How Gypsy Rose Blanchard became the world’s most captivating ex-con

People have been gripped by the tale of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the young woman who plotted to murder her mother to escape a prison of false sickness, ever since she was arrested in 2015. 

For a long time, British interest was limited to an especially interested and extremely online few. The case was huge in the States, but didn’t quite cut through in the UK to the same extent. This was until last week, when Blanchard was released from prison after serving eight years for second-degree murder, and her name hit the headlines all over again — and this time, it’s everywhere.

In the interviews and online postings since her release, Blanchard is quickly cementing herself as the world’s most captivating ex-inmate du jour (move over, Anna Delvey). From her long standing love of Taylor Swift to her graphic clapbacks at critics of her new husband, here’s how a young woman from Louisiana with the “mental capacity of a seven year old” became a murderer, and then a martyr. 

On July 27, 1991, 24-year-old Clauddine "Dee Dee" Pitre and 18-year-old Rod Blanchard welcomed their first and only child. They decided on the names Gypsy, a favourite of Dee Dee’s, and Rose, thanks to Rod’s love of the band Guns and Roses. The pair married while Rod was 17, but split before Gypsy was born, after Rod realised the relationship wasn’t right for him around the time of his 18th birthday. “I wasn't in love with her, really. I knew I got married for the wrong reasons," he told Buzzfeed in an interview. 

Gypsy was left in the primary care of Dee Dee, who was herself a troubled child. Born in 1967, also in Louisiana, Dee Dee was one of five children, and had a fractured relationship with her family. According to family members, when Dee Dee was young, she would apparently steal from her own family as a form of retaliation when “things didn't go her way.” Dee Dee also developed a documented interest in nursing and medicine, and at one point worked as a nurse’s aid, which provided her with some limited medical knowledge.

Which is why people believed Dee Dee when, as a first time mother, she started noticing “health problems” in her infant daughter, Gypsy Rose, who was just three months old.

According to Rod, Dee Dee was at first convinced Gypsy had sleep apnea, and would often take her to hospital for overnight stays. Sleep monitor and other tests found no sign of the condition, but it didn’t matter: Dee Dee thought she had it, so that’s what people believed. Similarly, Dee Dee told others that Gypsy was born “prematurely”, and later obscured her real birth date. 

But this was only the beginning.

Munchausen by Proxy, or factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), as it’s now known, is a mental health condition where an individual — usually a parent — convinces themselves and others that another person is medically unwell when they’re not. Dee Dee Blanchard’s Munchausen by Proxy led her to convince everyone she knew, including doctors, neighbours and family members, that Gypsy Rose Blanchard was gravely ill for over two decades of her life.

Dee Dee invented a host of false medical issues for Gypsy from a young age, including leukaemia, muscular dystrophy, and asthma, many of which she explained were the result of an unspecified chromosomal disorder — which was also fake. According to Dee Dee, Gypsy had the mind of a child of seven years old. She had Gypsy fed through a tube well into her 20s, and use a wheelchair and a walker to get around, despite being perfectly able to walk and support her own weight.

The wheelchair was actually introduced when Gypsy was around seven or eight, after she grazed her knee while playing on a motorbike. “I did get into a motorcycle accident with my grandfather,” Gypsy recalled in a more recent interview. “She [Dee Dee] took me to the hospital and then told me that the doctor gave her a wheelchair and I had to be in a wheelchair now.”

As well as the wheelchair, Gypsy was subject to unnecessary surgeries and medication. Dee Dee consistently shaved Gypsy’s head to keep up the leukaemia lie, which Gypsy was told was to get ahead of her hair falling out from the medication. Doctors and family members believed Dee Dee’s pleas for her child’s health, and since Gypsy was homeschooled, there weren’t any other reasonable adults around to help. Whilst being raised in near-isolation, Gypsy taught herself how to read by reading the Harry Potter book series, a franchise she’s still a fan of to this day (she went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway last night).

During her upbringing, there were times where Gypsy realised she wasn’t sick, or would accidentally say something that eluded to her being in better health than presumed. “If I said something I wasn’t supposed to, she’d squeeze my hand,” Gypsy has since said in interviews, “and I’d know [to] zip it.” Dee Dee also used physical abuse, where she would hit or forcibly restrain Gypsy, to frighten her into submission.

And Gypsy may not be Dee Dee’s only victim. According to Dee Dee’s nephew, Bobby Pitre, Dee Dee and Gypsy lived with Dee Dee’s father, Claude Pitre, and step-mother, Laura Pitre, for a period of Gypsy’s upbringing. During this time, Dee Dee did most of the cooking to help out in return for being able to stay. When Laura suddenly started to get sick, suspicions turned to Dee Dee, who was accused of mistreating Gypsy and her family. Dee Dee fled to New Orleans with Gypsy, and Laura miraculously recovered.

