Gypsy Rose Blanchard is officially out of prison, and the 32-year-old — who was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2015 killing of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard — has wasted no time telling her truth.
Blanchard was granted parole and released on Dec. 28, having served eight years of her 10-year sentence. On Friday, Lifetime premiered “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” a three-night event featuring interviews with Blanchard, several family members and her former doctors. The six-part docuseries, which aired its final episode on Sunday night, looks back at the details of Blanchard’s involvement in her mother’s death, which she planned with then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn.
Blanchard has alleged that her mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a caretaker fabricates medical conditions to gain sympathy. According to Blanchard, Dee Dee subjected her to unnecessary medical treatments and surgeries for conditions including leukemia and muscular dystrophy, and convinced her she was four years younger than her actual age. As Blanchard grew more suspicious, she began speaking to others online about her situation, which is where she met Godejohn. In June 2015, the two plotted and carried out the murder of Dee Dee, with Godejohn stabbing her 17 times while Blanchard hid in the bathroom. Godejohn was eventually charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In “The Prison Confessions,” Blanchard reveals further details about her life with her mother, the events leading to the murder and what she wants in the future with her new husband, Ryan Anderson. Read on to discover the biggest revelations from the docuseries, from Blanchard’s addiction to painkillers to the “voodoo hex” she says her mom put on her.
Blanchard Alleges She Was Sexually Abused by Her Grandfather
At 9 years old, Blanchard lived with her grandfather and his wife while Dee Dee recovered from a car accident in the hospital. During that time, Blanchard alleges that her grandfather sexually abused her.
“My grandpa would take me out of my wheelchair and bring me into a closet or the shack that was behind their house where he would do woodworking, and he would perform sexual acts on me,” Blanchard claimed. “He would make me touch him, he would touch me. At 9, I don’t think that I knew it was wrong. But then my grandfather told me not to tell anyone. He’s like, ‘You don’t want Papa to go to jail, do you?’ I didn’t want him to get in trouble, so I just kept quiet.”
Lifetime interviewed Blanchard’s grandfather, Claude Pitre Sr., for the series and asked him about Gypsy’s allegations. “No, I never. That’s the first I heard of it,” he said, adding: “She would try to touch me. I would say, ‘No, don’t do that.’ She’s the one that was trying to touch me. She started that when she was about 4 years old.”
When producers relayed to Blanchard her grandfather’s denial, she said that it “just confirms that I want nothing to do with him.”
“I would have had more forgiveness in my heart had he just told the truth,” Blanchard said. “There is no part of me that questions if this happened or not. This 100% happened. And he can take it to his grave if he wants to, but the one person who is not going to visit him at his grave is me.”
Blanchard added that she did attempt to tell her mother about the alleged abuse about a year after it happened, “but she started to cry and blame herself, so I just clammed up. And nobody ever knew.”
Blanchard Claims Dee Dee Attempted to Poison Her Own Stepmother
about a year after Blanchard’s grandmother died, her grandfather married a woman named Laura May. According to family members, this made Dee Dee very upset and she began to slowly poison Laura.
Blanchard’s cousin, Bobby Pitre, recalled one day when Blanchard and her grandfather were hanging out. “Gypsy sees the Roundup in the corner and she tells my grandfather, ‘Oh, that’s the vitamins that mom gives to grandma Laura May’,” Pitre said, later adding: “Laura May ended up dying a slow, painful death. And I guarantee you it had a lot to do with that poisoning from the Roundup.”
Blanchard said that she wouldn’t put doing something like that past her mother. “I know that my mother had this hatred toward Laura,” she said. “So that is something that would be in her character to do.”
She Was Addicted to Painkillers Before and During Prison
After having an extensive surgery when she was 16 years old, Blanchard received a prescription for pain medication. When that eventually ran out, she found that she still had a “craving” for it.
“My mother had a prescription for Vicodin, and so when she wasn’t looking I would just go and take one or two from her bottle,” Blanchard said. “I didn’t know what addiction really was, I just knew that it was a craving — it’s all I could think about. I wanted another one.”
As her tolerance for the pills heightened, Blanchard began taking three or four at a time to get her fix. This continued on when she planned her mother’s murder. once behind bars, she turned to drugs again to escape.
“In the first couple years of my incarceration, I coped using drugs,” she said. “I think I first started to learn that drugs were available in prison when I started seeing other women get high. I tried Suboxone and it gave me the same high as taking pain pills. Instantly, I was brought back to the addiction that I had to pain pills back when I was living with my mother.”
Blanchard is now sober.
She Claims Her Mother Put a ‘Voodoo Hex’ on Her
Blanchard first started to defy her mother after they went to the pop culture convention VisionCon and she met a boy named Dan. The two began talking online and Blanchard soon attempted to run away from home to be with Dan. However, Dee Dee eventually caught Blanchard and brought her back, chaining her to her bed for two weeks as punishment. During this time, Blanchard said she was not able to use the bathroom herself and was often deprived of food. After the two weeks were up, Blanchard claims that her mother put a “voodoo hex” on her.
“She printed out a picture of Dan and she printed out a picture of me and she went to the store and got a mason jar and a cow tongue,” Blanchard said. “She put the cow tongue in the mason jar with the two pictures and a little bit of my menstrual blood. She buried it in the backyard and said, ‘You will never find love. You will never be happy.’ So I think that it’s true. I just think it’s true because every time I get close to someone, they leave me.”
