Gossip Girl and Blue Bloods actress Chanel Maya Banks is speaking out after she was reported missing from her Los Angeles home by her family. Addressing the situation in a Nov. 13 statement to True Crime News, the 36-year-old actress, who was found safe and uninjured in Texas after her family said they hadn’t heard from her since Oct. 30, confirmed she has met with police and said she traveled to Texas from LA to get baptized.
“My name is Chanel Banks I’m a 36-year-old American nobody, and for my entire life I have been silently carrying the pain of the ritual … abuse, manipulation, and outright endless torment I’ve endured continuously since I was a defenseless baby, at the hands of my own so-called family, who are all so very concerned about my current whereabouts,” Banks told True Crime News. “I have met with the police and verified that not only am I OK, but I’m finally free.”
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Banks was reported missing by her mother and cousin earlier this month after her family hadn’t heard from her since Oct. 30, and after two welfare checks on Nov. 7 and Nov. 8 showed she wasn’t in her apartment. Banks’ cousin Danielle-Tori Singh later told Eyewitness News that “five days without hearing from my cousin is red flags and alarm bells. She doesn’t go more than 48 hours without speaking to me or her mom. That girl is more like a big sister to me.” Singh further claimed in a since-deactivated GoFundMe that Banks “would NEVER go anywhere without telling her mom or myself.”
However, according to Banks, she and her family are not close. She said that she has not spoken to her cousin “in over 15 years, much less every day or 48 hours.” Banks explained that for years, her family “has been my spiritual, physical, and emotional warden, giving me zero authority of my personage,” and claimed that she was “not allowed to make any decisions in life in any way without their approval. … Every instance I’d get close to leaving they’d falsify official government documents relaying lies concerning my mental health — for the record — I have no mental health or any other record aside from a parking ticket here and there, so law enforcement would unquestionably and mercilessly pursue me.”
“In this digital era, they were able for decades without my knowledge or consent to reach out to my colleagues, friends, even neighbors to sabotage and effectively destroy not only my life’s work, but any semblance of happiness or peace I could hold on to,” she continued. “It’s like they took shifts to isolate me by gaslighting me, lying to those who could help concerning my sanity, it was their life’s goal to destabilize and break me. … There will be no more lies. Everything in the darkness must come to light. Thus says the Lord.”
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed Wednesday that Banks was found on Monday, Nov. 11, in Texas, safe and unharmed. According to the actress, who confirmed she spoke to police, she traveled to Texas to get baptized. She said she “told my husband six days ago I was going to get baptized by one of my favorite pastors Pastor Robert Clancy. He drove me to the airport and then I was off for a week … but I also saw it as an opportunity to escape my cage.”
Banks said that she now wants “freedom” for herself and “everyone suffering in silence… I’m releasing a clarion call to those in high places who still have a soul and want to keep it in such a time as this. Reach out. Help the cause, help me. I will never allow myself to be silenced ever again, least of all by my abusers. … For 36 crushing years, I’ve had to endure the most abominable abuses.”
Banks is best known for her recurring role as Sawyer Bennett in Gossip Girl Season 3. She also appeared in the series premiere of Blue Bloods in 2010 and the action thriller Twelve that same year.
