’90s Fitness Icon Susan Powter Reveals How Jamie Lee Curtis Helped Save Her: ‘I Lost Hope, But I’m Filled With it Now’ (Exclusive)

Powter made millions with her ‘Stop the Insanity!’ fitness infomercial in the ’90s, but lost it all. Curtis, who’s producing a documentary on Powter, helped renew the fitness guru’s faith

Susan Powter was just starting to emerge from one of the most painful periods of her life, scraping to get by on Uber Eats tips, when she got a text saying someone was interested in telling her story.

Powter, 66, a fitness icon in the ’90s who made millions with three best-selling books and her wildly successful Stop the Insanity! infomercial, lost her fortune after putting it in the hands of financial advisors, her manager and her business partners, and eventually disappeared from public life.

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For the past six years, she’s been living in Las Vegas, struggling to survive on a meager food delivery salary before she started receiving a Social Security check, which became her lifeline.

But last year, she got a text from filmmaker Zeberiah Newman, who asked if he could film her and share her story in a documentary. “Never did I think that was possible,” Powter tells PEOPLE. For years, she says, she felt discarded by society because of her age. “I’ve learned that women are invisible and invaluable after a certain age,” she says. “It’s usually the f—able age.”

Newman texted his friend Jamie Lee Curtis about connecting with Powter, and immediately the actress was interested — and wanted to help. “She called me two minutes later, and the next day she said, ‘Go back to Vegas and start filming immediately,'” Newman says. Curtis became an executive producer on the project, an upcoming documentary called Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter.

Curtis calls Powter an “incredible woman”: “As one of the world’s first true influencers at the beginning of what we would now refer to as the social media era, Susan Powter was brazen and brave, and woke us all up,” the actress says. “Like so many women’s stories, Susan’s power and her light was diminished, denigrated and dismissed.”

A few months ago, Powter met Curtis in person and had a message for her. “I was in tears,” Powter says. “And I said ‘Thank you. Thank you for believing in me. I had lost faith. I had lost complete and absolute hope.'”

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Powter, who’s just released a new book And Then Em Died… Stop the Insanity! A Memoir , says the interest from Curtis and from the documentary in the works has given her renewed strength. “The response Zeb has gotten, in Hollywood and in the industry, people are like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so excited. She still looks good. That’s so great.’ That has meant something to me, a lot to me.”

Newman, who is making his feature-length film directorial debut with the documentary, says in the ’90s Powter spoke to people who felt taken advantage of by the diet industry — and today she speaks to women who feel left behind as they age.

“Anyone who was feeling frustrated with the system not working for them connected to her, felt seen by her,” he says, adding that he’s watched Powter start to reclaim her own voice again: “She’s blooming as a person and not as a celebrity or a thing in the world, as just a human being. It’s really incredible to watch her step into her power again.”

Powter, who plans do an RV tour of the country, speaking to people and selling her self-published book, says she’s eager to connect with her fans again and hopes they can find inspiration from her story.

“Those women will hear my voice and they’ll be like, ‘Well, goddamn, she hasn’t changed one bit.'” she says. “What I feel now is the possibility of possibilities. There were days and days, months and months and years of not feeling that. I lost hope but I’m filled with it now. I have never been more excited.”

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