Girlfriend of Jeff Banks responds to viral monkey bite story

The girlfriend of Texas special teams coordinator and assistant head coach Jeff Banks has responded to a report that her monkey bit a child on Halloween night in Austin.

In Banks’ first year with the Longhorns, a report surfaced Monday night that the monkey of his girlfriend, Dani Thomas, had an encounter with a trick-or-treater during Halloween festivities on Sunday.

Thomas responded to the report Monday night, taking to Twitter to answer a serious of questions and showed where the monkey, Gia, lives. An emotional support animal according to Thomas, Gia lives in a caged environment away from where children were allowed to trick-or-treat.

“This is sad that people have to go all out of the way to prove that a person is lying,” Thomas said in a video that has since been deleted, along with her entire Twitter account. “Here is the gate, here is where all the haunted house action happened. And yes, I do clean up fast — the shit’s gone. Here is the gate every child and parent was told to turn around at when they got to. It was closed and blocked off with balloons.

“This is how far the kid went in my backyard without permission, all the way over to where my animals live and watch this. I don’t even play when it gets to my animals, and I know all the legal rules on them. … How could she viciously bite someone if they stick their hand in there, where it don’t belong.”

Banks was previously the special teams coordinator at Alabama, where he worked with Steve Sarkisian, who is now the head coach at Texas. So far this season, the Longhorns are 4-4 and have dropped three consecutive games. Before joining the staff at Alabama in 2018 , Banks was the special teams coordinator at Texas A&M.

Thomas went on to describe the situation and how the incident occurred.

“No one was viciously attack this a lie, a whole lie,” she wrote on Twitter. “She was not apart of any haunted house, the kid did not have permission to be on the other side of my property!”

She continued: “I had a haunted house on one side gated off. He had no permission to go pass the gate. I had no idea he went in my backyard. Neither did I know anything about a bite! Until a doctor of neighborhood told me the treat a small bite. No parent have contacted me about it!”

A former punter at Washington State, Banks led the Pac-10 and ranked No. 15 nationally in average yards per punt while helping the Cougars earn an invitation to the Rose Bowl in 1995.

When Kevin Sumlin was fired in November of the 2017 season at Texas A&M, Banks was named the interim head coach. He went 0-1 on the job, losing to Wake Forest in the Belk Bowl.