The Transformation Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard From Childhood To 32

The way the public perceives Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been quite a rollercoaster ride. In 2015, Gypsy's story had those closely following it in a death grip. At first, she was a figure to be pitied. She was believed to be a young girl who was suffering from numerous debilitating health issues — and there was concern that she had become a victim of kidnapping or worse. Then, she was seen as a murderous liar who had helped plot the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. But as the public learned more about the pain and suffering that Dee Dee put her daughter through, the perception of Gypsy shifted again.

It's now believed that Dee Dee had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental illness in which someone fabricates or induces the symptoms of medical issues in a dependent. Dee Dee spent years lying to doctors about her daughter, claiming that Gypsy was sick with various ailments that she didn't have. Even worse, Gypsy was subjected to taking medications and undergoing medical procedures that she didn't need. Dee Dee kept her daughter sheltered and trapped in a cycle of abuse that Gypsy eventually became desperate to escape.

The Blanchards' story has been well-documented in documentaries such as "Mommy Dead and Dearest" and "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard," which have likely played roles in the next stage of Gypsy's transformation: When she became a free woman, the public's fascination with her story made her a huge cultural phenom.

Rod Blanchard was just 17 when he and 24-year-old Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard (née Pitre) learned that they were going to be parents. By the time Gypsy Rose Blanchard was born on July 27, 1991, the couple had already separated. In a 2018 "20/20" special, Rod revealed that Gypsy had no health problems as a newborn, saying, "Nothing wrong with her. Perfect." But three months later, Dee Dee told him that she was having Gypsy tested for sleep apnea because she was experiencing seizures. However, on the "Mystery and Murder: Analysis by Dr. Phil" podcast, Rod said that Gypsy wasn't diagnosed with the disorder to his knowledge. Still, Dee Dee convinced doctors to outfit their daughter with a heart monitor.

Soon, Dee Dee was insisting that Gypsy had a litany of health issues, including vision problems and trouble eating. According to BuzzFeed News, Dee Dee claimed that a chromosomal defect was the cause of her daughter's myriad ailments. Because she was a former nurse's aide, Dee Dee came off as being knowledgeable about the conditions Gypsy supposedly had, and she knew the correct medical jargon to use when speaking with doctors. This may help explain why so many healthcare professionals unwittingly helped her continue to medically abuse her daughter for years. Gypsy, meanwhile, remained oblivious about what was happening. "We got along so perfect," she told "20/20" of her relationship with her mom. "I saw her as an angel that can do no wrong."

One major medical problem that Dee Dee Blanchard conjured up resulted in Gypsy Rose Blanchard undergoing surgery to have a feeding tube inserted into her stomach. Gypsy's former pediatrician, Dr. Robert Steele, reviewed her medical records for "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard" and discovered that Dee Dee had told doctors she was worried that Gypsy wasn't eating enough. When Gypsy learned that her mother had also claimed she was "fearful of eating," she was shocked, exclaiming, "That's ridiculous!" The insertion of the tube was followed by a six-month stint at the Children's Hospital New Orleans. 

Gypsy recalled her mother naming the tube "Mickey Button" and said that she even made up a song about it set to the tune of "The Mickey Mouse Club" theme song. But this didn't exactly make the contraption seem fun. "The feeding tube was painful, especially when it needed to be changed because stomach acid erodes the internal hardware of it," she told "The Prison Confessions." Gypsy was 8 years old when the tube was put in, and she endured having it changed twice a year until age 24.

Dee Dee wasn't just taking her daughter to the hospital frequently; she was also using Gypsy's feigned problems to score invitations to events like the 2001 Krewe of Mid-City parade in New Orleans, where Gypsy was crowned honorary queen. While being interviewed by the Daily Comet about the honor, Dee Dee said, "She is such a good child. She has never once complained."

Over the years, the severity of Gypsy Rose's medical issues that Dee Dee Blanchard lied about kept increasing. At one point, she claimed that her daughter had suffered from muscular dystrophy, a type of severe muscle weakness that often causes difficulty with walking. On "Mystery and Murder: Analysis by Dr. Phil," Gypsy Rose's father, Rod Blanchard, recalled Dee Dee telling him that it was another chronic condition caused by their daughter's supposed chromosomal disorder, and that she claimed it was an early death sentence for her. "Dee Dee said she wasn't going to live to be 20 years old," Rod revealed.

