Related Articles
S
itting in a white armchair on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, the soft bayou light streaming into her family home, something is bugging Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.
“It feels like a circus,” she tells Rolling Stone in her distinctive, high-pitched voice. All around her, there are family photos and reminders of people who love her. There’s a sign across from her that reaffirms this. Family: A little bit of crazy. A little bit of loud. And a whole lot of love. But she keeps no pictures of her mother around. Blanchard, 33, spent more than eight years incarcerated for her involvement in the 2015 murder of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. Since she was released last year, the attention has been constant. “I’m not an animal in a cage,” she says.
Blanchard’s private life is better now in the small bayou town where she lives, about an hour outside of New Orleans. She is staying at the home of her father, Rod, and stepmother, Kristy, and is experiencing a lot of new things — grocery shopping, paying bills, doing laundry. She just returned from Florida, where she spent the holiday with her boyfriend, Ken Urker, and swam in the ocean for the first time. “I got water in my mouth and was like, ‘Oh, it’s salty!’ I didn’t expect that,” she says in an almost childlike tone. The couple, who first met through a pen-pal program in 2017 and reconnected after her release, is expecting their first child — a daughter — in January. Blanchard hopes she can go to cosmetology school later on to become a hairdresser.
But her life is anything but normal. In the near-decade since her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, fatally stabbed Dee Dee at her Springfield, Missouri, home, Blanchard’s saga has become fodder for everything from long-form podcasts to prestige documentaries to a scripted Hulu series starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King, which she says she still hasn’t watched. “To be quite honest, I didn’t know how big this story was until I got out of prison,” she admits.
While Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, Blanchard was given 10 years in prison for second-degree murder, and was released last year after serving about seven. (She had spent an additional year in a half incarcerated waiting for trial.) Since then, she’s been torn between reclaiming her life story and coming to grips with the fact that some of her legions of followers might be paying attention for the wrong reasons. “I don’t want people to follow me because of the crime that I committed,” Blanchard says. “I don’t want to have fans because they feel like what I did was right.”
Dressed in a slouchy yellow sweater, she hands me her phone. (The left sleeve is pulled up to reveal a tattoo of a husky on her forearm, withUrker having a matching one.) The screen shows a photo, taken without Blanchard’s consent, of her in the waiting room of her OB-GYN’s office with Urker, which was subsequently posted to a Reddit forum dedicated to dragging her. On Facebook, she shows me, there’s a photo someone snapped of Blanchard talking to a teller at the bank, along with comments trolling her appearance, her relationship and the crime itself.
When she was released in December 2023, Blanchard believed that she could — and would — live a normal life. “And then,” she says, “I started to understand that is not reality.”
Instead, her reality is much more complicated. It’s why, she says, she felt compelled to tell her story in full. On Dec. 10, Blanchard will release her memoir, My Time to Stand, which details her mother’s suspected case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a mental illness in which a caretaker makes up fake symptoms or causes real ones to appear that a healthy child is sick —and the abuse Gypsy suffered as a result. (Her mother, for instance, subjected her to endless medical procedures for diseases she didn’t have.)
It also covers the family dysfunction and trauma she experienced as a child, from her grandfather’s sexual abuse of both her and her mother, to the lies her mother told to government agencies and charities to scam benefits, including a house from Habitat for Humanity. She talks about the men, including Godejohn, with whom she began relationships online, and the multiple attempts she made to escape from her mother’s home. All the while, Dee Dee was godlike to her, her sole caretaker who was always hovering. “Gypsy-Rose will never find true love,” Blanchard claims her mother would tell her. “Gypsy-Rose will never find happiness.”
The memoir’s release comes at a time of radical change for Blanchard. In the past year, she divorced her ex-husband, whom she married in 2022; became pregnant; and had to learn life skills, like balancing a budget, that she was never taught growing up. While Blanchard’s story has been across numerous platforms, she says the memoir is the first time she has full control of her narrative and the events leading up to and after the murder.
After years of trying to move away from the crime, she is returning to the scene in her memory and in her own words. An author’s note in the beginning of the book says that while some of Blanchard’s memories have faded, the memoir is “true to my memory, and these memories have shaped my perceptions, many of which are also shared here.”
