[This story contains spoilers from The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.]
Gypsy Rose Blanchard, whose story has been told numerous times including in Hulu’s The Act, shared her own account of her past in a series of candid interviews over the course of 18 months for the Lifetime documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
Gypsy was released from prison last month on parole after serving eight-and-a-half years of a 10-year prison sentence. She pleaded guilty to persuading Nicholas Godejohn, a boyfriend she met online, to kill her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who had forced Gypsy to pretend for years that she was suffering from serious illnesses, including leukemia and muscular dystrophy.
In the docuseries, Gypsy shares several big revelations, some of which she hadn’t previously shared with anyone, including her own family.
“I think the biggest reason why I held back all this time and am kind of coming forward now, is because I just wasn’t emotionally ready at the time,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of why the timing was right to open up in such a honest fashion. “There are a lot of things to unpack in my life — more than just with my mother. And so I think at the time of doing my previous interviews, everything was so surrounded around my mother and I. So I think now I’m coming to a place where I could be more confident to open up a little bit more and feel like I’m in a safe space enough to [open up]. That’s why I’m so candid in this documentary.”
Here are six of the biggest revelations she shares in the doc.
Blanchard accuses her grandfather of sexually molesting her.
After Dee Dee divorced Gypsy’s dad, Rod Blanchard, the mother and daughter moved in with Dee Dee’s dad, Claude Pitre Sr., and stepmom, Laura.
“When I was living with [them], things changed in my life forever. I was being sexually abused,” she says. “My grandpa would take me out of my wheelchair and bring me into a closet or the shack that was back behind their house … and he would perform sexual acts on me. He would make me touch him. He would touch me. At 9, I don’t think that I knew that it was wrong. But then my grandfather told me not to tell anyone. … I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
While she was in prison, she told her stepmother, Kristy, about the abuse, but it’s been hard for her to open up about it. “The abuse was not something that I wanted to come forward with because I just wasn’t ready for that,” Gypsy says. “But I feel like releasing all of that out would be very therapeutic for me.”
Producers confront Pitre in the documentary, and he denies the accusation. His response: “No, I never — that’s the first I heard of it. We always, we would play together and always do stuff together and stuff like that.” Asked why Gypsy would say something that isn’t true, he replies: “I don’t know, I don’t know, baby. She would try to touch me. I said, ‘No, don’t do that.’ 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. And I said, ‘don’t do that.’ And that’s about it, but she was trying to touch me.”
Dee Dee’s brother, Evans Pitre, suggests that Dee Dee planted the idea in Gypsy’s head.
Gypsy says, “There is no part of me that questions if this happened or not, this 100 percent happened, and he could take it to his grave if he wants to, but the one person that is not going to visit him at his grave is me.”
She tried telling her mom about a year later, but Dee Dee became emotional and starting blaming herself, so Gypsy “clammed up,” she says in the doc.
Gypsy’s mother put a “voodoo hex” on her.
While still living with her mother, Gypsy met a man named Dan at a pop culture convention in Missouri called VisionCon. She later ran away to his house, where Dee Dee found her and convinced her to return home with false promises of letting Gypsy continue to see him if she came home with her. When they got home, Dee Dee chained Gypsy to the bed for two weeks with handcuffs and a dog leash, and she became physically abusive, hitting her daughter with her hands or items like coat hangers.
In an effort to continue to control Gypsy, Dee Dee put what Gypsy calls a “voodoo hex” on her daughter. She bought a mason jar and inside it put pictures of Dan and Gypsy, a cow’s tongue and a little of Gypsy’s menstrual blood. She buried it in the backyard and told Gypsy, “You will never find love. You will never be happy.” Gypsy believed her mom and still has feelings to this day that her mom was right. “I just think it’s true because like, every time I get close to someone, they leave me,” she says in the doc. In 2019, Gypsy became engaged to a man named Ken while she was in prison; he ended up leaving her, which broke her heart. “And so I always bring it back to that curse, where I believe it’s true,” she says through tears. “She never wanted me to find love or be happy, and I just kind of feel like that stuck.” This incident, with the chains and the hex, is what sparked Gypsy to start thinking seriously about wanting to live her life without her mother.
Gypsy shot her mother with a BB gun.
