The Untold Truth Of Gypsy Rose's Mother, Dee Dee Blanchard

The story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard has become a familiar one in the media, the shocking true tale of how her mother, Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard, maintained a years-long deception by claiming that her daughter was plagued with an array of illnesses; Dee Dee, in fact, was  perfectly healthy. Gypsy mother's lie wasn't just made to the outside world, but also to Gypsy; Dee Dee convinced her daughter, from her earliest years, that she was afflicted with multiple diseases, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy, and more. As a result, Gypsy endured horrific and unnecessary pain — having her teeth pulled and salivary glands extracted, for example, due to Dee's false claims of her daughter's tooth decay.

When Gypsy learned the truth, she enlisted her secret boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to murder Dee Dee. She was tried and convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison; in late 2023, she was released after serving seven years behind bars. The trial exposed the big lie that Dee Dee had perpetrated for years, depicting herself as a caring mother devoting herself to the care of a seriously ill child when the truth was that she likely suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. This rare psychological condition that explains her bizarre and harmful treatment of her daughter.

But how much is actually known about the woman whose years of tormenting her daughter led to her murder? To find out, keep on reading to discover the untold truth of Gypsy Rose's mother, Dee Dee Blanchard.

After Dee Dee Blanchard's murder, experts came to believe that she suffered from a very unusual and very specific form of mental illness, Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In an op-ed column for MSNBC, Susan Hatters Friedman — professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University — shared her knowledge about the condition, which has since come to be known as Factitious disorder. According to Hatters Friedman, Blanchard was afflicted with a "rare psychological condition in which a person — almost always the mother of the victim — induces injury or disease in another person, falsifies symptoms, or presents the victim as ill, typically forcing them to have unneeded medical treatments."

Muchausen syndrome by proxy is overwhelmingly found in women and predominantly in mothers. A 2017 review of nearly 800 cases of Munchausen by proxy demonstrated that nearly 98% of the abusers were female, while more than 96% had been the victims' mothers. 

Speaking with Refinery29, psychiatrist Dr. Marc D. Feldman explained that this psychological ailment is particularly alarming because it flies in the face of most people's perceptions of motherhood, which is all about nurturing and protecting their children. "Munchausen by proxy mothers put up the pretense of caring, but are devious and secretive ..." Feldman wrote. That description certainly fits the years of abuse that Dee Dee doled out to daughter Gypsy Rose, which included undergoing unnecessary surgeries and a variety of painful medical procedures.

High atop the list of lies that Dee Dee Blanchard maintained about her daughter was that she was unable to walk, which was blatantly untrue. In addition, she also forced her daughter to use a feeding tube when she was perfectly capable of eating regularly. 

As Gypsy Rose explained during an interview with People, suspicions about her were always bubbling under the surface, but Dee Dee was always able to talk her way out of her daughter's questions. "Obviously I knew that I could walk and didn't need a feeding tube, but everything else was a really big confusion for me," she said, explaining that when asking Dee Dee about inconsistencies she noticed about her condition, her mother would typically claim that Gyspy had suffered an epileptic seizure, which is why she was unable to remember. "There was always an excuse," she added. 

For Gypsy, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction; while knowing she didn't need the wheelchair, she did believe her mother's claims of being diagnosed with leukemia. "Because I was taking lots of medications, and mom said that they were for cancer, and she would shave my hair off and said, 'It's going to fall out anyway, so let's keep it nice and neat,'" she said when interviewed by "20/20," as reported by ABC News.

In the days following the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard, reports emerged of various financial fraud, including one claim that she'd faked losing her Louisiana Home to Hurricane Katrina. That report turned out not to be true, but neither was it entirely untrue.

When Katrina destroyed the home in which they were living, the tragedy presented an opportunity for Dee Dee. It was then when she began to insist Gypsy's birth certificate, and all of her medical records were destroyed by flooding. As a result, it was Dee Dee who became the sole authority about her daughter's imaginary medical issues. Meanwhile, Dee Dee had been developing a talent for cashing in on her daughter's fake illness, and managed to get both of them from Louisiana to Missouri due to Gypsy's seemingly precarious condition. When they arrived, their hard-luck story attracted local media attention — and eventually, a major upgrade in their living situation.

