“First selfie on freedom!”. The message written by Gipsy Rose Blanchard on December 28 on her Instagram account has already accumulated more than six and a half million views. I like and the freedom she speaks of is not metaphorical: it was her first selfie after leaving a women's prison in Missouri where she had been held for eight years for the murder of her mother Dee Dee Blanchard.
Yes, his face was already famous, but since his release from prison he has become a celebrity. His face is multiplied in the tabloids, all television stations want to hear his story and each of his publications on Instagram (where he has more than 6.5 million followers) and TikTok (where he has the same number) receives millions of interactions, the most related to their image. Her accessories, her hairstyle or her manicure are analyzed as if she were a contestant on a reality or a new pop star. There are also those who do not join in the enthusiasm: “It makes me feel very uncomfortable that she is so famous right now for doing something so horrible,” says one of the comments. Days before leaving the prison he granted a long interview with People in which he showed his regret for a crime that he regrets “every day.” “She didn't deserve it, she deserved to be where I am, sitting in prison serving time for criminal behavior.”
The expectation that his release has caused is such that according to TMZ The Missouri police were forced to thwart her intention to attend a Kansas City Chiefs game where she planned to meet her idol Taylor Swift, a regular in the box since the beginning of her relationship with player Travis Kelce. To satisfy the desire for information about the case, the chain Lifetime premiered last night The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Gypsy Rose Blanchard's confessions from prison), a six-part documentary announcing new revelations about the case, which became famous around the world thanks to a previous documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest (in Spain it can be seen on HBO Max).
“After a lifetime of silence, I can finally use my voice to share my story and speak my truth. As a survivor of relentless childhood abuse, the series chronicles my quest for liberation and my journey through self-discovery,” she announces. “I am unapologetically myself and unafraid to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now.”
Who is the monster?
On June 4, 2015, the Greene County, Missouri, police arrived at Dee Dee Blanchard's house after being alerted by neighbors. They were worried after seeing some strange messages on her Facebook. “The dog is dead,” could be read in an account usually filled with positivity and focused on her daughter Gypsy, a sick girl who was the center of her life. Not being able to contact her, they feared that something could have happened to them.
When they entered the house they found Dee Dee's body stitched up with stab wounds, but no sign of her daughter, only her wheelchair. The alarm went off. They feared a kidnapping. The girl was a sad celebrity in the area, a regular at charity events. The girl suffered from leukemia, heart problems and muscular dystrophy.
The kidnapping theory was dismantled when police traced the IP of Dee Dee's Facebook posts. It corresponded to a house in Wisconsin. There she met Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn with whom, it was discovered, she was in a secret romantic relationship. The police arrested them both. The most surprising thing within that accumulation of atrocities is that Gypsy walked by herself and no longer seemed like the fragile girl that could be seen on her social networks, always accompanied by Disney princesses. According to the first data of the investigation, the crime had been planned by Gipsy and executed by Godejohn, whom she had met in a Christian dating network.
Gipsy was not the girl her neighbors thought she was, but a twenty-five-year-old woman whose mother had falsified her birth certificate. She wasn't sick either, it was Dee Dee who made her sick. She had never had leukemia, but she shaved her head so she would look like it. He had also subjected her to complex unnecessary surgical interventions in her quest to make her completely dependent on her. How something like this could have happened is a question that still resonates. Dee Dee had kept her daughter away from society and also from her father who contributed to her support, but whom she barely allowed close. What could cause a mother to subject her own daughter to continued suffering? the United States wondered. Dee Dee suffered from factitious disorder, which according to the Mayo Clinic is “a serious mental disorder in which a person deceives others by pretending to be sick, getting sick on purpose, or hurting themselves,” a condition commonly known as Munchausen Syndrome. . When, as in the case of Dee Dee, the patients did not make themselves sick, but rather made other people sick, it is called Münchhausen Syndrome by proxy and the victims are usually children, vulnerable adults or even domestic animals. After each piece of information that came to light during the police investigation, the question was: who is the monster?
a perfect mother
There was no doubt that Gipsy was an accessory to murder. She had left the door open so that her boyfriend could access the house on the night of the crime and had written the words on her mother's Facebook. For months both had exchanged messages that came to light at the trial. They went from highly sexual comments to questions about duct tape and knives. The law was going to be relentless, but society had doubts about her guilt.