After Gypsy ran away, her mom bought a gun. “That scared the ever-living eff out of me,” she says. “I was afraid that she would kill me.” At one point, Gypsy decided to run away again and packed a bag, but Dee Dee found the bag and realized what Gypsy was planning. The gun was sitting out on the table, and Gypsy grabbed it and threatened Dee Dee. “Before I knew it, I pulled the trigger as many times as I could,” Gypsy says, adding that, at the time, she couldn’t believe what she had just done. A couple of the shots hit Dee Dee, causing superficial wounds. It turned out, unbeknownst to Gypsy up to that point, that the weapon 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 pulled the trigger at all,” Gypsy says. When producers tell this story to Gypsy’s stepmother, Kristy, who hadn’t previously heard about it, she responds: “Good for her.”
Dee Dee invented a cover story for the wound, saying she was approached by a man asking for her wallet in the parking lot of a Walmart. When she gave it to him, she said, he shot her 10 times with an air pellet gun.
Gypsy says she was addicted to pain pills for years, including when her mom was murdered
“Nobody knows that I even had an addiction before prison, let alone in prison,” Gypsy reveals.
When she was still alive, Dee Dee set up an appointment for Gypsy with an ear, nose and throat specialist, claiming that her daughter had excessive drooling, which is a common issue in those who have cerebral palsy. Before the doctor’s appointment, Dee Dee put Orajel on Gypsy’s mouth, so that it would numb her and make her drool. As a result, Gypsy had her salivary glands removed. That led to her losing several teeth, and she became addicted to pain pills.
“The doctors had prescribed me pain medication after the surgery,” she says. “But when the pain medication ran out, I was still in pain and 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. I didn’t know what addiction really was. I just knew that it was a craving that was all I could think about. I wanted another one.”
Her tolerance built up to where she was taking more and more pills, and her mother began to suspect something was up, but Gypsy lied to her and said nothing was going on. She was 16 at the time. But, Gypsy admits, she was high at the time of her mom’s murder (Gypsy was 23 then). The addiction also followed her to prison.
“When I first got to prison I was subjected to a lot of peer pressure, and I smoked for about a year,” she says. “I started with vaping and it became addictive, obviously. And then I went to real cigarettes and it led me down some bad choices that I regret.”
She also took Suboxone, which is a a medicine that is used to treat dependence on opioids. Eventually, she owed a fellow prisoner $50 for the drugs and lied to her stepmother to get the money. But the lie haunted her for years.
“I hated myself and I hated what I became,” she says, deciding to tell the truth to Kristy. Her mother forgave her, and Gypsy learned that “I can tell Kristy anything. I’m clean, I’m sober, and I’m not that person anymore.”
Gypsy made a video for Godejohn showing him how to commit the murder.
In the video, which is shown in the Lifetime doc, Gypsy shows Godejohn how to get to Dee Dee’s bedroom once he arrives at the house with the intention of murdering her. “This is something i never revealed before to anyone except for attorneys,” she says. “I made a video for Nick that’s kind of like a walkthrough of what the house layout looks like, what my mother’s bedroom looks like, because he would be walking into her room in the dark.
In the video, once Gypsy arrives at Dee Dee’s bed, she can be seen making stabbing motio. “I made the stabbing motions because I was high all of the time on pain pills,” she says. “The side effects of those create this disconnection to reality.”
Gypsy reached out to her ex before she married Ryan Anderson.
Before she married her husband Ryan Anderson, Gypsy got cold feet.
“I have always had a difficulty letting go of my ex-fiancé, Ken,” Gypsy says, explaining that Ken broke up with her over concern about the length of her prison sentence and the unwanted attention that came with being her fiancé. “It was devastating to me.”
Gypsy later became engaged to Ryan Anderson, a teacher from Louisiana. Twelve days before she was due to marry Anderson, Gypsy revealed to him that she reached out to Ken a few weeks earlier. She had lied and told him she hadn’t had contact with Ken for months.
Anderson was hurt, but the two worked through it, and she assured him she didn’t want to be with Ken anymore. “I omitted the truth, but I want to go into this marriage with no regrets,” she tells Anderson. “I want go into this marriage knowing that I wiped the slate clean of any omissions, lies, anything.” The couple ended up getting married and are currently adjusting to their new lives together in Louisiana.
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