With Blanchard, 32, out on parole after serving more than eight years behind bars on second-degree murder charges, she’s once again in the spotlight. Through a battery of media appearances and updates on her social media accounts, she has spent the past few weeks sharing what she has called the “cautionary tale” of her life.
Now, she’s out with a new e-book. Published Tuesday, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom” compiles personal essays from Blanchard and transcripts from interviews conducted while she was incarcerated at Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center. The 200-page account also includes personal photos, drawings and memories of her and her family’s background and past.
Here’s what to know about Blanchard, her headline-grabbing case and her latest tell-all.
Who is Gypsy Rose Blanchard?
Blanchard was born in Golden Meadow, a small town along the Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana.
Her mother, Clauddine, and her father, Rod, separated shortly after her birth. Clauddine, a nurse’s aide nicknamed Dee Dee, began claiming her daughter was sick when she was a toddler. This continued for years, with Dee Dee making her believe she was mentally and physically disabled, and maintained the charade with others by keeping her in a wheelchair. Blanchard was convinced she had a number of serious illnesses, including muscular dystrophy and leukemia.
Claiming the medical records were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, Dee Dee persuaded doctors to perform unnecessary procedures.
Dee Dee is said to have had “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” a disorder in which a caretaker fabricates illnesses in another person — often their child. Blanchard has emerged as an advocate for victims of the disorder, which experts have described as a form of child abuse, according to MedlinePlus.
Blanchard eventually met Godejohn through a Christian dating app, and the two maintained an intimate online relationship for years until they devised a plan to kill Dee Dee, which came to fruition in 2015.
Godejohn traveled to Missouri, where he stabbed Dee Dee 17 times while she slept. Blanchard and Godejohn had planned it together, and on the night of the murder, she stayed in the bathroom with her hands over her ears. Police arrested the couple at Godejohn’s Wisconsin home.
Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced in 2016 to 10 years in prison, the minimum sentence for the crime. She testified during Godejohn’s murder trial in 2018, during which he was found guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. He was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
After serving 85 percent of her sentence, Blanchard was granted parole and released Dec. 28.
“It’s nice to be home. I’m back home in Louisiana, enjoying a beautiful day outside, and I’ve got a lot of great things happening really soon,” Blanchard said in a recent Lifetime docuseries.
An intimate, personal reflection on her life
The e-book, co-written with Emmy-nominated executive producer Melissa Moore and editor Michele Matrisciani, weaves together interviews Blanchard gave Moore while incarcerated, through every call glitch or automated message from the prison.
“THIS IS A FREE CALL FROM AN OFFENDER AT CHILLICOTHE CORRECTIONAL CENTER — WE’RE SORRY, THE SYSTEM IS EXPERIENCING DIFFICULTIES; PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER,” one chapter begins.
Through the conversations, Blanchard described the challenges of building her identity behind bars, while also coming to terms with her past trauma. She detailed her reckoning with many of the behaviors she once thought were normal, such as bathing with her mother as a grown woman, and with lies she was told throughout the years.
Among the truths she learned: Her dad had supported her through the years, sent letters and Christmas presents and called on birthdays — all of which her mother withheld from her. Blanchard operated for most of her life under the assumption that her father was a “deadbeat” who left her.
Because she didn’t have the opportunity to understand the world outside of her mother’s control, she struggled with trust issues. She had a hard time believing her public defender when he told her that many of her supposed illnesses were merely delusions.
She noted, “The one person I did know how to trust had betrayed my trust for my whole life.”
The first time Blanchard fully trusted another person was when a fellow inmate let her vent. They bonded over shared trauma and emotions, but that inmate also betrayed her, spilling the conversation to her own public defender in hopes of a plea deal.
“I had made myself a target of manipulation. Again,” Blanchard wrote.
Within her own family, she wrote, many family members remained silent after the murder came to light. Bobby Pitre, a maternal cousin of hers, was an exception, writing letters for her parole hearings and giving media interviews. His perspective was significant because he was one of the few to share insight into Dee Dee and her treatment of her daughter. Although he disapproved of the murder itself, Blanchard said in the book that he understood why she did it.
“He can tell them how my mom was, confirm that he noticed oddities, just offer his point of view,” she wrote. “How me getting paroled will allow me to live with family and rebuild bridges that I burned with my mom’s family. I hope he’ll say that me coming home to the family is not going to hurt their healing process.”
Prison was the first time she was in an environment where she could attempt some of the social and life skills she had only seen on Disney Channel or in the sparse pieces of media her mother would let her consume.
“How do you make friends in a friendless environment?” Blanchard wrote. “As you already read, as I experimented with trust, betrayal became my frenemy. Trusting the wrong people even got me thrown in ‘segregation,’ a.k.a. the hole.”
Perspective on her mother
The book starts with an emotional letter she wrote to Dee Dee, three years after her death. It was for a mandatory class in prison that seeks to raise awareness of the consequences of an inmate’s crime, and as Blanchard put it, one of the first steps in the arduous, emotionally painful “processing, deep thinking, and taking accountability” for the crime and her mother’s death.
The letter reveals many of the resentments she holds for Dee Dee, including being shielded from other family members and friends, not receiving a proper education, as well as physical and emotional scars from unnecessary surgical procedures and medicines.
“Every day since your death, I have had nothing but time to reflect on the choices that have led me to where I am today, moreover of how your own actions formed the circumstances around mine,” Blanchard wrote. “The woman writing this letter to you is far different than the girl who was once broken and desperate to live what I would later come to understand as just an average life for a young woman.”
She dissects her feelings regarding Dee Dee, acknowledging the longtime abuse she endured under her care, while also mentioning how much she misses her. But she also broadens this perspective with a look into Dee Dee’s own trauma — the sexual abuse she allegedly faced as a child and divorce from Blanchard’s father.
“Please do not mistake this as me trying to play Freud; I’ve just examined, very deeply, how all this might have seemed from my mother’s perspective,” Blanchard wrote. “My mother’s first betrayal by her own father was exacerbated by her husband, my father, asking for a divorce. And here I was, the third person, closer than close to her, [who] would betray her too.”
Since her release, Blanchard has become something of a media star. She’s amassed 8.1 million followers on Instagram and 9.5 million followers on TikTok, where she has posted interview clips and photos with her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, a teacher. They initially met over prison correspondence when Anderson sent her a letter in 2020. They stayed in contact for years and eventually married in 2022, while Blanchard was still incarcerated. The two live together in Louisiana, where Blanchard also spends time with her father and stepmother.
During her many media appearances, she has said that she hopes to advocate for those who have suffered abusive relationships.
She has also shared her elation over being released.
“You don’t realize how much you’re restricted in prison,” Blanchard told Good Morning America. “I felt like I was in a black-and-white world, and I just stepped into Technicolor — it was amazing.”