Dee Dee Blanchard's deception about her daughter's health was a closely held secret, but she became adept at using her claims of Gypsy's medical maladies to her advantage. Using the media, Dee Dee publicized her daughter's bogus health issues, and milked the ensuing sympathy generated for all it was forth. This included a free house, built for Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose by Habitat for Humanity, with special handicap-accessible features to address Gypsy Rose's unnecessary wheelchair usage. "It's so easy to live here, and it's so peaceful," Dee Dee happily gushed in an interview with TMJ4 News shortly after moving into their ill-gotten new house. 

Other perks included a free trip to Walt Disney World, courtesy of the Make a Wish foundation, and backstage passes to meet country music superstar Miranda Lambert at one of her concerts.  Lambert was so moved by what she believed to be Gypsy Rose's health woes and her mother's apparent devotion that she gave them some checks totaling $6,000 — including $3,500 from her account. Meanwhile, Gypsy's fake afflictions also resulted in the opportunity to meet celebrities, posing for photos with "Lord of the Rings" stars Elijah Wood and Sean Astin.

Those who came into contact with Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy Rose left with the impression that she was a caring mother who'd sacrificed everything to selflessly take care of her seriously ill child. Anyone who asked Dee Dee about Gypsy Rose's condition received a laundry list of ailments, ranging from a chromosomal birth defect to muscular dystrophy to sleep apnea to epilepsy, in addition to childhood leukemia and others. Anything that Gypsy Rose might inadvertently divulge that could contradict her mom noted BuzzFeed, was usually offset by Dee Dee's insistence that her daughter had suffered brain damage and had the intellect of a seven-year-old. 

Amazingly, those who bought into the deception were concerned about Dee Dee. Her neighbor, Amy Pinegar, was sympathetic over what she perceived as Dee Dee's struggles. "I wondered," Pinegar told BuzzFeed, "keeping this child alive ... Is she that happy?"

Another acquaintance, Kim Blanchard (no relation), initially believed Dee Dee was circling sainthood. "Here was this poor, sick child who was being taken care of by a wonderful, patient mother who only wanted to help everybody," she told BuzzFeed.

One factor that allowed Dee Dee Blanchard to make others believe her fantastical claims about her daughter's health was keeping Gypsy Rose cloistered at home. Dee Dee homeschooled Gypsy Rose in order to keep her separated from other children, who could potentially realize she wasn't ill. "I was very sheltered," Gypsy told People. "I was limited in what I could watch and the exposure I had to other kids. What I knew of the outside world was only in Disney movies and those don't talk about warning signs of bad parents."

As she grew older, Gypsy Rose craved freedom, something she'd never experienced. She became rebellious and made some attempts to escape the shackles of her home confinement. Those efforts, however, were met with physical violence from her mother, who would respond by slapping and punching her. "It was very similar to a domestic violence type of relationship," Gypsy told People. "As long as you're complacent everything's fine. Put your foot down, then it's bad."

Anyone who wondered why Gypsy Rose Blanchard's father wasn't in the picture was told a story as untrue as Gypsy Rose Blanchard's ailments. Rod Blanchard met Dee Dee when she was 24, and he was a 17-year-old high school student. When she became pregnant, he felt it was his responsibility to marry her. He soon realized he'd made a mistake, and they split up shortly before Gypsy Rose was born. "I knew I got married for the wrong reasons," Rod told BuzzFeed.

Dee Dee kept Rod from seeing his daughter and filled her head with damaging lies. While he may have been largely absent from her life, he contributed $1,200 per month in child support. However, Dee Dee characterized her ex-husband very differently, telling doctors, acquaintances, and her daughter that Rod was addicted to drugs and alcohol and abandoned them. "My mother had created that distance there, and she would say so many bad things about him behind his back," Gypsy told People.

Looking back on how it all spiraled so far out of control, Rod has come to believe that Dee Dee became helplessly entangled in her lies. "She got so wound up in it ... and then once she was in so deep that there was no escaping," he said. "One lie had to cover another lie, had to cover another lie, and that was her way of life."

