Relatives of a Playa Vista actress who appeared in several episodes of “Gossip Girl” and on “Blue Bloods” and was reported missing a week ago conceded Friday that she has been found and said they would return donations made to a GoFundMe page created to help bankroll a search effort.
The admission by the family came after the actress — Chanel Maya Banks, 36, — posted a video of herself on social media Thursday night, saying she was getting ready to take part in a television interview.
That followed posts she made on Instagram on Wednesday insisting she was safe and warning people not to donate to the GoFundMe page.
Banks was reported missing Nov. 8, with her family saying their last contact with her was on Oct. 30. According to the GoFundMe page established by Banks’ cousin, Danielle-Tori Singh, a series of welfare checks were made at her apartment on Nov. 7-8, but she was nowhere to be found.
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Police Department stated that the agency had been notified by authorities in Texas that Banks had been found safe. An LAPD representative told City News Service there was no crime involved, and the case has been classified as closed.
But once media reports began circulating that Banks had been found, Singh took to social media Wednesday, posting an 8-minute video on Facebook denouncing the reports and insisting that her cousin is still missing.
She said a woman was located in Texas apparently in possession of a “10-year-old expired New York City driver’s license” with Banks’ name on it. But Singh said the woman is not her cousin.
“Please don’t stop looking for my cousin,” she said in the video. “… My cousin has not been found. Please continue looking for her.”
Singh said she saw video and audio from body cam footage showing the woman found in Texas, and she insisted it was not Banks. She said the woman in the video “could not answer one personal question, not about our family, not about herself.”
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The GoFundMe page established by Singh to help bankroll the search effort had raised more than $4,100 as of Wednesday morning.
Late Wednesday afternoon, however, a series of new posts showed up on Banks’ Instagram page, purportedly posted by the actress saying that she has met with police and verified that she is OK.
The post said that “for my entire life I have been silently carrying the pain of the ritual sexual 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, whom are all so very ‘concerned’ about my current whereabouts.”
The posts concluded with the author saying that shortly before she left, she found out her family and her husband’s family were planning to obtain a conservatorship over her to give them “complete legal control.”