True Crime Subject Gypsy Rose Blanchard Released From Prison After Serving Eight Years For Murdering Her Mother
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Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who became a major true crime figure after she conspired to murder her abusive mother, was released from prison on Thursday after serving most of her 10-year sentence.
Blanchard was sentenced in 2016 after pleading guilty to the second-degree murder of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard; her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, was convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing Blanchard’s mother, though Blanchard testified during his 2018 trial that she “talked him into it.”
The story of Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard was reported by Buzzfeed News’ Michelle Dean in 2016, and the wild story went on to be immortalized in the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest and then Hulu’s 2019 dramatization The Act. True crime books and podcasts soon followed, and it even inspired fictional characters in other media properties. The elder Blanchard embarked on a long con driven by her own Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental condition that makes a parent or caregiver inflict pain and sickness onto their charge with sympathy and attention from others as their reward.
In the Blanchards’ case, Dee Dee kept her daughter in a wheelchair, lied about her age, and shaved her head to keep up the appearances of illnesses that she did not have. She also put her daughter through unnecessary medical treatments and surgeries, taking her to different doctors every time she was questioned. Gypsy’s perceived ill health and sob story got the pair money, trips, a house, and countless benefits — until Gypsy started questioning what her mother was doing. The more suspicious Gypsy got, the more she tried to break free, and she eventually created a profile on the dating site where she met Godejohn.
As Gypsy rebelled, Dee Dee became more physically abusive to the point that Gypsy felt she had no choice but to kill her own mother. She convinced Godejohn to stab her mother to death in June 2015 while she hid in a bathroom. The two fled after committing the crime and were caught by police at Godejohn’s family home.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard was charged with the first-degree murder of her mother at first, but once the story of the abuse was uncovered, a plea deal was worked out with prosecutors. Since her sentence, Blanchard has granted some interviews, including for the HBO doc and Dr. Phil McGraw, and will be the subject of an upcoming, Lifetime series The Prison Confession of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. And proving that the walls of prison can’t stop the PR machine, Blanchard’s team has been generating buzz for her upcoming e-book, Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom, on social media all this month.
