On August 12th, 2013, Ryan Anderson walked into his New Orleans home after a short errand and found his girlfriend unconscious. The 25-year-old NBA forward immediately dialed 911 and began CPR, screaming for her not to die. Paramedics managed to restore a heartbeat, but the oxygen deprivation had already caused catastrophic damage. Two days later, surrounded by her mother, father, stepfather, and Anderson, Gia Almon, the woman America had fallen in love with on The Bachelor, was removed from life support.
She was 29 years old. The public struggled to reconcile the vibrant woman they had watched on television with the devastating manner of her death. Gia had seemed to possess everything. She was a beauty queen, a Maxim model, and the girlfriend of a rising NBA star.
Her smile promised that everything would be all right. But the lens had only captured the beauty. It missed the invisible war raging inside her mind. Born in Howard Beach, Queens on December 20th, 1983, Gia Marie Almon was a professional baby.
Before she could form full sentences, she was starring in commercials for Johnson and Johnson and winning competitions to appear in Gerber campaigns. She learned early that to be seen was to be loved. Her parents, Eugene and Donna, separated in 1992 when Gia was a young girl, eventually divorcing. For a sensitive child, the dissolution of the family was a seismic event.
Gia moved between Staten Island and Manorville, Long Island, navigating the complexities of a fractured home. Her mother remarried a man named Tony Micheleti, who Donna would later describe as being closer to Gia than her own biological father. Gia found an anchor in ballet, reaching a professional level. The world of elite ballet demands ruthless perfectionism.
Dancers spend hours staring at themselves in mirrors, correcting every flaw, pushing their bodies past the point of pain. For a young girl already prone to seeking external validation, it was a double-edged sword. It provided structure and discipline, but it also reinforced a brutal scrutiny of the body. Severe injuries to her hamstring and Achilles tendon shattered her dreams of a professional dance career.
She learned a cruel lesson: no matter how hard you work, your body can betray you. With the door to ballet closed, Gia pivoted to modeling and acting. She was petite, standing five-foot-three, with a magnetism that worked best in glamour modeling. In 2005, she was the runner-up in the Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest.
By 2007, she had reached the summit of the field with a feature in Maxim magazine. She was named Miss Bikini USA’s model of the year in 2008 and won the bikini short class at the MPC Arnold Amateur Championships in 2009. She also studied acting at Hartford College and was cast to play Ava Gardner in a planned biopic, a project that never fully materialized. In early 2010, Gia was selected for season 14 of The Bachelor.
The show’s premise was a fairy tale: 25 women, one handsome bachelor, Jake Pavelka, and a journey to find true love. But the reality of the show was a psychological pressure cooker. The women were stripped of phones, contact with the outside world, and a sense of time. They were surrounded by competitors, fueled by free alcohol, and sleep-deprived by filming schedules that stretched until sunrise.
Gia became the rare contestant who seemed genuine. She stood apart from the infighting with a quiet dignity. In her confessional, she didn’t talk about winning. She talked about her fear that she wasn’t good enough to be chosen.
She made it to the final three, but when Jake eliminated her, she didn’t blame him. She blamed herself. The rejection reinforced a narrative she had been writing in her head for years: I am almost perfect, but not quite enough. After the show aired, Gia was beloved.
To stay relevant, she signed up for Bachelor Pad, a spin-off combining romance with cutthroat strategy. In the first season, producers introduced a kissing contest where men would blindfold women, kiss them, and rate them. Gia refused, stating she had a relationship. She drew a line in the sand.
In the second season, the atmosphere proved too toxic. She quit in the second episode, walking away rather than waiting to be voted off. She realized the cost of fame was too high. In 2011, Gia found what seemed like stability with Ryan Anderson, a power forward for the Orlando Magic who was later traded to the New Orleans Pelicans.
When he moved to New Orleans, Gia packed up and relocated, leaving behind her mother, her friends, and her career momentum. She adopted the role of the NBA girlfriend, attending games, cooking meals, keeping the house beautiful. But stripped of her own identity, isolated in a new city, her world shrank until it fit entirely within the contours of her relationship. It was during this time that the shadows lengthened.
Friends and family noticed Gia changing. Her highs became manic, her lows catastrophic. She would become convinced Ryan was cheating despite no evidence. She would feel physically ugly, worthless, unlovable.
Then, as quickly as the storm arrived, it vanished, and she would return to being the perfect girlfriend, apologizing profusely and blaming stress. Doctors would later reveal that Gia was suffering from premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. It is not bad PMS. It is a severe neuroendocrine disorder.
During the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, natural hormone fluctuations trigger an abnormal reaction in the brain’s neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin. For 10 to 14 days every month, her brain stopped producing the chemical that allows a person to feel hope. Gia described it to her mother as a black hole she couldn’t climb out of. She felt like she was going crazy.
The perfectionist in her tried to hide it, masking the pain with smiles for cameras and Instagram posts about her blessed life. On the morning of August 12th, 2013, Gia went to the dollar store for household errands. But inside her body, the hormonal tide was turning. The luteal phase was peaking.
That afternoon, she and Ryan argued. Gia, viewed through the distorted lens of her illness, had become convinced the relationship was failing. She accused him of infidelity, an accusation he denied and for which there was no evidence. Around 6:00 p.
m. , Ryan chose to deescalate. He told her he loved her but needed to walk away. He left to go to the grocery store.
For Gia, in that specific chemical state, the closing door was not a pause. It was a verdict. In the minutes after Ryan left, Gia called her mother in New York. Donna heard her daughter’s distress and tried to talk her down.
But the conversation ended with a tone of finality that chilled her. Gia said, “I love you, Mom. ” It was a goodbye. There was no note, no plan.
In a moment of overwhelming darkness, surrounded by the life she had built, Gia made a tragic, impulsive decision to end her life. Ryan returned roughly an hour later and found her. He called 911 and began CPR, counting compressions, begging for a miracle. The paramedics restored a heartbeat, but the damage was done.
Gia was rushed to University Hospital in New Orleans. Tests showed critical loss of brain and organ function. The Gia who danced, laughed, and loved was gone. The body remained, but the vessel was empty.
On Wednesday, August 14th, 2013, the decision was made to remove life support. Surrounded by her family, Gia took her last breath. In the days following her death, Donna made a brave decision. She refused to obscure the cause.
She told the world the truth, introducing them to the disorder that had been living in Gia’s head: PMDD. Her death forced a public conversation about high-functioning mental illness, challenging the belief that depression must look like obvious despair. In the aftermath, Ryan Anderson retreated from the public eye, grappling with the trauma of finding the woman he loved. Team members rallied around him.
Years later, he spoke in a landmark interview with Sports Illustrated about the guilt, the what-ifs, and the anger, humanizing the survivors left behind by suicide. Donna Almon weaponized her grief. She founded the Gia Almon Foundation, which later merged with the National Association for PMDD to form the International Association for Premenstrual Disorders. Women who recognized their own symptoms in Gia’s story began reaching out, saying her daughter’s story saved them.
They went to doctors. They got diagnosed. The silence Gia lived with was broken. If Gia had survived the night of August 12th, the fog would have lifted.
The luteal phase always ends, and the hormones always shift. She did not want to die. She wanted the pain to stop. She was held hostage by a biology that blinded her to the future.
Her story became the visceral public confirmation of why PMDD belonged in the DSM-5 as a formal depressive disorder. The dream she embodied offered no protection against the darkness of the mind. But though the vessel broke, the light spilled out, illuminating corners of mental health that had been dark for too long.