The book itself outlines the story of a young, poor girl growing up in Louisiana and Missouri, bound to a single mother who made Blanchard think that it was them against the world. To win, Dee Dee had to lie, cheat, and steal, with Blanchard as an accomplice to her mother’s fraud and a victim of her abuse. She worked with two co-writers for it, Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani, who began working with her when she was still in prison and uncertain of any early release.
“She’s lived a lot of life, a life of ups and downs —but more ups than downs,” says her stepmother, Kristy, who’s been married to her father, Rod, for 25 years. “She’s doing all the things that her mom said she couldn’t do — falling in love, getting married, getting divorced, reuniting with the love of her life, having their child. And even cutting the grass or taking out the garbage, those are the things she couldn’t do.”
Since her conviction, she’s appeared on The View, Dr. Phil, and The Kardashians, with both the Cut and Slate dubbing her“America’s sweetheart.” In the process, she’s become a polarizing figure. Her supporters maintain she is a survivor who has done her time and should be able to live a private life. On TikTok and Reddit, her detractors loudly flood the platforms with a mix of legitimate criticism, conspiracy theories, and unflattering memes, calling Blanchard a liar and grifter who is profiting from her crime. The memoir is also getting review-bombed on sites like Goodreads with one-star ratings before anyone has read a page.
This reality can be depressing for Blanchard, who is preparing for possible protesters at a book-signing event in New Orleans later this month. She has publicly disavowed what she did to her mother, as well as supporters who feel killing her mom was somehow the cool thing to do. But each time someone secretly takes a photo of her in public or posts a video slamming her, she wonders if there is any path toward a normal life, or if she’s even capable of living such a life by the time she becomes a mother of her own.
“When people come up to me and are like, ‘I don’t blame you, I would have done the same thing,’ I’m disgusted,” she says. “It’s not like I look back on my past and am proud of what I did. I’m very ashamed of it, so I honestly get offended whenever someone says things [to me] like that because they are missing the whole point.”
DEE DEE’S SCREAMS STAY with Blanchard. So does the total silence that followed the murder.
“To this day, I have never seen [the] crime-scene pictures,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I heard her scream, but the aftermath of what happened is unknown to me.”
When she was recording the audiobook for her memoir, Blanchard broke down recalling her breaking point leading to the death: When Dee Dee lied to doctors and pushed for an exploratory surgery on her larynx, which could have potentially silenced her voice — literally — forever. To Blanchard, it felt like her mother was lying to doctors as her way to cut her daughter’s throat.
“I started to think if nothing happens, how old will I be until this stops? Will I be in my forties? Will I be in my fifties? Will I die?” she says. “That was the moment when I was like, ‘OK, something needs to happen right now.’”
She then struggled recounting how she lay in a fetal position with her hands pressed over her ears, as Godejohn repeatedly stabbed Dee Dee as she called out for her daughter. In that moment, Gypsy couldn’t think about the years of abuse she suffered; she could only focus on her breathing. For a while, Blanchard had a recurring nightmare that had her reliving her mother’s murder each night, as an observer witnessing the crime.
“I didn’t want to make [Dee Dee’s death] the sole point of the book, but I did want readers to understand that there is a level of trauma,” she says. “It’s not something that happens and then you just go back to your daily life and you’re fine. It’s something that doesn’t go away.”
In the book, Blanchard examines her mother’s motivations, particularly how Dee Dee was keenly aware that she was creating a world of lies and lore from an early age. “I heard from her brothers, her sisters, that she was kind of the black sheep. She didn’t just quite fit in,” Blanchard says. “There were certain aspects of her personality that were manipulative [and] controlling. But there wasn’t enough awareness at the time [in] the Eighties [and] Nineties about mental health issues. So it just very much went undetected.”
I ask Blanchard, who admits in the book that she was taught to live a life of deception, the greatest lie that Dee Dee told her. “This is gonna sound a little harsh,” Blanchard says. “But I think the greatest lie she ever told was that she loved me.”
Matrisciani, one of the memoir’s co-writers, understood early on that Blanchard did not want to make the book a justification for murder as a response to lifelong physical, mental, and emotional abuse. “This is a young woman who is really trying to make sense of why things happened the way they did, and how things are not black and white,” Matrisciani tells Rolling Stone. “It’s very hopeful. It’s dark, but it’s hopeful.”
