The husband of the late reality TV star Miriam Rivera has told an Australian news outlet that he disputes suicide as the cause of her death in February.

Rivera, the transgender model and star of Endemol’s controversial 2004 British dating show There’s Something About Miriam, died February 5 in Mexico, but her death only recently has become widely known with husband Daniel Cuervo’s Daily Mail Australia interview Thursday.

Cuervo told the news outlet that he believes unnamed authorities in Mexico “passed off” his 38-year-old wife’s death as a suicide by hanging after she declined to work as a prostitute.

Rivera made headlines in the mid-2000s when men on her dating show filed personal-injury lawsuits against Endemol after learning that she had been born male. The series, criticized for its prank-like use of Rivera’s transgender reveal, aired on the UK’s Sky One and later in Australia. Rivera also appeared on Big Brother Australia in 2004.

The lawsuits were settled out of court.

Cuervo posted news of his wife’s death on Facebook in February, writing, “My Adorable wife rest in peace darling until God lets us be together again.”

Rivera was a member of New York’s ballroom house House of Xtravaganza, which posted the following tribute to her on February 6: