Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a girl turned woman who has spent her life in chains has started a new chapter, officially, as a free woman. On Dec. 28, 2023, after spending eight years serving in Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri for her role in her mother’s murder, is free. The question is, is she an idol, the villain, or a victim?
I think she’s the victim. In her position, suffered at the hands of a mother with Factitious Disorder imposed on another, more commonly known as “Munchausen’s by Proxy ” or MSP. MSP is a debilitating mental illness in which a parent or guardian imposes fake illnesses on their child. The estimated mortality rate of children with parents who suffer from MSP is 9% according to the national institute of health, and if her mother continued with her ‘treatment’ of her daughter, Gypsy was bound to be that 9%. It was kill, or be killed.
Dee Dee, Gypsy’s mother, claimed her daughter suffered from; leukemia, asthma, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, brain damage due to premature birth, sleep apnea, and hearing and vision impairment. This caused Gypsy to spend most of her life in a wheelchair she didn’t need, medication she didn’t need, surgery and treatments she didn’t need. Dee Dee had her own daughter’s teeth removed, had her salivary glands removed, and lied to her to the point where Gypsy Rose thought she was 15 years old, at the age of 19.
With clever lies sprinkled in, claiming to lose her past medical records in a house fire, switching doctors everytime they got suspicious, lying to her community to take advantage of people’s generosity and stealing their money, moving states when the neighbors got suspicious, Dee Dee was a master manipulator. There was no one to help Gypsy Rose escape the hell her mother had made other than the most extreme solution; murder.
I think the part that shows that Gypsy Rose isn’t the monster people make her out to be is the fact she even expresses remorse in recent interviews, saying that she wouldn’t have done it if she had any other choice, a choice that she didn’t have. She says she understands her mother had her own demons, and that she even misses her.
Most people try to villainize Gypsy Rose because someone killed Dee Dee on her behalf, calling her a master manipulator, because that person was her boyfriend who she met during her secret escapades on the internet, named Nicholas Godejohn. If Godejohn was a nice, normal, maybe just easily manipulated guy, then I’d understand. However, Godejohn is none of these things. He had described meeting Gypsy Rose as his ‘chance’ to kill someone; he even wanted to sexually assault Dee Dee’s body after death. Does that seem like a man who was the ‘real victim?’ Not to me.
After eight years of incarceration, years that Gypsy Rose said she was freer than she ever was during her time with her mother, she’s been released from prison. Once again, Gypsy finds herself under the blazing spotlight of the media. However, reception at first was a little different this time. People, at the beginning, were supportive of her and her healing journey. They called her ‘mother’ and said she slayed, in the slang terms, not literally this time.
Gypsy was becoming famous, in the same veins as Meredith Duxbury or James Charles, instead of Dahmer or Bundy. Which, frankly, good for her. It really seemed like good things were finally in store for Gypsy, she was happy, healthy, she had even gotten married during incarceration. Until Jan. 3rd, 2024 the day which Gypsy Rose found herself a victim again, a victim of the internet. Her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, had been receiving hate on Instagram, placing words into Gypsy Rose’s mouth, claiming he was some sort of pedophile, or just as bad as Godejohn had been.
They acted as if Gypsy Rose WAS developmentally stunted like Dee Dee had claimed, like she couldn’t make decisions for herself, and Anderson had taken advantage of that. People spread lies, soon changing their story that Gypsy Rose was a helpless little girl to saying she was an evil master manipulator.
So, what does Gypsy Rose do? What any other millennial woman would have done, a millennial woman who hasn’t had a normal life around normal people with normal social skills for 32 years. She defended her husband in an Instagram comment, and ended that defense by praising her husband for their bedroom activities. She didn’t even defend herself, her focus was making sure people didn’t slander her husband. No, Gypsy Rose wasn’t vulgar or descriptive when talking about this, but nonetheless, to the troll’s eyes, they were now fools. They had ‘fell off.’
All Gypsy Rose had wanted was to live a normal life and bring awareness to those suffering from Munchausens and Munchausens’ by Proxy, by making an Amazon Prime docuseries called The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. She wanted to explain her story from her point of view, unlike HULU’s The Act (2019).
People need to leave her alone. She isn’t a villain, an idol, or a clown to poke and prod and gawk at. She’s just a woman, a woman who has been a victim by so many hands who just wants another chance to have a normal life and speak her truth.
