Tyra Banks Reveals She Lost Her Home in the L.A. Wildfires
Tyra Banks is opening up about losing her home in the Los Angeles wildfires.
While appearing on the Australian morning show Sunrise on Monday, the model shared publicly for the first time that her house was one of those destroyed in the fires that ignited earlier in January in L.A.
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“I lost my house,” Banks said. “I haven’t really talked about it, but, yeah, I have.”
Banks also explained why she hasn’t shared her loss publicly until now. “I just didn’t want to pull a lot of attention to me,” she said. “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.”
She said she learned that she lost her home, which she shares with her partner, while they were in Australia.
“We were at a friend’s house here and we were celebrating just having fun. I kept checking my phone, not for my house, but for friends and family, making sure they were evacuating and everything,” Banks said. “And then I asked my partner, I was like, ‘I’m seeing something here, what do you think?’ and he [nodded].
“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,” she added.
Given that she and her partner travel back and forth between L.A., New York and Australia, she noted that she didn’t lose all of her personal items 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 said. “There were some mementos that we lost. But yeah, it’s tough.”
Banks is one of the thousands who tragically lost their homes due to the multiple fires, including several Hollywood stars such as Mandy Moore, Anna Faris, Milo Ventimiglia, Paris Hilton and Jeff Bridges.
The Palisades and Eaton fires have killed at least 27 people and destroyed more than 14,000 structures since they first ignited on Jan. 7. As of Tuesday, the Palisades Fire was 63 percent contained and the Eaton Fire was 89 percent contained.
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