Blanchard Shot Her Mother With a BB Gun Before Murder
After Blanchard was unchained from the bed, her mom bought a gun.
“That scared the everliving F out of me,” Blanchard said. “I was afraid that she would kill me.”
So, she decided to try to run away again. She packed a bag and hid it under the couch, but Dee Dee eventually found it.
“She was like, ‘You were going to run away again, weren’t you?’ And my heart was pounding, like a million things were going through my mind of how bad this was going to be. And I saw her gun on the table,” Blanchard said. “She normally kept the gun in the safe in her bedroom, but she had used it to practice shooting earlier that week. And that’s when I grabbed the gun and I threatened her with it. And before I knew it I pulled the trigger as many times as I could.”
Blanchard shot her mother 10 times — but it turned out to be a BB gun.
“When I shot my mother, I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, did I just do that? What did I just do?'” Blanchard said. “A couple of them hit her, a couple of them hit the wall. But the wounds were superficial. They barely grazed her. That’s when I realized it was a BB gun. It made me feel relieved because I did not intend to kill her. But the point is, I was shocked that I even pulled the trigger at all.”
Blanchard Alleges She Was Raped by Nicholas Godejohn After Mother’s Murder
Eventually, Blanchard found her way back online and began corresponding with Godejohn. After a secret meet-up at the local movie theater didn’t go as planned, Blanchard became more and more desperate, eventually asking him to murder Dee Dee. Godejohn said he had an alternate personality — a 500-year-old vampire named Victor — who could carry out the task. As the date of the murder approached, Blanchard began to see a more violent and twisted side to Godejohn. He asked her if he could rape Dee Dee after killing her, but Blanchard refused. In June 2015, while Blanchard hid in the bathroom, Godejohn killed Dee Dee by stabbing her in her sleep.
After Dee Dee had been killed, Blanchard claims that Godejohn said that “because I didn’t let him rape my mother, I had to agree to let him rape me.”
“After Nick killed my mother, he told me to get in my bedroom and take off all the stuffed animals that was on my bed. I knew that he was going to have sex with me. Never once was it a fantasy to me,” Blanchard said. “When I yelled ‘stop,’ he didn’t. I called for my mother.”
Despite Blanchard’s allegations, the documentary notes that he has never been charged with sexual assault.
Godejohn Sent Her a Letter From Prison
After Blanchard and Godejohn were arrested for Dee Dee’s murder, they didn’t see each other again until Blanchard testified against him at his trial in 2018.
“It was my opportunity to take the stand and take accountability. And I owned up to my part,” Blanchard said of her testimony.
However, Blanchard revealed that Godejohn did send her a letter from prison in early 2019. “Basically, he was explaining to me that he is still in love with me, that he doesn’t regret what he did,” she said. “And so I began writing a letter back to him. I said, ‘We’re both paying the consequences of our choices,’ and then I moved on to say, ‘I don’t want a relationship with you and I’m happy.'”
Her Family Is Skeptical of Her Marriage to Ryan Anderson
In Episode 5, Blanchard reveals that she is engaged to Ryan Anderson, a teacher from Louisiana who she met when he wrote a letter to her in prison. Though Blanchard had been engaged once before, her relationship with Anderson moved quickly and the two began to consider marriage despite her incarceration. In the docuseries, Blanchard’s family does not hide their skepticism of her and Anderson’s decision to get hitched.
Blanchard’s father, Rod — who Dee Dee did not allow to be a part of her life growing up — and his wife, Kristy, met Anderson shortly before the wedding. “Ryan’s demeanor was very pleasant. Real sweet, good manners. And it makes me happy that she has somebody she can turn to,” Kristy said. “But, I said, ‘Gypsy, I’ll support what you want to do, but please don’t get married.’ Learn his habits, learn everything there is, just like he would need to learn with you. Walk out as a single woman, or dating Ryan — don’t walk out married.”
However, Blanchard’s father did give the couple his blessing. “I like Ryan, he seems pretty genuine. So if you really love each other, it’s going to work out and y’all gonna make it,” Rod said on a phone call with Gypsy. “You have to be in love with him, and you know, I wasn’t in love with your mom. Wish I would have, but you can’t force that. And it’s not always going to be easy. Just be strong for him when he’s weak, and he’ll be strong for you.”
Blanchard and Anderson ended up tying the knot in a simple prison ceremony. But, just three months after their wedding, they had a disagreement about one of Blanchard’s ex-boyfriends. That’s when Kristy advised Blanchard to get an annulment.
However, Anderson went to visit Blanchard in prison and they were able to work it out.
“I said, ‘I need help, I need therapy and I think that you do, too,'” Blanchard said. “So he got a therapist and he has gotten me a therapist. And that has been the last argument that we have had.”
She Wants Kids One Day
Despite her traumatic childhood with her mother, would Blanchard be open to having children of her own one day? The answer is yes.
“The kind of mother that I envision myself being is absolutely different from my own mother,” Blanchard said. “I feel like I know everything not to do.”
Anderson agreed, adding: “I feel like Gypsy would make a great mother because she’s so sweet and caring. I’m nervous, but I’m excited for the future.”
