Popular New Zealand fitness influencer Raechelle Chase died suddenly from unreported causes at only 44 years of age.
News of the death was released by her oldest daughter, Anna Chase, who said her mother died earlier this month, according to News.com.au.
The Chase family has not released a cause of death.
The New Zealand Coroner’s Office says they are looking into the death but have not said if they suspect any wrongdoing.
“Given the recent nature of the death, no further information is available at this stage,” a spokesman for the New Zealand Ministry of Justice added.
In 2011, Raechelle Chase became the first New Zealand woman to qualify for the Figure Olympia bodybuilding event. She went on to compete in a series of international meets.
She later became a fitness model and had a social media presence that garnered more than 1.4 million followers.
In her final post, Chase posted a photo from a photoshoot for an upcoming cover of Oxygen Magazine — one of more than a dozen covers she appeared on during her modeling career.
Raechelle was married to Chris Chase for 14 years and bore five children with him. But she divorced him in 2015, just before he was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for selling illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
Chase said her marriage was a “toxic” relationship and warned her social media followers to get help for the children’s sake.
“If you know you are in an abusive relationship and you don’t have the courage to leave, do it for your children,” she wrote. “Grab hold of whatever you need long enough to survive crawling out of that hole because I promise you it will be worth it.”
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