A June 15 GoFundMe campaign, reportedly created by a man who identified himself as Daveigh Chase’s boyfriend, brought renewed attention to the former child actor’s alleged health crisis.
Within 24 hours, reports said the 35-year-old actress, widely recognized for her performance in the horror hit The Ring, had died.
According to those accounts, Chase had become severely emaciated and was struggling with AIDS and substance abuse after years marked by addiction and homelessness.
In the aftermath, attention quickly turned to Roy Hernandez, 38, the man described as her boyfriend, after members of Chase’s family and her former manager accused him of attempting to benefit financially from her death.
They also raised questions about why Hernandez sought donations through a crowdfunding page, arguing that Chase had access to a SAG trust account that could have paid for her medical care.
They also accused him of leading her deeper into a world of drugs.
Now, in an exclusive sit-down interview, Hernandez has hit back at those accusations, speaking for the first time on camera about his relationship with Chase, their final days together and the circumstances surrounding her death.
Sporting a cursive ‘Daveigh’ tattoo above his eye, Hernandez also revealed that he proposed to Chase before her death – and that she said yes.
He told the Daily Mail why he believes he, not her family, should inherit her $400,000 estate.
Actress Daveigh Chase died on June 16 from AIDS with chronic drug use as a contributing factor, according to the LA County Medical Examiner’s Office. She was 35
Hernandez said he and Daveigh planned to get married. Since the actresses’ death, Hernandez has received criticism over a GoFundMe page he set up just before she passed away
After months of communications, Hernandez finally agreed to be interviewed last week. We met in LA’s Elysian Park, a special spot he said he and Chase used to visit ‘to escape.’
Hernandez recalled meeting Chase for the first time in 2021 at a mutual friend’s house.
He said he had no idea Chase was a celebrity, noting she had short hair at the time and had not acted in a movie since 2016.
‘We hung out the whole night,’ Hernandez recalled.
Within two months they were a couple.
Their relationship began at a time when Chase’s family claim she was already deeply troubled.
They say she was addicted to drugs and homeless, living on Skid Row and moving between tents across LA.
Hernandez, however, paints a radically different picture of the life they shared.
‘She was always happy,’ he said. ‘She made me really happy.’
He insists they were never homeless, saying they lived together for five years in his RV by choice.
Hernandez described a nomadic life of road trips with their two dogs and visiting his mother in East LA when the couple needed a home cooked meal and shower.
In 2024, he proposed to Chase and said she accepted. In February 2026, he had her name tattooed above his eye.
Hernandez rejected the suggestion that he was responsible for Chase’s drug use, or that he stood by her while her health deteriorated.
Hernandez said Daveigh was surprised and pleased when he got a tattoo of her name.
Daveigh Chase had multiple arrests and was in and out of LA jails after she left her career in Hollywood
He claimed he never took drugs with Chase or saw her using during their relationship.
‘Anybody who knew us out there, they would know,’ Hernandez said of the family’s accusations. ‘Especially when it came to me, they would know that I would never let that happen. It’s 100 percent not true.’
Hernandez admitted he knew Chase used to ‘smoke’ drugs, including fentanyl, before they began dating. Chase had told him she used them to cope with painful memories from her past.
‘She was trying to forget her past and what she went through. She said it made it easier for her,’ Hernandez claimed.
He was referring in part to an alleged 2021 incident in which Chase said she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by an unidentified man in a Los Angeles hotel. She never reported the alleged assault to police.
Hernandez said that, rather than enabling Chase’s addiction, he spent much of their relationship trying to keep her away from drugs and protect her from the things she was struggling with.
But the picture of Chase in the months before her death was starkly different.
Hernandez claimed he and Daveigh were never homeless and lived together in his RV
Hernandez told the Daily Mail he decided to finally break his silence because he wanted her fans to know that she was cared for and was surrounded by him and his family
In footage filmed in 2025, Chase appeared severely emaciated and in extremely poor health. The actress’s father, John Schwallier, says the video makes Hernandez’s account difficult to believe.
‘[Roy] had to have known how sick Daveigh was because in that video, she looked to be only 80 pounds,’ Schwallier told the Daily Mail.
Cathy Chase has also described her daughter as extremely frail in the footage, saying she was ‘nothing but skin and bones.’
Hernandez insists Chase was fed and cared for, but says she would sometimes hide food and resisted going to hospital until it was too late.
But Chase’s decline had begun years before she met Hernandez.
Her mother Cathy said her downward spiral began after a motorcycle accident around 2016 in which Daveigh injured her back.
She was prescribed powerful painkillers, which Cathy said marked the beginning of an addiction that eventually progressed to stronger drugs.
From 2018 to 2024, Chase was in and out of jail on drug possession and other charges.
