Caitlyn Jenner‘s close friend and former manager Sophia Hutchins died at age 29 following an ATV accident on Wednesday, July 2.
TMZ reported that Hutchins was riding an ATV near Jenner’s Malibu, California, home when the vehicle was plunged 350 feet into a ravine after colliding with the bumper of a car. Hutchins was pronounced dead at the scene, while the two people in the car she struck were not injured. It’s not clear whether Jenner witnessed the deadly incident.
After appearing in several episodes of the E! docuseries I Am Cait, which premiered in 2015, Hutchins eventually became Jenner’s business manager. Like Jenner, Hutchins was a trans woman, having come out in college.
While Hutchins frequently attended Hollywood functions at Jenner’s side — including annual Academy Awards festivities — the pair always insisted that their relationship was strictly platonic.
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Jenner initially tried to shut down insinuations that she was dating Hutchins in 2018 when Variety asked to explain their connection.
“We are not going to get into that,” Jenner insisted at the time. “But we are very close. We do a lot of things together. We’re kind of inseparable. We’re the best of friends.”
Hutchins also addressed the rumors in a 2019 interview with The New York Times by revealing that she was dating a Harvard graduate who worked on Wall Street.
“[Caitlyn and I] were never romantically involved,” she said.
Asked why she thought many assumed she was Jenner’s girlfriend, Hutchins theorized: “Because we weren’t addressing it. I don’t feel a need to address my sex life, quite frankly, unless I want to.”
Hutchins also offered some insight on her working relationship with Jenner, claiming that she stepped in to stop people from “taking massive advantage” of the former Keeping Up With the Kardashians star.
“I was saying, ‘Caitlyn, if I don’t step in here and start managing you, you’re going to go broke,’” she alleged in 2019. (Hutchins graduated from Pepperdine University in 2019 with a finance degree.)
While working with Jenner, Hutchins brokered the athlete turned reality star’s appearance on the British reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2019 and negotiated numerous paid corporate speeches for her.
She famously clashed with U.K. TV host Piers Morgan in 2019 over a combative interview where she was repeatedly asked about her love life.
“If you’re not an item [with Jenner], why aren’t you an item?” Morgan asked during Hutchins’ appearance on Good Morning Britain.
“Was that a real question?” Hutchins asked. “We have a really special relationship. I don’t think we need to be an item to have a really special relationship, so to speak.”
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She went on, “I am here for Caitlyn 1,000 percent and Caitlyn’s here for me 1,000 percent. I think the best way to describe our relationship is that we are partners in every sense of the word. When it comes to work, absolutely there for each other 100 percent. When it comes to family and our personal relationship, absolutely there for each other 100 percent and there’s no denying it.”
Hutchins later complained via Instagram about Morgan’s repeated questions about the nature of her relationship with Jenner.
“Good Morning Britain, having Piers Morgan is your biggest mistake,” Sophia wrote at the time. “What a joke of a journalist he is. What a pathetic line of questioning he had for me this morning. Totally not cool.”
Hutchins resided at Jenner’s Malibu mansion while managing her career and revealed on Heather McDonald’s “Juicy Scoop” podcast in 2020 that there were similarities to “living with your parents.”
“Last week, we had to put a lock on my door because Caitlyn decided to barge into my room while I had a [male] friend over,” she shared. “You know, [she] kind of saw a lot of things happening.”
She teased, “I’m like, ‘Oh, this might be a turning point where I might need to move out.’ … I don’t want to leave her by herself, but she also knows that I’m getting older and I want to be able to have my own life.”
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“I really like living there. My office is based out of there,” she added. “She converted the guest house into our office space. Everyone on my team is in the city. It’s tough to have everyone always drive [to us].”
More recently, Jenner clarified in October 2023 that even though she was “very single,” she was “not even close to looking for a relationship.”
“I’ll never have a relationship in the future,” she emphatically told The Times U.K. “I just don’t see that in my life. I am not looking for that.”
Jenner has yet to comment on Hutchins’ death.
