A surgery-addicted social media star known online as ‘Mary Magdalene’ has been found dead in Thailand.
The 33-year-old, whose real name was Denise Ivonne Jarvis Gongora, died after falling from the ninth-floor balcony of a high-rise condominium on Tuesday, the Phuket News reported this week.
The Daily Mail has reviewed information released by local police that verifies her identity and has independently confirmed the death with sources close to the family.
The Mexican-Canadian model’s body was discovered by hotel staff in the parking area of the Patong Tower after 1.30pm, according to local police, just hours after checking in for one night.
Khaosod English reported that Gongora’s body was transferred from Patong Hospital to Vachira Phuket Hospital for a full autopsy to determine the exact cause of death.
Shortly before her death, she had cryptically posted the closing scene from the 1998 film The Truman Show alongside a childhood photo of herself to social media.
In the scene, which she shared to one of her multiple Instagram accounts, Jim Carrey’s character Truman Burbank takes a bow and says, ‘And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening and good night.’
She also changed the username of one of her other Instagram accounts to ‘MaryMagdaleneDied’.
The Daily Mail contacted the Mexican Embassy, the Patong Police Station and the Phuket Tourist Police for comment, as well as friends and family members.
The Phuket News initially withheld her name from their reporting until her family had been informed.
Tributes have already poured in from her celebrity pals, including rapper Kreayshawn, RuPaul’s Drag Race star Plane Jane and influencer Eden the Doll.
Her brother Ivan also shared a heartbreaking tribute to his sister on Thursday.
Posting a photo of himself and Gongora at lunch in Mexico, Ivan wrote, ‘I wish I’d spent more getting to know you.’
He continued, ‘You are so funny and so creative, way more than I’ll ever be. I love you much more than words will ever say. You are my world. I wish things were different. Thank you for everything I love you sis.’
Gongora boasted around half a million followers on social media thanks to her extreme plastic surgeries.
She was also a respected artist who earned a cult following for her psychedelic paintings, sculptures and self-portraits.
Mary claimed in various interviews that she grew up in a strict religious family and, as a child was forbidden from even watching Disney.
She rebelled at age 12, when she became sexually active and started doing drugs.
‘Twelve, thirteen were the wildest years of my life,’ she said on the No Jumper podcast.
‘I was doing lines of cocaine. I was going to school drunk in grade seven and eight.’
By 17, Gongora was working as a stripper and later started escorting.
After going viral on the internet for her plastic surgeries, she monetized her online fame by joining OnlyFans.
‘Because of OnlyFans I was able to stop dancing and escorting, which was making me depressed, so now I’m blessed enough to just live off that,’ she previously said.
Gongora had her first boob job at age 21 in Mexico by a local dentist, which was botched.
Over the years, her surgeries have included brow lifts, fat transfers, liposuction on her face and body, multiple nose and boob jobs, veneers, cat-eye surgery, silicone butt infections as well as multiple BBLs on top of butt implants and much more.
She first went viral in 2018 after undergoing a dangerous operation to enlarge her vagina with fillers so that it would become ‘the fattest in the world’.
‘I almost died during the procedure. I had to get two blood transfusions. The doctor said I was losing so much blood and turning very pale. He thought I was going to die,’ she previously said.
She later underwent a vaginoplasty to reverse the surgery after complaining that it had disfigured her genital area.
As many of her surgeries were illegal, she often travelled all over the world from Colombia to Russia, to go under the knife.
She almost died multiple times on the operating table and at one point her buttocks started ‘rotting’ after she had illegal butt injections, which she sealed with superglue.
In early 2023, she was temporarily left with just one breast after one of her size 38J implants exploded and deflated.
While it’s unclear what caused the implant to pop, fans speculated at the time that the troubled star may have over-filled it using an expander.
Expanders are a feature of some implants that allow the patient to top them up themselves with saline via a needle and port in the implant, which Gongora often boasted about doing.
Her surgeries led to multiple health complications for the model.
In 2022, she revealed that she could no longer close her mouth due to having so many procedures on her lips.
She was also rushed to the emergency room after one of the tattoos on her breasts became infected, resulting in what could have been a deadly bout of sepsis.
More recently, she almost went blind after tattooing her eyeballs blue and yellow.
In the year before her death, Mary had started tattooing her entire upper body in pure black ink.
Despite her surgery addiction, she had at times expressed regrets and a desire to return to a more natural look.
In an emotional post, shared in 2023, she admitted that she had been ‘trapped in a never-ending cycle’ of plastic surgery and was constantly going under the knife to fix botched procedures.
‘It’s not a fun little adventure anymore, it’s just draining in every possible way,’ she said.
‘My time gets drained, my bank account, my energy, my health. And in the long run, you just kind of end up digging yourself into a really expensive time-consuming hole.’
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