When Gypsy Rose Blanchard was interviewed in prison for "The Dr. Phil Show" in 2017, she said that Dee Dee initially made her start using a walker as as young child, which would bolster her claim that Gypsy would eventually lose the ability to use her legs. But it wasn't until she suffered a skinned knee in a motorcycle crash, that her mother insisted that Gypsy needed to be wheel-chair bound. According to Gypsy, Dee Dee punished her if she got caught walking from then on. "She started hitting me with a coat hanger," she said to Dr. Phil.

Dee Dee's next fabricated diagnosis was leukemia. To make this lie believable, she shaved Gypsy's head and shortened her life span again. "She would tell me, 'With your cancer, you only have about two more years,' and then when two years would come up, she would tell everybody and me, 'It's a miracle you've lived this long.'" Gypsy recalled on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard." 

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

In some photos of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, her front teeth are gone and the silver caps on others are visible. Gypsy explained on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard" that her mother had started rubbing Orajel on her teeth so that she would drool excessively, which is a cerebral palsy symptom. Because of the heavy drooling, Dee Dee Blanchard was able to convince a doctor to surgically remove Gypsy's salivary glands. Dr. Robert Steele said that this procedure can result in dental issues. "After the surgery, I had more and more of my teeth removed," Gypsy recalled. During her "Dr. Phil" interview, she also shared that the medication she was taking for an epilepsy diagnosis had contributed to some additional tooth loss.

Gypsy ultimately lost all but 16 of her teeth and had to start wearing dentures. "Today, my dentures don't fit in properly and I'm not able to get in a new set because I'm at prison and they don't do that here," she said on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard"

Around the time of her epilepsy diagnosis, Gypsy and Dee Dee were gifted with a Habitat for Humanity home in Springfield, Missouri. Gypsy told Dr. Phil that at the time, she didn't realize her mother was financially benefitting from the falsehoods about her health, but did recall Dee Dee telling her that she "had no idea how hard it is to keep up everything she built."

Per "20/20," Dee Dee Blanchard's ruse earned her and her daughter a trip to Disney World through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, as well as meetings with celebrities such as "Lord of the Rings" stars Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. Donations from caring supporters poured in, including a sizeable one from country singer Miranda Lambert. The musician gave the Blanchards a check for $3,500 in 2013, not long before Blanchard celebrated her 22nd birthday. By then, Gypsy Rose had grown so tired of being manipulated, lied to, and abused by her mother that she had tried to run away from home.

Things unfortunately took a turn for the worse. After Gypsy Rose snuck out to spend time with a man she met online in 2011, her mother tracked her down and persuaded her to go back home. Gypsy Roes later recalled on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard" (via People) that her decision to run away upset her mother, which lead to her facing a severe punishment. "She chained me to the bed, she smashed my computer and my cell phone and I was chained for two weeks," she said.

Dee Dee Blanchard's response to the incident was extreme. She also erroneously claimed her daughter was an underage 15-year-old, despite the fact that she was a 19-year-old adult. A former neighbor who was around Gypsy's age told "20/20" that Dee Dee also confronted her about a conversation she and Gypsy had about boys. "It was like, 'My daughter has the mentality of a child; you're talking to her about teenage girl things," she recalled.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard continued to rebel against her abusive mother by creating a profile on a Christian dating site. She began communicating with a match named Nicholas Godejohn and initially told him that she was confined to a wheelchair. "Why would that be a problem u are an angel in my eyes," he wrote in response to her false revelation, per "20/20.  According to The Guardian, when Blanchard started making arrangements to meet Godejohn in person, she decided to come clean and told him that she actually didn't need her wheelchair.

During an interview with "Dr. Phil" in 2023, Blanchard said that Godejohn made a few surprising revelations of his own. "He said that he was psychic and that he had these premonitions. He thought that he was a 500-year-old vampire named Victor," she recalled. 