Nick Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder and Gypsy was sentenced t
o 10 years in prison, the minimum possible. Thanks to a plea deal that acknowledged his abusive relationship with her mother, she served eight. The case contained all the elements to generate fascination in the public and the media capitalized on it. Two documentaries were released, the aforementioned Mommy Dead and Dearest and Gypsy's Revenge. In 2019, Hulu produced The Act with Joey King and Patricia Arquette, who received an Emmy for best supporting actress. It was one of the “abject crimes” of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and appears in a poorly concealed way in The Politician, by Ryan Murphy, where Jessica Lange acts as Dee Dee's southern counterpart. Munchausen syndrome has always captivated fiction.
Each answer generated another question. How had Dee Dee been able to deceive doctors and nurses for years? Although fiction shows them as deranged monsters, those affected by “factitious disorder” tend to be articulate and stable people who spend years learning to avoid the control of the system and when they feel stalked they change medical centers. The reward for so much effort is recognition, feeling indispensable, that something as everyday as taking care of children is seen as heroic. That is one of the reasons that make these types of patients, generally white middle-class women, so attractive for fiction. What could be more terrifying than a perfectly normal mother who continually harms her daughter?
There is another protagonist in this story of mothers and daughters: Nicholas Godejohn. He and Gypsy talked for two years before meeting in person. His first date was at a movie theater and his second was when he traveled from Wisconsin to Missouri to kill Dee Dee. Gypsy stated in Mommy Dead and Dearest that on the night of the murder they had both had a manicure and when their mother fell asleep, Godejohn entered the house and stabbed her while she remained hidden in the bathroom. During the trial Gypsy confessed to having convinced him, but despite his lawyers alleging manipulation of her, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“I was blindly in love,” he declared during the trial. In a later interview He said that the time he spent with Gypsy had been the best of his life. “From the beginning I knew we were soulmates,” she confessed, “those five days I was with her physically were the most intense, magical and impressive I have ever had.” He also stated that he had murdered Dee Dee because with her alive they could never be together.
The end of the romance
It emerged that Gypsy and Nicholas had broken up when she announced her engagement to another man. In 2020, Ryan Scott Anderson, a high school teacher from Louisiana, one of the men she corresponded with from prison, came into her life. They got married in prison in July 2022, in a small ceremony without guests, and now they are planning a big party with all their friends. “We deserve it” she told exclusively to People. She also revealed that she felt some concern because she had never lived with a man: only her mother and her fellow prisoners have been in her life.
Their relationship seems to be going well, according to a controversial comment she wrote in response to a post by her husband on Instagram in which she boasted about the intensity of her sex life. “Don't listen to the naysayers, I love you and you love me. We don't owe anything to anyone. Our family is what is important. If they tell you good things, that's fine, if there is hate, ignore it, because they don't matter. I love you, despite jealousy because you please me every night…yes, I said it, sex is great. Happy wife, happy life,” she wrote. Her husband he answered next: “Who said I gave a damn what these jealous people say, anyway, haha… Now come get it, honey.”
Gypsy's life after her release is being frenetic and at the same time unusually conventional. Her Christmas isn't being too different from anyone else's, except that in the United States it's hard not to see her face on every show. She is a 32-year-old woman who records videos on TikTok and shares photos on Instagram with family and friends celebrating her return home, as normal as if instead of a state prison she had been touring the Aegean in a cruise.
Other criminals seek anonymity after serving their sentence, but this is not their case. There are those who warn of the danger it can pose for a person who has spent his entire life captive and guarded, first by his mother and then by the state. The history of the celebrities he seems to be trying to emulate is filled with tragic lives and broken toys. “Let's not turn Gypsy Rose Blanchard into a meme” wrote Lois Shearing in Cosmopolitan. Judging by the speed with which each anecdote of his new life is going viral, perhaps the warning comes too late.
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