Who Is Gypsy Rose Blanchard, And Why Are You Seeing Her Everywhere?

Unless you live under a rock or are light years away from loud whispers on Twitter (now, X), you’d recognise the face of this 32-year-old Missouri woman. She has recently been released from prison after serving an eight-year sentence on account of a second-degree murder. Of her mother. Her story is NOT what it reads like from the above sentences. Ever since her release, she’s become an overnight star, and not without a reason.

She is Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a victim of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (we’ll explain this term in some time). Born in Louisiana, US, in 1991, Gypsy was single-handedly raised by her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. In the preceding months before Gypsy’s birth, Dee Dee separated from her husband, Rod Blanchard, who reportedly realised they weren’t meant to be.

Dee Dee was a full-time caretaker of her daughter, who, she wanted to be sick. As mentioned above, Gypsy was a victim of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. According to Medline Plus, it is a “mental illness and a form of child abuse” where the child’s caretaker makes up fictitious symptoms or causes real symptoms to create the impression as if their child is sick.

According to a report by Harpers Bazaar, when Gypsy Rose was barely three months old, she was diagnosed with sleep apnoea and was provided with a breathing apparatus, following her mother’s implication that she had been experiencing troubled breathing. Later, when she was seven years old, her mother claimed her daughter had a chromosomal disorder wherein her motor ability was significantly reduced. Once, following a minor bicycle accident, Dee Dee told her daughter that doctors had said she’d need to depend on a wheelchair.

In an interview with People, Gypsy recalls, “The most painful was the removal of my salivary glands in my neck (in 2007). They made two incisions, and I didn’t respond well to the anaesthesia. Recovery was really hard. To this day, it has left me with the side effect of having to clear my throat all the time. And the reason why I had surgery is because my mom put Orajel on my gums to make me drool at the appointment. She complained to the doctor that I drooled too much.”

Even though Gypsy was aware that she could walk and didn’t need a feeding tube, she did not raise concerns for years. “Obviously I knew that I could walk and that I didn’t need a feeding tube, but everything else was a really big confusion for me. I was limited in what I could watch and my exposure to other kids. What I knew of the outside world was only in Disney cartoons, and those don’t talk about warning signs of bad parents”, she recounts in the People interview.

Apparently, sometime after the second grade, Dee Dee homeschooled her daughter, supposedly because of her ‘severe illness’. Her seemingly devoted mother would sing about their woes to the world. To the outsiders, she was a devoted mother and a generous soul. It is reported that Dee Dee would even bribe her daughter to perform well at the hospital. “She’d say, ‘If you do well at the hospital, then we’re going to Toys “R” Us to buy you a new Barbie.”, Gypsy noted, and any misbehaviour had consequences in the form of physical and verbal abuse.

After they moved from Louisiana to Missouri, their situation also leveraged them free perks, like generous charities, tickets to a Miranda Lambert concert, and trips to Walt Disney World, among others. Her mother would also lie to her and the world about Gypsy’s age. When she turned 19, Gypsy confided to her about being sexually abused by a family member. “She let me know that he did the same thing to her when she was a child.”

Around 2012-2013, Gypsy found a man named Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian singles dating website, with whom she fell madly in love. She kept her affair secret from the surveilling eyes of her mother. Their communication escalated, and Gypsy eventually confessed to him that she was bound to a wheelchair that her mother had forced upon her. They finally met in person in 2015 when they planned to meet one another at a local movie theatre screening and make it appear to her mother as if she was seeing him for the first time.

Together, they hatched an idea to kill Dee Dee, and in June 2015, they executed the plan. Gypsy snuck Godejohn to her house and handed him gloves and a knife. Her boyfriend stabbed Dee Dee to death. When her body was discovered, it was assumed there was a case of foul play and abduction as it was accounted that Gypsy had chronic ailments and a significantly hampered brain capacity.

The police found Gypsy Rose in Wisconsin. Her medical examination did not corroborate with the disorders she presumably had. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Godejohn was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

After serving more than eight years in prison, Gypsy was released on parole on 28 December 2023. She also uploaded her ‘first selfie on freedom’ on Instagram.

Her heart-wrenching story, backed with public empathy, has made her a star. A docu-series around her life’s story titled ‘The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’ is airing in the US now. Previously, her story has been seen on Hulu’s The Act (2019) and the HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest (2017).