Blanchard had long had a fascination with princesses and loved dressing up like Cinderella, according to BuzzFeed News. Blanchard told Dr. Phil that she was wearing her Cinderella costume when she and Godejohn met in person for the first time in 2015. She and her mother had gone to a local theater to watch the live-action "Cinderella" remake, where she had arranged to meet with her suitor. During the movie, the pair snuck away to the men's restroom and had sex. "I wheeled myself to the bathroom and he followed while my mother was still in the auditorium," Blanchard recalled. 

In January 2024, Gypsy Rose Blanchard told People that she reached her breaking point when Dee Dee Blanchard insisted that she needed to undergo surgery on her larynx. "It was work on my neck, something about my voice and my vocal cords and my voice box, to figure out why my voice is so high-pitched," she said. Blanchard became so desperate to avoid another unnecessary surgical procedure that she started plotting her mother's murder with Nicholas Godejohn.

On June 14, 2015, those who followed the Facebook account that Gypsy Rose and Dee Dee Blanchard shared saw two alarming messages. "THAT B***H IS DEAD," the first one read. The second said, "I f***en SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER... HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO F***EN LOUD LOL," per The Guardian. When Dee Dee's body was later discovered and Blanchard was nowhere to be found, this disturbing message initially led authorities to believe that Blanchard had possibly been abducted. However, authorities tracked Blanchard and Godejohn in Wisconsin using the IP address that the Facebook messages had been posted from.

Friends and family members were stunned when they saw video footage of Blanchard walking after she and Godejohn were apprehended and arrested. "I felt so stupid. If she can walk, what else have we been lied to about?" her father said on "20/20." Rod Blanchard added that he was glad that his daughter didn't actually need a wheelchair.

Dee Dee Blanchard had long insisted that her daughter had the mental capacity of a 7-year-old, per BuzzFeed News. But while those who were closely following the Blanchards' story were getting a crash course in Munchausen syndrome by proxy, they were also learning that Gypsy Rose Blanchard was perfectly capable of arranging for her mother to be killed. In 2016, Gypsy accepted a plea agreement; in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to second-degree murder. 

Gypsy had already been in jail for a year when she appeared in court to accept her fate. According to the Springfield News-Leader, her attorney said that she had become much healthier during that time. Gypsy later revealed that she experienced a surprising feeling when she started her long stint behind bars: freedom. "The best memory that I have in my entire life is the day that I got to prison, and I got to go out to the picnic tables. And I'm like, 'I'm free,'" she recalled on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard." 

In a 2024 interview for the A&E True Crime Blog, Gypsy shared that her mother never educated her past the second-grade level, so she used her time in prison to improve her education. Eventually, she was able to earn her GED. "It took me five years, but considering the fact that I had never really been to school, I'm really proud of myself," she told People. 

During her 2017 "Dr. Phil" interview in prison, Gypsy Rose Blanchard got emotional while looking at photos of her mother and their former home. She also expressed remorse over the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard. "She didn't deserve what happened," said a tearful Gypsy. "If anything, she just deserved to be where I am." Gypsy also insisted that she was not like her mother at all, adding that she no longer wanted her life to be filled with falsehoods and deception. "I'm trying to be a good person now," she shared.

While Gypsy told Dr. Phil that she had come to believe that murder is not acceptable in any circumstance, she also shared that she thought her sentence was too harsh. "I don't believe that I'm in the right place to get the help that I need," she explained. 

During the same interview, Gypsy also opened up about the medical abuse she suffered while under her mother's care, estimating that Dee Dee made her undergo around 30 unnecessary procedures. "I had multiple eye muscle surgeries, multiple leg surgeries, multiple throat surgeries," she said. Despite, this, she said she was no longer despairing over the years she lost due to her mother's actions, nor the repercussions of the horrible decision she made when she finally decided that she was done being a victim. Instead, she was thinking about her future. "I want to make a difference, and I believe that I have the story to," she said.

In 2018, Gypsy Rose Blanchard took the stand during her ex's murder trial. In a failed attempt at getting his client a lesser charge than first-degree murder, Nicholas Godejohn's attorney, Dewayne Perry, suggested that Godejohn's was a victim of Gypsy's purported manipulative behavior. "Nick was so in love with her and so obsessed with her that he would do anything, and Gypsy knew that," said Perry, per the Springfield News-Leader. Perry also argued that Godejohn was trying to save Gypsy from suffering further abuse from her mother when he stabbed Dee Dee Blanchard to death. 

