Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was just released from prison on December 28, 2023 after serving more than eight years for the 2015 murder of her abusive mother, released a book on Tuesday in which she shared more shocking details about revealed her life before and after the murder.
Blanchard co-authored “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom” with Michele Matrisciani and Melissa Moore, who interviewed her in prison. Her interviews are featured in the Lifetime documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, and the book is supplemented by transcripts of her other conversations and Blanchard's personal accounts of her traumatic upbringing.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard attends The Prison Confessions Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard red carpet event in New York City on January 5.Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images
It is believed that her mother, Dee Dee, was given a factitious disorder formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, tricking doctors into treating her daughter for non-existent illnesses, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy and one chromosomal disorder. among other complaints. At the same time, Dee Dee accepted money – and even a house – from charities.
Here are some of the revelations Blanchard shared about her life before and after she persuaded her online boyfriend Nick Godejohn to fatally stab her mother. Although she was 23 years old (but thought she was 18), the murder was the only way for her to escape the terrible abuse.
Blanchard only learned that all of her illnesses were faked after her arrest.
Even though she, like her mother, had lied about having to use a wheelchair (she could and did), and her baldness was not because of the medication but because she had shaved her head, Gypsy Rose had a hard time with her public defender to believe when he said she didn't. I do not have cancer “or any of the diseases that have defined and limited me.”
Blanchard and her mother used her wheelchair to shoplift.
Because they recognized they were a mother who loved her “special needs child,” Blanchard wrote, no one suspected they were stealing.
They used their wheelchair to push items off the shelves and dress them in children's clothing under their “princess dress” (Blanchard's mother, who told her she was five years younger than she actually was) or her hat (which she wore). to hide over her shaved head as part of the cancer ruse) and swapped barcodes on expensive items with those on cheaper items.
She didn't need many of the stolen items, said Blanchard, who described her mother as a hoarder. “There was so much piled up in our bedroom that I had to make my way from the door to the bed,” she said.
She bathed with her mother “until shortly before the murder.”
“I never thought it wasn’t normal,” Blanchard told Moore of the shared bathrooms. She said this was where her mother shaved Blanchard's pubic hair, which Dee Dee described as “clean.”
In a recorded interrogation after her arrest, Godejohn said that after the murder, Gypsy Rose shaved her legs and pubic hair in the bathroom where she hid while he stabbed her mother. Gypsy Rose said he raped her there while claiming the sex was “consensual.”
Her grandfather sexually abused both Gypsy Rose and her mother.
Blanchard discussed her grandfather's sexual abuse of his daughter and granddaughter in the docuseries, but noted in the book that he even sexually abused her mother when Dee Dee was an adult. While her mother was recovering from a serious car accident, Blanchard said, her grandfather carried Dee Dee into other rooms and abused her.
In the docuseries, her grandfather Claude Pitre denied abusing Gypsy Rose and instead claimed she tried to touch him. “She was the one who tried to touch me and I said, 'No, don't do that.' She started doing this when she was about 4 years old.”
She said she hadn't spoken or communicated with him since she was a child.
The romantic relationship between Blanchard and Godejohn continued for a year after the murder.
Blanchard said she was still “pining for Nick” while they were in the county jail. They exchanged letters by hiding them in the lounge and writing messages of love on the wall.
Later, when both were in prison, the former couple exchanged only two letters. When Godejohn found out she was engaged to another man (before she met and married Ryan Anderson in 2022), he accused her of adultery for taking her virginity she said he hadn't), and they were still married according to “God's law.”
She replied that she never wanted to get back together with him but “still feels guilty” and said that was why she testified on his behalf at his murder trial. (He was sentenced to life in prison without parole while she agreed to a plea deal.)
Blanchard spoke about her mother's abuse and the role she played in her mother's murder on Lifetime's “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”Courtesy of the Blanchard family
Blanchard said her mother claimed to be a “powerful witch,” used “spells” to punish her daughter, “saw shapes and shadows” and heard “voices” of people who disliked gypsies.
Blanchard also said her mother had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It is unclear whether Dee Dee was diagnosed with the disease, whether she was taking medication for it, or whether others noticed her unusual behavior during her frequent public appearances and doctor's appointments.
Blanchard's family was Catholic and she is now a Christian, but she researched Wicca and wore a pentagram medallion in prison.
She said Wicca seemed “familiar” to her because she grew up near New Orleans, where there is a supernatural “downside” to Catholicism with voodoo and other practices – not to mention her mother's belief in “results through spells to manifest”.
When she went to prison, Blanchard had only completed a first-grade education.
Blanchard said her mother initially taught her the alphabet and numbers at home using Christian books, but soon stopped and was never challenged by authorities. Blanchard attended school while in prison and eventually earned an equivalent high school diploma.
She spent two weeks in solitary confinement.
After a stranger's social media post, which prison officials interpreted as a signal that Blanchard was planning an escape, she was thrown into “the hole” while authorities investigated. It was “traumatizing” and made no sense, she said, since it happened just months before her parole hearing.
Blanchard and her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, are seen leaving a taping of “The View” on January 5 in New York City.She plans to do a follow-up series to the recent Lifetime documentaries and another book.
“As much as I've resisted the public persona,” she wrote, “it always finds me in bigger, more transcendent ways.” I know that working on two books, a Lifetime documentary and a follow-up series isn't what it looks like will be like the private life I wish I had.”
A spokesperson for Lifetime told HuffPost that Gypsy was followed by cameras during her recent press tour and is “evaluating what might come next in Gypsy's story.”