Tyra Banks’ House Has Burned Down

Tyra Banks has lost her home in the recent L.A. wildfires. The America’s Next Top Model alum, 51, revealed that she is one of the many people whose homes were destroyed in the devastating wildfires during a Monday, Jan. 20 appearance on Australia’s Sunrise morning show.

“I lost my house,” Banks said on the show. “I haven’t really talked about it, but, yeah, I have.” She explained that she didn’t want to share the loss publicly until now, because, “I just didn’t want to pull a lot of attention to me.” The model continued, “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 learned her home had burnt down while she was working in Australia. The former Dancing With the Stars host said she was “at a friend’s house here, and we were celebrating just having fun” when she learned about the fires.

“I kept checking my phone, not for my house, but for friends and family, making sure they were evacuating and everything,” she recalled. “And then I asked my partner, I was like, ‘I’m seeing something here, what do you think?’ and he [nodded]. And 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 shared that while she did have a home in Los Angeles, she is currently living between Australia and New York, “so a lot of those memento-mementos are here and in New York, so I didn’t lose that, thank goodness. There were some mementos that we lost. But yeah, it’s tough.”

Banks is one of the thousands of people to be displaced amid the Los Angeles area wildfires since they sparked on Jan. 7. Other celebrities to lose their homes include Mandy Moore, Milo Ventimiglia, Paris Hilton, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, and Leighton Meester and Adam Brody.

The Los Angeles County wildfires have killed at least 27 people and destroyed more than 15,000 structures since Jan. 7. As of Wednesday, Jan. 22 the Palisades Fire was 65% contained and the Eaton Fire was 89% contained.