In 2005, just after Gypsy had celebrated her 14th birthday, Hurricane Katrina hit the United States, devastating the city of New Orleans. Dee Dee and Gypsy’s plight as a single mother and disabled child surviving a hurricane garnered media attention, and as a result the pair were airlifted out of New Orleans and given assistance to relocate to the neighbouring state of Missouri. Dee Dee used this convenient opportunity to claim that the hurricane had destroyed Gypsy’s medical records and birth certificate, which allowed her to continue faking illnesses, as well as pretend that Gypsy was younger than she actually was.

During their time in Missouri, Dee Dee cashed in on charity honours and handouts on Gypsy’s behalf. In 2007, Gypsy was honoured by the Oley Foundation, a charity which advocates for the rights of feeding-tube recipients, as its 2007 “Child of the Year”, despite her feeding tube being wholly unnecessary. Then, in 2008, Habitat for Humanity built them a small home in the town of Springfield, with a ramp and a hot tub, so the two settled there.

Gypsy still had a relationship with her father Rod, though he never visited her in her new home in Missouri. Dee Dee used his absence to tell doctors and new friends falsely that he was a drug addict who had abandoned his daughter. Meanwhile, Rod spoke to Gypsy frequently. They promised to visit but “for one reason or another, it would never work out,” he said in an interview.

Gypsy’s “medical issues'' persisted. Her saliva glands were treated with Botox and eventually removed to stop her “drooling”, tubes were implanted in her ears due to made-up hearing issues, and her seizure medication — for non-existent seizures — resulted in tooth loss, so Gypsy’s actual teeth were replaced with a bridge. Then, for the first time in nearly 18 years, a doctor got suspicious. 

The only documented suspicion of Dee Dee’s medical interferences is from Dr Bernardo Flasterstein, a paediatric neurologist who saw Gypsy for an appointment some time around 2008, while she lived in Springfield. Gypsy would have been around 17 years old at this point, but Dr Flasterstein was told she was just 14. 

Dr Flasterstein was immediately suspicious of Gypsy's diagnoses of muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy. “There was nothing there to support either,” he recalled in a TV interview. So Dr Flasterstein told Dee Dee of his doubts. “The mother was not happy with that,” he remembered. “She left the office in a storm and told my nurses that I don’t know what I’m talking about and that she’s not coming back.” After this meeting, Dee Dee relocated Gypsy’s healthcare to another centre three hours away in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Then, in 2011, when Gypsy was 19 years old, she made her first ever attempt at an escape. Gypsy was in attendance at a science fiction and fantasy convention, the likes of which she had attended since she was 10 years old, when she met an older man who took an interest in her. Soon after, she snuck out of her house at night to meet him, only for Dee Dee to find the pair together in a nearby hotel. When Dee Dee finally convinced Gypsy to return home, she chained her to her bed for two weeks as punishment. 

What Dee Dee didn’t realise was that Gypsy, now an adult woman, was developing a sexuality of her own, and a keen interest in men. What she also didn’t realise is that Gypsy knew how to use the internet to meet these men (she had multiple online accounts with fake names), and to tell them the truth of her experience.

In 2013, Gypsy connected with a 23-year-old man from Wisconsin called Nicholas Godejohn via a Christian singles website called Christiandatingforfree.com, where the pair bonded over their shared Catholicism. Whether Gypsy knew it or not, Godejohn was not a good guy: that same year, he was arrested for watching porn and masturbating in a McDonald’s for nine hours, then convicted for carrying a concealed weapon.

Gyspy and Godejohn kept in communication for years, often discussing sex and BDSM, as well as their plans to elope and have children. Along with Godejohn, Gypsy also spoke online to her friend and neighbour, Aleah Woodmansee, who she connected with under the name “Emma Rose” to hide her identity. In 2014, over this online chat, Gypsy confessed to Aleah about her relationship with Godejohn. 

The pair met up for the first time the next year at a local movie theatre, with Dee Dee present, where they acted like they had just bumped into each other by chance — then snuck off to have sex in a nearby toilet. According to Gypsy Rose Blanchard expert and Mommy Dead and Dearest documentary maker Erin Lee Carr, “When Gypsy got out, her mother was furious and forbade her from ever seeing Nick again.” So, once Godejohn had returned to Wisconsin, they started to plot Dee Dee’s murder. 

On 9 June 2015, Nicholas Godejohn caught a Greyhound bus from Wisconsin to Louisiana and waited for Gypsy’s signal. Gypsy let Godejohn into their house, allegedly gave him duct tape, gloves, and a knife, then hid in the bathroom and covered her ears. 

Godejohn entered Dee Dee’s bedroom and stabbed her 17 times while she was asleep. He admitted in past police interviews that he then considered raping her corpse, but didn’t because of a deal he had with Gypsy. “I made a deal with him,” Gypsy said in an interview, “I'd let him rape me and then he wouldn't do that to my mom." Godejohn claims the sex they had after the murder was consensual, whereas Gypsy says it was up until a point where it became non-consensual. 

The pair cleaned up the crime scene, took $4,000 in cash from the house and fled to a motel, then to Wisconsin. During their journey across the country, Gypsy was described by multiple witnesses to be wearing a blonde wig and walking unassisted.

