“Gossip Girl” Actress Chanel Banks Says She’s Not Missing, Makes Explosive Claims About Family Members

Chanel Banks was located safe in Texas and has spoken to media outlets, though family members still cast doubts

Chanel Banks, an actress who appeared on Gossip Girl, found her name in headlines after her family reported her missing. But days after she was located safe, Banks appeared to go on social media to say she's never been missing at all — and that she was trying to distance herself from relatives she accused of abusing her.

Banks, 36, was officially reported missing on Nov. 8, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. But despite claims from her family that she had vanished and that something was wrong, Banks was located on Nov. 11 in Texas, where she had seemingly gone on her own volition.

A post on Banks' verified Instagram account appears to explain where she went.

"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, whom are all so very 'concerned' about my current whereabouts,” a post on Banks’ account says.

Related: Police Say Gossip Girl Actress Chanel Banks Was Found Safe

The post continued by saying she had gone to Texas in order to get baptized by her favorite pastor and that she was “finally free.”

The alarm about Banks' whereabouts was first publicly raised by her cousin, Danielle-Tori Singh, who wrote on a GoFundMe page that Banks hadn’t been heard from since Oct. 30. Singh wrote that she had flown from Canada to Los Angeles to help her aunt search for the missing actress.

Singh later told KABC that Banks typically didn't go more than 48 hours without speaking to her or her mother.

Despite the Los Angeles Police Department’s assertion that Banks is fine, the actress’ family held a press conference on Wednesday, Nov. 13, during which they disputed that she’d actually been found, despite apparently having been shown body camera footage by Texas authorities.

“What I saw was a woman who did not look like my cousin,” Singh said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “She was much skinnier, the woman in the body camera footage. She was wearing things that my cousin would not normally wear and her voice was different. Her accent was different.”

The paper reported that Banks’ mother, Judy Kumar, also appeared at the press conference and made a similar claim.

Banks also spoke with the Times about the ordeal, saying that she had to “distance” herself from her family and reiterated that she is “fine.”

In the post on Banks’ Instagram account, she accused Singh of lying about the closeness of their relationship, saying that she had not spoken to her cousin in over 15 years, a claim that Singh disputed in a Facebook post. Banks also called Singh, whose GoFundMe has since been taken down, “fame-hungry.”

Banks’ post also claims that her family and her husband’s family were trying to put her in a conservatorship. Her husband, Carlos Jimenez, denied that his family had attempted to do so while speaking to the Times. He did tell the paper that before she left for Texas, Banks had accused her family of abuse.

Banks told the paper that Jimenez had not harmed her.

Singh, Kumar and Banks’ stepfather could not immediately be reached for comment by PEOPLE. In a Thursday morning Facebook post, Singh continued to insist that police had not really found her cousin, saying that a still from body camera footage showed an “imposter.”

Banks appeared on three episodes of Gossip Girl, as well as an episode of Blue Bloods.

PEOPLE has not been immediately able to reach relatives of Banks or her husband.