Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was just released from prison on Dec. 28, 2023, after serving more than eight years for killing her abusive mother in 2015, published a book Tuesday in which she revealed more shocking details about her life before and after the murder.
Blanchard co-wrote “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom” with Michele Matrisciani and Melissa Moore, who interviewed her while she was in prison. Their interviews are featured on Lifetime’s docuseries, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” and the book is supplemented by transcripts of their other conversations and Blanchard’s personal accounts of her traumatic upbringing.
Her mother, Dee Dee, is believed to have had a factitious disorder imposed on another, formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and fooled doctors into treating her daughter for nonexistent illnesses, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, and a chromosomal disorder, among other ailments. At the same time, Dee Dee was accepting funds — and even a house — from charitable organizations.
Here are some of the revelations Blanchard shared about her life before and after she persuaded her online boyfriend, Nick Godejohn, to fatally stab her mother. Although she was 23 (but thought she was 18), the murder was the only way, she said, she could escape the horrific abuse.
Blanchard didn’t learn that all of her illnesses had been faked until after her arrest.
Although she joined her mother in lying about her need to use a wheelchair (she could and did walk) and was bald not from medication but because she shaved her head, Gypsy Rose had a hard time believing her public defender when he said she didn’t have cancer “or any of the illnesses that had defined me and confined me.”
Blanchard and her mother used her wheelchair for shoplifting.
Because they were recognized as a mother doting on her “special needs child,” Blanchard wrote, no one suspected they were stealing.
They used her wheelchair to knock items off of store shelves and hide them under her “princess dress” (Blanchard’s mother, who told her she was five years younger than her actual age, dressed her in children’s clothes) or beanie cap (which she wore over her shaved head as part of the cancer ruse), and swapped barcodes on expensive items with those on cheaper ones.
They didn’t even need many of the items they stole, said Blanchard, who described her mother as a hoarder. “Our bedroom had so much piled in it, I needed to carve a pathway for myself from the door to the bed,” she said.
She took baths with her mother “up until right before the murder.”
“I never thought this is not normal,” Blanchard told Moore about the shared baths. She said this was where her mother would shave Blanchard’s pubic hair, which Dee Dee referred to as making her “clean.”
In a recorded interrogation after their arrest, Godejohn said that after the murder, Blanchard shaved her legs and pubic hair in the bathroom where she’d been hiding while he stabbed her mother to death. Blanchard said he raped her there, while he claimed the sex was “consensual.”
Her grandfather allegedly sexually assaulted both Gypsy Rose and her mother.
Blanchard discussed her grandfather’s alleged sexual abuse of his daughter and granddaughter in the docuseries, but said in the book that he sexually assaulted her mother even when Dee Dee was an adult. While her mother was recuperating from a debilitating car accident, Blanchard said, her grandfather would carry Dee Dee into other rooms and assault her.
In the docuseries, her grandfather, Claude Pitre, denied abusing Gypsy Rose and instead claimed that she tried to touch him. “She was the one that was trying to touch me, and I said, ‘No, don’t do that.’ She started that when she was about 4 years old.”
She hasn’t spoken or communicated with him since she was a child, she said.
Blanchard and Godejohn’s romantic relationship continued for a year after the murder.
Blanchard said she was still “pining over Nick” while they were in the county jail. They exchanged letters by hiding them in the recreation room and writing love messages on the wall.
Later, when they were both in prison, the former couple exchanged just two letters. When Godejohn found out she was engaged to another man (before she met and married Ryan Anderson in 2022), he accused her of adultery because he had taken her virginity (though she said he hadn’t), and they were still married under “God’s law.”
She replied that she never wanted to get back together with him but “still felt a sense of guilt,” which is why she testified on his behalf at his murder trial. (He was sentenced to life without parole, while she accepted a plea deal.)
Blanchard said her mother claimed to be a “powerful witch,” used “spells” to punish her daughter, “saw shapes and shadows” and “heard voices” from people who disliked Gypsy.
Blanchard also said her mother had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It is unclear whether Dee Dee had been diagnosed with the disease, was taking medication for it, or if others noticed her unusual behavior during her frequent public appearances and medical appointments.
Blanchard’s family was Catholic, and she is a Christian now, but she explored Wicca and wore a pentagram medallion in prison.
She said that Wicca “felt familiar” to her because she grew up near New Orleans, where there was a supernatural “flip side” to Catholicism in voodoo and other practices — not to mention her mother’s belief in “manifesting outcomes through spells.”
Blanchard had only a first-grade education when she was sent to prison.
Blanchard said her mom homeschooled her at first with Christian books about the alphabet and numbers, but soon discontinued it and was never challenged by authorities. Blanchard attended school in prison and eventually earned a high school equivalent diploma.
She spent two weeks in solitary confinement.
After a stranger’s social media post that prison officials interpreted as a signal that Blanchard planned to escape, she was thrown in “the hole” while authorities investigated. It was “traumatizing” and didn’t make sense, she said, since it happened just a few months before her parole hearing.
She is expecting to do a follow-up series to the recent Lifetime docuseries and another book.
“As much as I have resisted the public role,” she wrote, “it keeps finding me, in bigger, more transcendent ways. I know that doing two books, a Lifetime docuseries, and a follow-up series will look nothing like the private life I wish I had.”
A spokesperson for Lifetime told HuffPost that they had cameras following Gypsy during her recent press tour and are “evaluating what could come next in Gypsy’s story.”