Anika Rashaun, who appeared on MTV’s The Real World Seattle: Bad Blood and The Challenge: Invasion of the Champions, died October 1 after a battle with stage 4 breast cancer. She was 34. Her death was confirmed by friends, including Cyndi Rich and Tiara Ramos, across social media.
Rashaun first appeared on The Real World Seattle: Bad Blood in 2016 at age 24, a season built around housemates being joined by people they considered personal rivals; she was paired with her ex-boyfriend of three years, Will Groomes. She returned to the MTV universe the following year for The Challenge: Invasion of the Champions, where she was eliminated in the third episode. After reality television, Rashaun built a career as a matchmaker, dating coach, and advice columnist, launching her own lifestyle and relationship brand, ASKANIKA, and was training to become a licensed marriage and family therapist.
In a Substack tribute, her close friend Tiara Ramos wrote that Rashaun was diagnosed last summer despite her mother’s own history with breast cancer, noting she was never flagged as high-risk or advised to prioritize mammograms, a gap Ramos described as one of several failures within the medical system Rashaun encountered during treatment. In a podcast conversation the two recorded roughly a year before her death, Rashaun spoke about the rising number of young women being diagnosed with breast cancer and urged others not to assume it couldn’t happen to them simply because they lacked a known family history, something she said she’d believed herself before her own diagnosis. Ramos described Rashaun as unapologetically herself, fiercely loyal to her friends, and uniquely persuasive, while fellow Real World and Challenge castmate Theo King-Bradley remembered her as someone who always told him the truth even when it was hard to hear.
Rashaun married her husband, Kyle Rehn, on Valentine’s Day this year in San Marcos, California, writing on Instagram afterward that the day felt like a dream.