Gossip Girl and Blue Bloods actress Chanel Maya Banks broke her silence after she was reported missing by her family.
“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, 36, told True Crime News in a Wednesday, November 13, statement. “I have met with the police and verified that not only am I OK, but I’m finally free.”
She added, “They say, once you’re free in Christ Jesus, you’re free indeed, so I 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.”
In addition to seeking freedom, Banks also wants “justice.”
Actress Chanel Maya Banks Reportedly Found After Going Missing
“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,” she said. “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’ mother and cousin filed a missing person’s report earlier this month after a welfare check revealed that she wasn’t home in Los Angeles.
“Five days without hearing from my cousin is red flags and alarm bells,” Banks’ cousin Danielle-Tori Singh told Eyewitness News on Wednesday, November 13. “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.”
The L.A. police department revealed several hours later that Banks had been found safe.
“She is fine,” LAPD spokesperson Charles Miller told People. “No danger. She is OK. She has been taken out of the missing person system for us and we have closed our investigation.”
Singh previously claimed in a recent GoFundMe campaign that Banks was last in contact with their family on October 30.
“She would NEVER go anywhere without telling her mom or myself. We noticed on November 10 that her husband has a busted lip and marks and scratches on his neck and arms,” Singh claimed via GoFundMe description. “Police were called on November 10 and they took pictures of his injuries, which he did not have two days ago when police did the last welfare check.”
Banks, however, alleged to True Crime News that she had not been in contact with her relatives in nearly 15 years.
“For decades my family has been my spiritual, physical, and emotional warden, giving me zero authority of my personage,” she said. “I 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.”
Banks also claimed that her family members “mercilessly gang-stalked” her and attempted to set up a conservatorship.
“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,” Banks stated. “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.”
Banks got married in November 2023 to a man identified on her TikTok page by “CJ” initials. According to Singh, the actress’ spouse told her that Banks “does not want to be found” and “will reach out when she’s ready.”
Banks had previously been quiet on social media. In an upload shared on September 12, she asserted that she is in her “who cares what they say era.”
‘Gossip Girl’ Alum’s Family Speaks Out After Actress Goes Missing in L.A.
“As [the Jewish holiday] Rosh Hashanah approaches, I’ve been pondering the significance of unadulterated individuality,” she wrote via TikTok. “For most, it takes courage to be one’s authentic self in a world where everyone thinks, acts and strives to look like everyone else. I’m not deterred in the least, no. I strive to exist in that all-encompassing ever-expansive bliss of bucking the zeitgeist and just doing me.”
Banks continued, “I’ve decided I’m now in my, ‘Who cares what they say’ era, my, ‘Because I can’ era. Because, at the end of it all, we always admire the originators: the ones who write their own stories.”
