'Bachelor' contestant reported as a missing person for lying to her mom. Probably.
This article has been updated with an Instagram post from Martinez, in which she confirmed she forgot to call her mom back before going on The Bachelor.
Many of you know Bekah Martinez as the 22-year-old battling to win Arie Luyendyk Jr.'s heart on Season 22 of The Bachelor, but few know that she was also a reported missing person in the state of California only a couple days ago.
On Thursday, Humboldt County's local newspaper The North Coast Journal shared the truly bizarre story about a reader reporting the Bachelor contestant as one of the 35 people listed as missing on the California Department of Justice's website.
The revelation came after North Coast Journal shared a cover story titled "The Humboldt 35" to Facebook, which asked why Humboldt County has the highest rate of missing persons reports in California.
After several comments suggested one of the missing women was Martinez, the Journal's Linda Stansberry wrote that the publication reached out to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office.
Martinez's Instagram account shows she's had a variety of different hairstyles over the years, but her face clearly resembles the woman listed.
Also, her missing person description said:
Rebekah Helena Martinez was last seen Nov. 12, 2017. She has tattoos on her ankles of a Scrabble tile and an ankh.
She revealed her tattoos on her Bachelor contestant biography, sharing she has "two small ones on my inner ankles."
After authorities were contacted, the deputy who initially filed Martinez's missing persons report reportedly emailed Public Information Officer Samantha Karges saying, "I just got off the phone with Rebekah. She is in fact the same person. She has been removed from (the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit)."
"Martinez had reportedly come to Humboldt County to work on a marijuana farm," Karges told the Journal, noting that her mother, who hadn’t heard from her daughter since Nov. 12, 2017, was the one to file the missing persons report.
On Sept. 17, 2017, two months before she was reported missing, Martinez announced on Instagram she was giving up her phone and social media for the next several weeks, adding, "If you need to contact me, welll... tough luck!"
But then she posted again on Nov. 22, 2017, 10 days after the report, so, uh, who knows.
After the Journal's cover story went live, another person, Daniel Ogden Stromberg, reportedly saw himself on the missing persons list and called in to set the record straight. Now the list has dropped from 35 people to 33 people.
Since filming for this season of The Bachelor began on Sept. 20, it seems pretty safe to assume that Martinez had to shut off all communication with the outside world in order to win some boring, 36-year-old man's heart. Only, she didn't tell her mom.
Our suspicions were confirmed hours after writing this piece, when Martinez posted a photograph of herself on the side of a milk carton to Instagram.
"Found myself, quite literally, on this season of The Bachelor. PSA: always call your mom back," she wrote.
Nicole is a Senior Editor at Mashable. She primarily covers entertainment and digital culture trends, and in her free time she can be found watching TV, sending voice notes, or going viral on Twitter for admiring knitwear. You can follow her on Twitter @nicolemichele5.
