Why ’90s fitness icon Susan Power fell from fame (exclusive)

Susan Power I never expected to become a fitness guru when I first started teaching exercise and nutrition to fellow stay-at-home moms in Texas.

Power, 66, was simply hoping to connect with other women who might be interested in her story, which has become the basis of her hugely popular Stop the madness! fitness commercials, and best-selling books and videos from the early 90s. She weighed 260 pounds. a mother of two whose husband left her for another woman and who took revenge by getting into shape.

“I just got up and talked to women,” she tells PEOPLE. “That’s what I did in the commercial. It was not rehearsed, not according to the script. And these women responded.”

When Power signed her first contract with her manager and the investor partner who founded her company, “it was for an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line. That’s it,” she says. But within a year she appeared on a national daytime talk show. Home show and received a $2 million advance for her first book. “Nobody expected this,” she says.

The success “was huge and it was fun,” he says powerwho was enough of a cultural icon that SNL spoofed her and named her one of PEOPLE’s 25 Most Intriguing People of 1993. “And that was the biggest relief as a single mom because I thought, ‘Damn, I can make a life.’ And I had a current musician husband who never worked in our marriage, and an ex-husband who I paid to look after his children.”

But she soon realized that she had given up too much control and money to her business partners. “I didn’t run my company; it was a 50/50 deal,” she says. And the business began to push her to be something she wasn’t.

“They started making me out to be me,” she says. “And this happened when the money got here (raising his hand high). Then it was like, “Oh, Susie, don’t say that. No no. It’s too much. Oh, you’re shocking.” . Shocking. But it’s the same shock that brought me there.”

She felt the effects of this control most strongly after she began filming her syndicated television show. The Susan Power Showin 1994. “I worked really hard on this show. I filmed three shows a day. I did it with everything I had,” she says. “But it was humiliating. They put me in pearls. Look at me – do I look like a pearl type? And I didn’t have the right to vote. All these fragments, I can’t even watch them now.”

She terminated her television contract and attempted to renegotiate her business partnership, but this ended in lawsuits. “In the ’90s there was nothing but lawsuits,” she says. She filed for bankruptcy and realized how much of the money she was making was ending up in other people’s pockets. “Yes, there was money, but I never had $300 million in my bank account,” she says. “I never made the money I made.”

Disillusioned with Hollywood and seeking a simpler, less expensive life, she moved to Seattle with her recently adopted child, her third son, whom she raised as a single mother after splitting from her second husband. (She later came out as gay in 2004.) “I didn’t just decide to leave. My heart broke in two,” she says of feeling betrayed by her business partners. “It was shocking. I was furious. And I thought: I just don’t exist.”

In Seattle, she rented a house, taught cooking and fitness classes, and took up photography, living the “hippie” life that suited her, she says. “I was away from all the big corporations… and I was very happy.”

But over time, the money ran out, and by 2018 she found herself unable to get a job. “Try getting a job as a 60-year-old woman,” she says. She was nearly penniless while living in Las Vegas, where she spent the last six years delivering for Grubhub and Uber Eats to make a living, a living, she tells PEOPLE who got “scary as hell…”

Last year, however, she found hope again: She began receiving a Social Security check, which gave her enough financial security to save money again, and she met filmmaker Zeberiah Newman, who is making a documentary about her life. This movie Stop the Madness: The Search for Susan Powerof which he is the executive producer Jamie Lee Curtisis expected to be released next year.

Power who just freed her memoirsis planning a cross-country RV tour and wants to reconnect with fans. And this time, she said, “no one is telling me what to do.”