventually metastasized, Ananda realized that she probably ‘should have’ gone through with the life-saving surgery.

‘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,’ Lewis explained to CNN’s Stephanie Elam.

‘I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way,’ she continued, before adding: ‘Looking back on that, I go, ‘You know what? Maybe I should have.” 

Instead, Lewis pursued homeopathic remedies as well as medication and radiation, and although her situation improved for a while, she discovered last year that her cancer had spread.

‘My lymph system really flared up. It was the first time I ever had a conversation with death because I felt like: This is how it is,’ she said candidly.

‘I was just like, ‘Fudge man, I really thought I had this.’ I was frustrated, I was a little angry at myself, and I said, ‘Man, listen. I know you’re coming for me at some point. But I don’t want it to be now. And if you could just wait, I promise when you do come, I’m gonna make it fun for you.”

‘I literally had that conversation laying in my bed. I couldn’t get out of bed for, like, eight weeks,’ Lewis added.

Referring to her decision to not have surgery, Lewis said: ‘My quality of life was very important to me, like there’s a certain things I know I’m not gonna be okay with and I know myself. I want to want to be here, so I had to do it a certain way, for me.’

Days after her CNN interview, Lewis clarified her comments about refusing a double mastectomy.

In reply to a fan on Instagram, Lewis explained that she did ‘say no to the original conventional plan that was laid out before me at first’ and ‘chose the integrative approach early on.’

However, she claimed that the ‘treatments I was getting closed down and the monitoring of the tumor stopped’ due to the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.

‘Later, I felt the tumor growing and knew I had to re-consider my options with this new barrier of lockdowns. That’s when I inquired again (after having said no which I stand behind as my choice in that moment) about surgery and was told it wasn’t even something I could consider unless it was emergency surgery because that’s all hospitals were doing at that time,’ Lewis claimed.

‘There are a TON of moving parts on most people’s cancer journey and mine is no exception. I don’t know that I would’ve opted for the surgery, I just knew I needed to adapt and take another look at all my options if I wanted to live.’

Lewis said that she chose to be transparent about her cancer journey so that ‘other women may learn from it, good or bad.’

Ananda spoke about her cancer battle more recently in an essay published in the January 2025 issue of Essence magazine.

The star stressed the importance of cancer prevention, dubbing it the ‘real cure.’

‘We’re not meant to stay here forever. We come to this life, have experiences — and then we go. 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,’ she wrote.

‘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.”

Lewis worked as an MTV veejay from 1997 until 2001, when she left the network to host her own broadcast syndicated television talk show, The Ananda Lewis Show.

She was a correspondent for The Insider from 2004 to 2005.

She then became a carpenter and hosted the 2019 revival of While You Were Out on TLC.

Lewis was born in Los Angeles but her parents’ divorce when she was just two-years-old led to her being raised by her mother and grandmother in San Diego, California along with her sister Lakshmi.

She attended an arts high school before studying at historic Howard University, which she graduated from in 1995.

Lewis first garnered TV fame as a host of BET’s youth talk-show Teen Summit in Washington D.C., where she famously interviewed then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

In a 1999 interview with Teen People, Lewis said that that interview was what ‘got me noticed at MTV and in August of 1997, I moved to New York and started working there.’