Tyra Banks revealed she’s one of the many celebrities who have lost their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires.
The model, 51, shared the sad news on the Australian morning show “Sunrise” on Monday.
“I lost my house,” said Banks. “I haven’t really talked about it, but, yeah, I have.”
“I just didn’t want to pull a lot of attention to me,” she explained. “I feel like there’s a lot of people that need that attention, so I haven’t really talked about it, but I can’t sit here and not tell the truth that, yeah, we lost our house.”
Banks said that she and her partner, Louis Bélanger-Martin, found out about their LA home while they were in Australia, where the couple lives part-time.
“We were at a friend’s house here and we were celebrating and having fun. I kept checking my phone, not for my house, but for friends and family, making sure they were evacuating and everything,” Banks recalled. “And then I asked my partner, I was like, ‘I’m seeing something here, what do you think?’ and he [nodded].”
She added, “I just pulled it together and just didn’t say anything to my friends and just stayed in that moment, and then we went home and we cried and we had our moment.”
Banks said that since she and Bélanger-Martin split their time between Australia and New York, they didn’t lose everything in the fire.
“We’re between here and New York, so a lot of those memento-mementos are here and in New York, so I didn’t lose that, thank goodness,” she shared. “There were some mementos that we lost. But yeah, it’s tough.”
As of Monday morning, the fires have killed at least 27 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures, with over 200,000 people forced to evacuate their homes.
The two biggest blazes, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, still haven’t been fully contained.
Stars who have lost their homes in the crisis include Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, Billy Crystal, Anthony Hopkins, Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Miles Teller, Candy Spelling, Melissa Rivers and Jeff Bridges.
Major events in Hollywood have also been impacted by the fires.
The 2025 Critics’ Choice Awards, set to take place at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, were postponed from Jan. 12 to an unconfirmed date in February.
The 2025 Grammy Awards will still take place on Feb. 2 at LA’s Crpyto.com Arena, but the show will be dedicated to “raising additional funds to support wildfire relief efforts and honoring the bravery and dedication of first responders who risk their lives to protect ours,” the Recording Academy confirmed.