During her testimony, Gypsy revealed that she had suggested to Godejohn he get her pregnant to force Dee Dee into accepting their relationship. Although Godejohn nixed this course of action, Gypsy said that she still planned on marrying and having children with him someday. "I stole baby clothes and things for a child," she confessed. She also admitted that murdering her mother was an idea she had thought about for a year before Godejohn carried out their plan. "I wanted to be free of her hold on me," she said. She explained that she didn't simply tell someone what her mother had been doing to her because she thought no one would believe her. She also confessed to stealing the knife that Godejohn killed Dee Dee with from Walmart. Godejohn is now serving a life sentence for using that weapon.

Despite the years of misery she suffered at Dee Dee's hands, Gypsy later revealed that she couldn't bear to hear her mother in pain when Godeojhn started stabbing her. Gypsy was in the bathroom at the time and recalled hearing Dee Dee scream and yell out her name. "At that point, I wanted to go help her so bad," said Gypsy to ABC News. "But I was so afraid to get up. It's like my body wouldn't move." Once her mother was dead and she and Nicholas had fled the scene, Gypsy recalled having no doubt in her mind that they would get away with the crime.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard sat down for another prison interview in 2019, this time for "20/20." She told reporter Amy Robach that her mother had her believing that she really did suffer from numerous health issues and listed them off: "leukemia, asthma, both vision and hearing impaired, muscular dystrophy, and seizures." However, she said that she was well aware that Dee Dee Blanchard was lying about certain diagnoses. "I knew that I didn't need the feeding tube. I knew that I could eat," she said. Because she was also capable of walking, she knew that she didn't need a wheelchair. However, she kept using it because she trusted her mother so completely. According to Gypsy, the only real medical problem she had was having worse vision in one eye than the other. 

Ryan Anderson, a special education teacher, began writing letters to Gypsy Rose Blanchard sometime after the pandemic started in 2020. He told People that he got the idea from a co-worker who had shared her own plan to start corresponding with a famous inmate: "Tiger King" subject Joseph "Joe Exotic" Maldonado-Passage. Anderson settled on Blanchard as a potential prison pen pal because he remembered learning about her in the documentary "Mommy Dead and Dearest." When he received an email from her in response to his first letter, he was surprised. "My letter must have touched her in some way because I did not expect her to write me back," he said on "The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard." From there, two continued corresponding over email and formed a tight emotional bond. Blanchard later said that their relationship provided her with exactly what she needed during a period of uncertainty and fear. "Ryan has seen me through some really good times, some really hard times," she told People.

The couple first met in-person in the visitation area of Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center, where hand-holding was allowed. They would later marry at the prison in 2022. Zero guests were present for the ceremony, so the couple decided to have a bigger wedding after Blanchard's release so that they could celebrate with their family and friends. "Gypsy's already got the style of dress she wants," Anderson told People in January 2023. "Somebody asked her that question the other day, and I was like, 'Wow, that was specific,' and she had it ready. So I wanna give her that moment."

After serving 85% of her 10-year sentence, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison early, becoming a free woman on December 28, 2023. Thanks to the massive public interest in her story, she quickly became an in-demand interview subject. Many of the outlets Blanchard spoke to normally cover Hollywood celebs, and she found herself fielding a lot of questions about her favorite music, stars, and TV shows. She told "Access" that she loves Taylor Swift and has a crush on Jason Momoa. When asked which television series she'd like to appear on, "Survivor" was her top pick. "I've watched it ever since I was a kid," she said. Of course, despite the buzz around her story, Blanchard said she has yet to watch "The Act," which is based on her experience and features Joey King portraying a fictionalized version of herself. "I lived it," she explained to ET.

The world seemed ready to embrace Blanchard as a social media influencer as well. At the time of writing, she has over 8 million followers on Instagram, where fans can see a photo of her wedding ring and a video of the all-Zara "outfit of the day" that she wore when she appeared on "The View." She also has a TikTok account with over 9.5 million followers. Of her social media fame, she told ET, "I don't even comprehend it at this point, because for me, I'm just another face in the crowd." However, she's also admitted to feeling more fab than drab. "I was in a little cocoon," she told AP. "And now that I'm free, I've emerged as a butterfly."