Cathy said that when she first visited her daughter behind bars in 2019, she barely recognized her, attributing the dramatic change to the hold drugs had taken over her life.
But Hernandez suggested that her relationship with her family and experiences during her childhood also played a role in her decline, as well as the pressures of growing up in Hollywood.
Hernandez said Chase rarely spoke about her father and claimed she had told him that she believed her father was dead because that was what her mother had allegedly told her.
Chase’s relationship with her parents is now at the heart of the bitter legal dispute over who should access her estate.
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Hernandez said that while Chase was in jail, her mother once suggested that she give her money to her younger brother because she was ‘over here doing nothing with it.’
‘I would just tell her, “Don’t listen to your mom,”‘ Hernandez recalled.
The award-winning actress, seen here with mom Cathy, showed promise for an early age and was set for Hollywood stardom
John Schwallier, pictured here with Daveigh, claimed his former wife kept their daughter away from him for years
Chase died with an estate worth around $400,000, including residuals from commercials, films and television shows that she had apparently never collected.
At a hearing on Wednesday in a Downtown LA courtroom, Chase’s parents and their attorneys told a judge that they planned to move forward with competing petitions over control of her estate.
Her former manager, John Ryan, is also involved in the legal battle. Last week, Ryan filed a declaration to the court supporting a fiduciary to take over as administrator of Chase’s estate.
Ryan and his company is also seeking money he claims is owed to him while he served as Chase’s manager.
During our interview, Hernandez also laid his claim to her estate, presenting himself as the person who was closest to Chase during the final years of her life.
He claims Chase told him she wanted her money to go to him or to animal charities, and that she did not believe either of her parents deserved it.
‘She and I never really cared about the money,’ Hernandez claimed.
‘I know she probably would’ve wanted me to have it, but that’s what we had talked about previously. She wanted to take the money and go on trips, to take us away from here.’
Hernandez has yet to file any documents to the court seeking to obtain any funds from Chase’s estate.
Daveigh in 2012 at the peak of her career following a string of high profile movie and TV roles
Daveigh Chase and Naomi Watts in the 2002 film The Ring
He claimed Chase was afraid to collect money she was owed from film and television residuals because she feared her mother would find out about it.
‘I told her I would go help her [get the checks], but she would say her mom would “go crazy,”‘ Hernandez said.
‘If anyone knew she had it, she thought her mom would probably go looking for it and try to take it from her.’
Hernandez insists the ugly fight over money shows the broken home life that Chase dealt with.
‘That just made me realize more what Daveigh was going through when she was young,’ said Hernandez.
He said that whenever he suggested calling her mother, Chase would refuse.
‘Now I kind of know why.’
The Daily Mail has contacted Cathy Chase for comment.
Chase’s parents have told the Daily Mail that Hernandez’s account of their daughter should be scrutinized. He also has had his own run-ins with the law.
Hernandez pleaded no contest to a 2024 firearms possession charge and was sentenced in March 2026 to three days in jail.
When asked about his criminal past, Hernandez refused to comment.
Hernandez said Chase was ‘up and down’ during the last two weeks of her life in June, which she spent in hospital.
He recalled watching her struggle to communicate, with dried blood and sores filling her mouth.
It was during her final days, Hernandez says, that they came up with the idea for the GoFundMe.
Hernandez, pictured with his mother, in Elysian Park in Los Angeles. Hernandez said Daveigh was loved by him and his family
The day before Chase died, Hernandez claims she was coherent enough to discuss what would happen when she left hospital.
He said they discussed setting up a GoFundMe to raise money that would allow her to live comfortably after she was discharged.
Hernandez claims he has not received any of the $4,500 money that they raised.
The next morning, however, Chase’s condition suddenly worsened.
Doctors told Hernandez that she had only hours to live.
‘The next day is when they called me and they told me in the morning that she had like only hours,’ Hernandez said, fighting back tears.
‘I was like, “What do you mean? She was perfectly fine when I left!”‘
Her full autopsy report remains pending, including toxicology results.
It is also unclear when Chase contracted HIV or when her diagnosis progressed to AIDS.
When asked about his health, Hernandez replied: ‘I’m OK.’
Questions also remain over how long Chase had been seriously ill before she was admitted to hospital and whether more could have been done to intervene as her weight and health declined.
Hernandez claimed Chase refused to get treatment even when he and his mother encouraged her to go.
‘I could only tell her so much. You can’t force somebody to go if they don’t want to go,’ he said.
Sitting in the park where he and Chase had spent so much time together, Hernandez recalled the last words she said to him before she died.
‘She told me, “I’m not afraid,”‘ he said.
‘She said, “You’re not afraid either, right?”‘
‘I told her, “No, you’re right. I’m not afraid.”‘