What happened to Richard Simmons? The question once carried an entire hit podcast
On February 15, 2014, Richard Simmons stopped showing up to teach at Slimmons, the Beverly Hills studio where he'd led classes for decades. He didn't announce anything. He just stopped, and stopped taking calls from most of the people who knew him. Three years later, that silence became one of the biggest podcasts in the country. Here's the actual answer.
Simmons withdrew from public life in 2014 and never returned to it. He kept insisting nothing was wrong, and by every official account, nothing was. He died at his Los Angeles home on July 13, 2024, one day after his 76th birthday. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled the death accidental: blunt traumatic injuries from a ground-level fall, with arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease listed as a contributing condition.
The theories the podcast ran through
Missing Richard Simmons launched in February 2017, hosted by filmmaker Dan Taberski — a former Slimmons regular who'd known Simmons personally. Six episodes, produced by Pineapple Street Studios, structured like a true-crime serial. It topped the charts and worked through a long menu of possibilities:
- The knees — a double knee replacement that made teaching class difficult, later the central claim of TMZ's 2022 documentary.
- The dog — the death of his dalmatian, and a possible depression following it.
- The scrutiny — four decades of relentless public access finally wearing out an extrovert.
- The housekeeper — a persistent rumor that Simmons was being held in his own home against his will.
That last one prompted an actual LAPD wellness check. Simmons convinced the detectives he was fine, then called TODAY in March 2016 to say plainly that nobody was holding him hostage in his own house.
What Taberski concluded
Very little, in the end. NPR's review in March 2017 noted that the series landed roughly where it started — Simmons was safe, healthy, and had simply chosen to stop.
Simmons himself responded to the whole thing from a hospital bed during a bout of severe indigestion, posting on social media:
"Aren't you sick of hearing and reading about me?! LOL," he wrote in 2017.
The last days
The coroner's timeline is specific. Simmons had a dizzy spell and fell on the evening of July 11, 2024. He was found the next morning — his birthday — and spent the day in bed, declining a hospital trip. His housekeeper, Teresa Reveles, found him unresponsive on his bedroom floor the morning of July 13. Death was called at 9:45 a.m. The autopsy found a fractured left femur; toxicology came back clean apart from prescribed medication.
For the record: less than 24 hours before he died, Simmons posted a thank-you to fans for their birthday messages and mentioned he was sitting there answering emails.