Meanwhile, someone was posting on DeeDee’s Facebook account. “That Bitch is dead!” said a post on her wall. Then another: “I f*cken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER… HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO F*CKEN LOUD LOL.” It was not Godejohn, as the perspective implied, but Gypsy writing the posts — she was scared no one would find her mother’s body and wanted to make them realise something had happened to her.

Friends went to Dee Dee’s house and called 911. The police found her body, as well as Gypsy’s empty wheelchair, intact prescriptions and feeding tube. Fearing the worst, neighbours and friends thought that poor, sick Gypsy had been abducted, or also killed. A Go Fund Me was started to raise funds for their funerals. 

When police appealed for information, Aleah Woodmansee came forward with what she knew about Nicholas Godejohn. They traced the IP address of Dee Dee’s posthumous Facebook posts to a location in Wisconsin, and local police raided Godejohn’s home. He and Gypsy surrendered for arrest and were taken into custody under charges of murder and felony armed criminal action.

Following their arrests, the media gradually learned that Gypsy was not a victim in the way they had initially presumed — she was not hurt, nor was she kidnapped — but in another: Gypsy was never sick, and her mother had been lying the whole time.

As the trials of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Nicholas Godejohn loomed, so did questions about death row. Missouri still has the death penalty, and first degree murder can carry this punishment. But this was quickly dismissed by county prosecutor Dan Patterson, who said he wouldn’t be seeking the death penalty for either defendant, due to the “extraordinary and unusual” nature of Blanchard’s case. 

Gypsy accepted the plea deal for her case, pleading guilty to her charges, whereas Godejohn’s lawyers went for a defence of diminished responsibility. Because of Gypsy’s lack of trial, she was in jail by July 2016, whereas it took until July 2017 for Godejohn’s date to even be set. It was announced eventually as November 2018, with Godejohn kept in custody until then. When he testified in his trial, he said he had considered himself Gypsy’s rescuer. Godejohn’s attorney, Dewayne Perry, described Godejohn as a “low-functioning person with autism” (psychologists later confirmed this) who wasn’t capable of pre-deliberation. The legal team also claimed that Godejohn was manipulated by Gypsy. “Nick was so in love with her and so obsessed with her that he would do anything,” Perry claimed. “And Gypsy knew that.”

Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2019 following his trial conviction for first-degree murder. According to Marc Feldman, an international expert on factitious disorders, this is the first case in which a Munchausen-abused child has killed an abusive parent, and not the other way around.

Once Gypsy was put in prison and her mother cremated, Gypsy’s remaining family members agreed that Gypsy had suffered as much as necessary for her crimes, and did not mourn DeeDee — instead, they flushed her ashes down the toilet. Gypsy’s father Rod was more forgiving, "I think Dee Dee's problem was she started a web of lies, and there was no escaping after," he told BuzzFeed. "[I]t was like a tornado got started." He also said he was happy the first time he saw a video of Gypsy walking unassisted.

Meanwhile, behind the bars of Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center, an imprisoned Gypsy was happier than ever. “I feel like I'm more free in prison than with living with my mom. Because now I'm allowed to just live like a normal woman,” she said in a 2018 TV interview.

This was the beginning of her outspoken interviews, which gained her widespread sympathy and praise. Her story has become the subject of numerous documentaries, as well as a book, and a TV drama series. The Apple TV+ drama series, entitled The Act, featured The Kissing Booth actress Joey King as Gypsy and True Romance star Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee Blanchard. It received critical acclaim at the time, drawing more and more people to the shocking details of Gypsy’s real life story.

From the confines of prison, Gypsy also managed to find love with Louisana-based school teacher Ryan Scott Anderson, who wrote her letters while she was in prison. In an interview with People, he recalled how he was inspired by his friend wanting to write to Joe Exotic in 2020: “I said, 'I'll tell you what, if you write him, I'll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard.' And I had watched her documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, like three years before that,” he said. “And then The Act had came out and I've never watched The Act, but I remember my friends talking about The Act and I was like, I'll watch the documentary again. So it was kind of fresh on my mind.” The pair didn’t meet in person until July 2021 due to Covid restrictions, but their face-to-face meeting was a success, and they tied the knot a year later.

Further interest in Gypsy’s life was generated by snippets from interviews she completed within prison, such as the revelation that she is a huge Taylor Swift fan, or the assertion that Millie Bobby Brown should play her in a biopic of her life. Since her release, her position as an internet cult figure has only strengthened. 

In interviews, she has shared how she was asked out “250 times” while in prison, and has graphically defended her new husband from online criticism, saying: “Ryan, don’t listen to the haters. I love you, and you love me. We do not owe anyone anything. Our family is who matters. If you get likes and good comments great, if you get hate then whatever because THEY DON’T MATTER. I love you.” Blanchard continued: “Besides they jealous because you are rocking my world every night… yeah I said it, the D is fire.”

Between her mind-boggling past and new fiery online persona, Blanchard looks set to be famous for life.