Tyra Banks says she is single again and back on the dating scene at 52. In a nearly hour-long conversation on HOT 97, she said she feels feminine dating again and believes it is never too late to start over.
The update matters because Banks did not frame it as a pause or a maybe. She said she is single, said she is 52, and said she has reached a point where she wants something different now than she did when she was younger. Back then, she said, a man mainly had to be “fine as hell” and pretty. Now, she wants someone who is present.
That is the clearest public shift in years for a woman whose private life has often been kept just out of reach. Banks had been linked to Canadian businessman Louis Bélanger-Martin since around 2018, but she did not mention him by name in the interview. She has also lived through a very public family chapter before that, dating photographer Erik Asla, welcoming son York via surrogate in 2016, and splitting from Asla in 2017.
The new comments land while Banks is also back in fashion television as a recurring judge on Project Runway, giving her another high-profile platform at the same time she is reopening the subject of dating. She is also embroiled in a legal dispute with Netflix over Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, and Netflix and the producers have denied wrongdoing. That fight keeps her name in the headlines even as she talks about what she wants in her personal life.
There is still one gap Banks did not fill: when her relationship with Louis ended, and whether she is seeing anyone specific now. For the moment, her own words are the story. She says she is single, she says she feels feminine again, and she says she is not done starting over.
One more Banks headline has also found a second life on its own. Modelland returned to shelves on November 3 after becoming a viral sensation 15 years after its original release, and an audiobook version features all 50+ characters voiced by Banks. For a celebrity who has kept shifting between fashion, television and business, the pattern is the same: she keeps re-entering the conversation on her own terms.
