Rasa von Werder, a Binghamton legend and Downtown’s nightlife celebrity, passed away at the age of 80 on June 5.

Rasa lived in the Binghamton area during her later years and frequented several bars attended by Binghamton University students. A quick search reveals Instagram posts from the 2010s with images of BU students posing with von Werder and captions such as “She’s back! ’70s playboy model, Rasa von Werder.”

Before moving to Windsor, New York, in the 1990s, von Werder was a model, bodybuilder, stripper, religious leader, “yoga guru,” founder of her own church and self-proclaimed “cougar.”

Von Werder was born as Rasa Sofija Jakstas to Lithuanian parents Stasys and Regina Jakstas in Calw, Germany, on July 16, 1945. Her parents had fled Stalin and were living in a displaced persons camp. They boarded the Navy ship S.S. Heintzelman bound for the United States in 1949.

After arriving in the United States, von Werder’s family first lived in Newark, where her father founded a Lithuanian school. Her mother had an affair with the church priest and then the organist, she told Pipe Dream in 2016. She later moved to Brooklyn at the age of 10 with her father, and eventually moved to Hollywood by herself at the age of 16 after meeting André De Dienes, a photographer close with Marilyn Monroe, at the Chelsea Hotel.

“Whenever I would get a job, she wanted me to be at home, being the slave,” von Werder said about her mother in an interview with Pipe Dream in 2016. “Her whole idea was to keep me powerless.”

Prior to pioneering female bodybuilding, von Werder began her career as a model, which she knew she wanted from the age of 15. Von Werder competed in different beauty pageants in the 1960s, including Miss Body Beautiful and Miss Nude Universe, winning the Miss Nude Universe in 1968. She often went by the pseudonym “Kellie Everts,” which was also the name of her daughter, who was born to her and her ex-husband, Stanley Everts, in 1964.

Von Werder married Stanley Everts in 1963, but he was diagnosed with cancer and died in April 1966. (6) Before his death, Stanley Everts cancelled his life insurance, leaving von Werder and their daughter Kellie penniless. Von Werder described her relationship with Stanley Everts as abusive.

“She was definitely a victim of the patriarchy,” said Hannah Goykadosh, a senior double-majoring in math and physics. “And she stood up to that.”

Von Werder was also the first official female bodybuilder and the first female bodybuilder to be featured in a major magazine, Esquire, in 1975. She was the first female bodybuilder to be featured in Playboy Magazine in 1977. She was honored as “The Progenitor of Female Bodybuilding” by the World Body Building Guild in 2007.

“In the ’90s, she had like a really early website going back where she sold basically like fetish clips and things,” said Jenn Swann, a freelance journalist who periodically interviewed von Werder throughout her lifetime and is currently working on a project about her. “Like it was basically like an OnlyFans in the ’90s, which is kind of interesting to think about.”

Von Werder has also authored many autobiographical works about her life, with 32 written works including a 10-part series titled “I Strip For God.”

As for von Werder’s presence in the downtown Binghamton bar scene, she went out so often that a Pipe Dream article from 2015 encouraged students to wear “strappy heels and blue eye shadow” to cosplay their favorite nightlife celebrity.

“Then I eventually found out that she had passed, which was really sad because she always talked about — she felt like there was still so much left to do,” said Swann. “You know, she was always writing, and she had all these, like, ambitions, even, you know, at 80 years old.”