Chargeback time...
There's a contract between LA fitness and someone commiting fraud with my CC. My identity can't be stolen because I still have it - LA Fitness has been defrauded by a 3rd party and they shouldn't involve me in their mess.
If you've been going for nine months, good luck. They'll pull up all the photos they automatically took of you entering the doors to check in.
In this case, your argument was that you never had a contract with them in the first place. But this would be hard to believe if you actually used their services. Your cancellation email would undermine this argument even more, as you don't request cancellation if you don't have a contract.
So a court could perfectly well decide that the gym acted in breach of the law by making it deliberately hard to cancel, but that you acted in breach of the law too by stopping payment without even trying to cancel.
If you argue that you made your best effort to cancel, as documented by the email, that would be a more convincing argument I think (not a lawyer tho) but that's a different argument than claiming there never was a contract at all.
Obviously, nowhere in the communications with the gym I'd acknowledge there is any contract. It's no different than going to a grocery store: just because I've been using it for years doesn't mean there's any contract, even if the grocery stores believes so.
I’d know, I’ve won 17 Nobel prizes.