Gypsy Rose Blanchard released from prison
Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison after serving seven years for her role in the murder of her mother. She was released from Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri.
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Gypsy-Rose Blanchard is now free from the confines of a Missouri prison and finding her voice and a sizeable audience on social media. Starting Friday, she’ll experience a new kind of release: revealing in her own words the depths of the medical, emotional, and physical abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, and why Gypsy-Rose felt murder was her only way out.
“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. I’m free to have friends. I’m free to do what I want,’“ she says in Lifetime’s new six-episode docuseries, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” (Friday through Sunday, 8 EST/PST). “It might be in a controlled environment, but this is nice.”
The unimaginable saga included Dee Dee continuously shaving Gypsy-Rose’s head to reinforce a fabricated leukemia diagnosis, forcing her daughter to use a wheelchair and making her undergo unnecessary medical procedures. Those developments, and Dee Dee’s eventual murder, were covered in HBO’s 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and Hulu’s 2019 limited drama series “The Act,” starring Joey King and Patricia Arquette.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is free from prison. Now she’s everywhere.
Urged on by Gypsy-Rose, her boyfriend Nick Godejohn stabbed Dee Dee to death on June 9, 2015 at the family’s Springfield, Missouri home. Godejohn was sentenced to life without parole and Gypsy-Rose was released Dec. 28 after serving 8 1/2 years of a 10-year-sentence.
For Lifetime’s docuseries, filmmakers spent 18 months capturing Gypsy-Rose’s life and backstory while she was an inmate at Chillicothe (Missouri) Correctional Center. “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” features revelatory interviews with Gypsy-Rose’s dad Rod Blanchard; her stepmother Kristy Blanchard; Dee Dee’s dad Claude Pitre; her brother Evans Pitre; and Gypsy-Rose’s pediatrician, Dr. Robert Steele.
Here are the biggest revelations from Night One. (This story will be updated with revelations from the next two nights.)
Where to find it: How to watch and stream ‘The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’ Lifetime special
How Dee Dee faked Gypsy-Rose’s health issues
Kristy says when Gypsy-Rose was about 8 years old, Dee Dee told her Gypsy-Rose had been diagnosed with leukemia, which Kristy didn’t question. Rod and Dee Dee married when Rod was still a teen and Dee Dee was in her early 20s after she became pregnant. They welcomed Gypsy-Rose in 1991. Their marriage quickly dissolved, and Rod saw Gypsy-Rose only a few times a year.
When Dee Dee moved with Gypsy-Rose to Missouri after Hurricane Katrina ravaged their native Louisiana in 2005, Gypsy-Rose began seeing Steele, the pediatrician. He says Dee Dee never provided Gypsy-Rose’s medical records, claiming they weren’t available after Katrina.
Steele says Dee Dee told him Gypsy-Rose suffered from a seizure disorder, muscular dystrophy, and had a history of cancer, but he never saw evidence of the illnesses. Gypsy-Rose also had a surgery to remove her salivary glands to treat excess drooling, which Gypsy-Rose attributes to Dee Dee’s rubbing Orajel on her mouth. After the surgery, Gypsy-Rose lost several teeth.
Gypsy-Rose says she didn’t tell anyone what Dee Dee was doing because she feared her mother and craved her attention. The relationship “was either very affectionate because I was very submissive and obedient, or I was either rebellious and I would be punished for it,” Gypsy-Rose says in the docuseries. “After I would do something that my mom wanted me to do, we would go to Toys ‘R’ Us, or she would buy me a new dress, and then the next best thing was her love and affection.”
Gypsy-Rose accuses her grandfather of molesting her
After Dee Dee was badly injured in a car wreck in 2000, Gypsy-Rose went to stay with her grandfather, Claude Pitre, while her mom recovered in the hospital. Gypsy-Rose says during that time she was molested by her grandpa.
“He would perform sexual acts on me,” she says. “He would make me touch him. He would touch me.”
When asked about the alleged abuse, Pitre denies it on camera and claims Gypsy-Rose inappropriately touched her. “She started that when she was about 4 years old,” he says. “I said, ‘Don’t do that.’” Pitre’s son, Evans Pitre, suspects the alleged abuse might’ve been an idea planted in Gypsy-Rose’s mind by her mom, but Gypsy-Rose insists it “100% happened.”
Gypsy-Rose tried to run away before her mom’s death
Gypsy-Rose made a plan to escape her mother’s house in 2011, shortly after meeting a man named Dan, then 36, at a sci-fi convention. Gypsy-Rose had also recently learned by discovering her Medicaid card that she was 19 and not 15, as her mother claimed.
She decided to flee to Dan’s Arkansas farm. So one night she packed a few costumes (she didn’t have real clothes) and money stolen from her mom. When she arrived at Dan’s friend’s house, where Dan was staying, Gypsy-Rose learned he was on parole and couldn’t actually leave Missouri.
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