Gypsy Rose Blanchard is a free woman today. The true crime figure walked out of Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center at 3:30 a.m. Thursday morning, a little more than eight years after her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, was fatally stabbed by Gypsy’s boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn. As viewers of the 2017 documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest and Hulu’s dramatic adaptation The Act are aware, prosecutors argued that the couple conspired to kill Gypsy’s mother after Dee Dee—who is widely believed to have been ill with Munchausen syndrome by proxy—subjected Gypsy to years of medical abuse.
Blanchard was sentenced to ten years in prison for her role in her mother’s death, after text messages between Godejohn and Blanchard revealed they had discussed and planned the crime together. “I talked him into it,” Blanchard admitted in 2016, saying it was the only way she could escape a home life in which her mother falsely claimed Gypsy was ill with several illnesses, including cancer, and forced her to use a wheelchair.
In a plea arrangement, she agreed to second-degree murder charges and was sentenced to ten years in prison. “I feel like I’m more free in prison than living with my mom,” Blanchard said while incarcerated. “Because now, I’m allowed to just live like a normal woman.”
The 32-year-old’s ordeal gained national attention with Michelle Dean’s 2016 BuzzFeed longread, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered,” then hit screens in 2017 when documentarian Erin Lee Carr’s Mommy Dead and Dearest dropped on HBO. Years later, Carr’s film remains a fixture on “best true crime documentary” lists.
It was followed by The Act, Dean’s 2019 Hulu adaptation of her previous reporting, which starred Joey King as Gypsy and Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee. According to King, she watched Carr’s documentary “no less than 15 times,” and through that and other research, she determined that Blanchard “deserves to be free and deserves to be in therapy, not behind bars.”
“I hope that when she gets out one day and if she does watch the show that she will hopefully find the good in the show as far as it really showcasing her in a sense and really showcasing how much of a victim she was,” King said. “’Cause she really was a victim. Her life—no one deserves the life that she had.”
Dean seemed to share King’s sentiments, saying of Blanchard, “I don’t really think that the best place for Gypsy is prison.”
“What this case shows us is that the justice system isn’t prepared to apprehend cases at this level of complexity,” Dean said. “She got a sentence of 10 years [because] at least she pled out to second-degree murder, but nonetheless, it’s still a long time in jail, or in prison, and it’s a long time without possibly appropriate treatment.”
Eve Batey
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