Gypsy Rose Blanchard – who helped murder her abusive mother and spent eight years in prison for it – says she is not “doing anything that anybody else wouldn’t do” by embracing the viral internet fame that greeted her when she was released from her sentence.
“Honestly, I’m a very shy person,” Blanchard said in an interview airing on a Friday evening episode of the ABC News show 20/20, a preview clip of which was provided to Rolling Stone. “[But] honestly, I don’t think that I’m doing anything that anybody else wouldn’t do.”
Blanchard, 32, also spent some of the interview defending how she has been publicly boasting about the satisfaction she has received from her intimate life with her new husband, Ryan Anderson.
“Well, I’m newlywed,” Blanchard said when 20/20 anchor Deborah Roberts asked her about some of the details she had previously shared on social media, including that Anderson’s reproductive organ was “fire”. “I’m newly married and I just came out, so I’m living my best married life with my husband. I don’t think that’s any different than any other wife would.”
Blanchard’s remarks to 20/20 – which airs Friday at 9pm ET – provide the latest chapter to one of the US criminal justice system’s stranger sagas. The case dates back to the 2015 stabbing death of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who had forced her daughter to pretend to be seriously ill and then endure numerous unnecessary medical procedures.
Mental health experts have said Dee Dee Blanchard had the psychological disorder Munchausen syndrome by proxy, seen in parents or guardians who exaggerate or invent their children’s medical conditions to gain sympathy and support.
Dee Dee Blanchard forced her daughter to use a wheelchair as well as a feeding tube, neither of which she needed. And she also beat her daughter and chained her to a bed, investigators have said.
Eventually, Blanchard gave a knife to her boyfriend at the time – Nicholas Godejohn – and hid in a bathroom while he killed her mother.
Blanchard told the makers of the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest that she could hear her mother scream while she was slain.
“I heard her say my name a couple of times,” a teary-eyed Blanchard recounted on the film. “And she said, ‘Help me.’ And then there was just silence.”
Authorities later found Dee Dee Blanchard’s body in her bed as her daughter and Godejohn fled. After the couple were captured, a jury found Godejohn guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Blanchard, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as the details of her abuse propelled her case into the national media spotlight.
She was given 10 years in prison and was paroled in late December.
In her first TV interview after her release, Blanchard told ABC’s Good Morning America that she didn’t believe her mother was a monster because “she had a lot of demons herself that she was struggling with”. Yet Blanchard said she did believe murdering her mother “was the only way out” of her abuse.
Blanchard additionally began documenting some of her early days of freedom to about 12 million Instagram and TikTok users who were following her on those social media platforms at the time of her parole.
One of Blanchard’s posts which was particularly popular showed her posing in a mirror with a long ponytail pulled over her shoulder – which she dubbed her “first selfie of freedom”. Well-wishing commenters on that post included influencers with words of support such as, “Slay my girlie!!!”, “YES!” and “QUEEN”.
A substantial number of interactions also met a picture that she shared online of her husband, Anderson, whom she married in 2022 while still imprisoned. She captioned that photo, “A New Years Eve Eve kiss with my hubby,” before sharing images of her diamond wedding ring and French manicured nails that inspired supportive responses typically seen on the accounts of more mainstream pop culture celebrities.
As Rolling Stone noted, another of Blanchard’s viral moments saw her charging into the comments of a social media selfie that Anderson posted to defend her from trolls who were insulting him.
Blanchard wrote that the couple’s mutual love was all that mattered, and she accused critics of being envious.
“They [are] jealous because you are rocking my world every night,” Blanchard wrote. Invoking colloquialisms to refer to Anderson’s member and his sexual prowess, she added: “Yeah I said it, the D is fire.”