Blanchard knows she’s not alone in the morbid club of people who murdered family members who they claim abused them. She hopes the Menendez brothers, who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1989 murder of their parents, are granted their freedom. (A resentencing hearing for the brothers is scheduled for January.)
“I feel like they have paid their dues to society. Thirty years is a long time,” Blanchard says. “I’m one of those people that feels that they did their time for the crime. Let them have their freedom. I am in support of anyone that has been a victim of abuse like that because it’s not something anyone should ever go through.”
IT’S A LITTLE AFTER 9 a.m., and for now, the house — which is covered in portraits of the family, including the pregnancy photos of a smiling Blanchard and Urker basking in joy and golden-hour lighting — is relatively quiet. Later, the family will watch the Saints play the Rams, and put up Christmas decorations; white stockings already hang above the fireplace. In the coming days, a TV crew will arrive to shoot the second season of her Lifetime reality show, Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up. She’s planning to pre-sign hundreds of books ahead of the event in New Orleans, where online critics who don’t want her to profit off her past say they’re threatening to protest.
“Nobody’s ever come up to me with anything negative to say,” Blanchard says.
Leaning back in her green recliner, Kristy succinctly guesses why none of the online hate shows itself in-person: “They don’t have the balls.”
Blanchard maintains that she doesn’t see herself as famous and never sought out attention. She can talk endlessly about how much the guilt, shame, and responsibility for her mother’s murder weigh on her, but that still doesn’t deter some young people from approaching the person they see as TikTok famous and saying they support her because she helped kill her mom. It leaves her in no-man’s land: appreciative of the support, but decrying the catalyst for why some of her fans are there in the first place.
“There’s Gypsy-Rose Blanchard from the media and documentaries, and then there’s the Gypsy that my family knows, that my partner knows, that I know,” she says. “The two are in the same body, but I just kind of feel like nobody really knows the real me.”
Blanchard knows that some people will never let her live down her sins or the sins of her mother. She says that she recently tried to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, which built and gifted the home to Dee Dee after the mother and daughter lost their Louisiana home to Hurricane Katrina. But Blanchard says the organization declined her offer, in part because Lifetime wanted to film the experience for the reality show.
“I did express that I would like to make amends for what my mom did, and I got rejected,” she tells me. “I’ve found that not everybody forgives.” (A spokesperson for Habitat for Humanity did not respond to a request for comment.)
She also understands that there appears to be a disconnect between saying she wants a private and quiet life with her burgeoning career as a social-media influencer and reality-TV star. Blanchard has recently stayed in the headlines on gossip sites thanks to her posting the results of a paternity test to prove that Urker is the father and quell rumors that the child was her ex’s.
“It’s how it is right now,” she says. “I don’t think the public will ever let me fade into obscurity altogether. I think there will always be curiosity about what I’m doing in my life. And I have come to accept it.”
But after the show is finished filming what she says will be the last season, Blanchard wants to disconnect and plan her exit from the public eye. That off-ramp includes backing away from her public social media accounts, which she says she only uses for promotion these days, as well as raising her daughter, whom she and Urker plan to name Aurora. She eventually wants to get her own place and be closer to Urker, who lives in New Orleans. Blanchard is also taking driver’s education, which terrifies her.
“I’m very scared to drive because I’m like, what if I hit [someone], and it turns into a whole big thing, and I go back to prison?” she says. “I need to be responsible enough as a mom to do that.”
As part of her consideration of motherhood, Blanchard must confront what she plans to tell her daughter about Dee Dee. Whether it’s on TikTok, the book, or her nightmares, her mother’s murder remains. When the time comes to talk to her daughter about who her grandmother was and what happened to her, Blanchard wants there to be no more lies.
“I feel like [the book] is a nice segue into when Aurora is older, and a lot of people might give her shit or bully her over it,” she says. “In essence, this [book] is for her. This is so she can have a place of comfort that is safe for her.”
Blanchard’s relationship with her mother was based on lies; now the adult, she plans to tell Aurora the truth about how every choice she made in her life, whether it was right or very wrong, has been with the hope of having her own daughter.
“’Where do I go from here?’ is constantly what I’m asking myself, because I’m trying not to look back,” she says. “I’m always like, ‘This is what happened. Now, what do I have to live for?’”