The suffocating closeness that Dee Dee Blanchard insisted on having with her daughter grew more awkward as Gypsy Rose grew from childhood to adolescence. This manifested itself in their hygiene habits; as Gypsy later revealed, she and her mother did everything together, and that included bathing. "I didn't realize there were things in my life that weren't normal until I got to prison and worked through it all. Like the baths I used to take with my mother, up until right before the murder," Gypsy said in her e-book, "Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom."

Because she'd never known anything differently, Gypsy assumed that taking a bath with one's mother was something everyone did. She had similar feelings about her mother's practice of shaving her daughter's pubic hair while they soaked in the tub, which Dee Dee explained was so that Gypsy would look "clean" afterward. 

It wasn't until she had the opportunity to speak with others while incarcerated that she came to appreciate just how deviant that behavior was from the mainstream. "I never thought, 'This is not normal,'" Gypsy admitted. "It was when my mother would shave my vagina."

Dee Dee Blanchard had never held a job, and those who thought that they knew her assumed her full-time occupation was caring for her sickly daughter, Gypsy Rose. It wasn't until after her murder and the shocking revelations that emerged in its wake that people picked up on various inconsistencies they'd noticed or ignored. For example, Blanchard didn't work but never seemed to be lacking for money.  

The money she did have came from a variety of sources. Chief among those was the $1,200 checks that her ex-husband, Rod Blanchard, sent without fail each month. Even after their daughter turned 18, he continued sending the money; believing Dee Dee's lies that Gypsy needed continual medical care, he was happy to contribute. "There was never a question whether or not I was going to stop paying," he told BuzzFeed. As Gypsy told "20/20," her mother received both disability and social security checks. She also availed herself of food stamps, while medical expenses for Gypsy — even though they weren't legitimate — were taken care of by Medicaid.

Given all the lies her mother had told her about her father over the years, Gyspy was shocked when she eventually discovered how much he'd actually been contributing. "Later, I found out that my father was paying child support the whole time," she said.

The headline-making murder caused the shocking story of Dee Dee Blanchard's unbelievable treatment of her daughter to be exhaustively covered in the media and "Mommy Dead and Dearest," a 2017 HBO documentary.

Then, in 2018, Deadline reported that Joey King — who'd made a big splash in Netflix's "The Kissing Booth" and its sequels — had been cast as Gypsy Rose Blanchard in a miniseries for the Hulu Streaming service. According to the outlet, the series, based on Michelle Deans' BuzzFeed article, "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered."

Meanwhile, Patricia Arquette had signed on to portray Dee Dee. Arquette's chilling performance won accolades — not to mention a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie. However, Arquette told People that her children had urged her not to take the part — because they knew all about the creepy true-crime story on which "The Act" was based, and didn't want their mother involved. "They're like, 'Don't do that. We know that story. Please, mom, don't do that,'" she said. Arquette, however, was nonplussed, insisting she had no intention of bringing Dee Dee home with her from the set. "I'm like, 'You guys. I'm not going to turn into her," Arquette recalled. "What are you talking about?'"

Free from prison, Gypsy Rose Blanchard stepped into the spotlight to tell her own story by sharing her memories about what she'd endured from her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Over time, she explained during an interview with "Good Morning America," she'd come to develop a certain degree of sympathy for her Dee Dee. "She had a lot of demons herself that she was struggling with," she noted. "I didn't want her dead. I just wanted out of my situation. And I thought that was the only way out."

Meanwhile, the newly transformed Gypsy had come to understand that her mother's actions were very likely beyond her control due to extent of her mental illness. "Maybe it was like an addict with an impulse, and that it was not consciously malicious," Gypsy told People of her mother's abhorrent treatment. "And I think that helps me with coping and accepting what happened," she added.

Looking back, Gypsy wondered how everything would have played out had Dee Dee — who'd been diagnosed with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder when she was younger — received treatment, and prescribed the proper medication. "And so perhaps, if maybe she was on her meds, maybe things would've been different," she mused. "But I can't focus on the 'could have, shoulda have, would've,' because I'll get too deep into that rabbit hole."