The Act’s Gypsy Rose Blanchard is Making a Lifetime Docuseries

Vanity Fair, December 29, 2023: The Act’s Gypsy Rose Blanchard is Making a Lifetime Docuseries

“Gypsy Rose Blanchard is a free woman today. The true crime figure walked out of Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center at 3:30 a.m. Thursday morning, a little more than eight years after her mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, was fatally stabbed by Gypsy’s boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn. As viewers of the 2017 documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest and Hulu’s dramatic adaptation The Act are aware, prosecutors argued that the couple conspired to kill Gypsy’s mother after Dee Dee—who is widely believed to have been ill with Munchausen syndrome by proxy—subjected Gypsy to years of medical abuse.

“Blanchard was sentenced to ten years in prison for her role in her mother’s death, after text messages between Godejohn and Blanchard revealed they had discussed and planned the crime together. ‘I talked him into it,’ Blanchard admitted in 2016, saying it was the only way she could escape a home life in which her mother falsely claimed Gypsy was ill with several illnesses, including cancer, and forced her to use a wheelchair.

“In a plea arrangement, she agreed to second-degree murder charges and was sentenced to ten years in prison. ‘I feel like I’m more free in prison than living with my mom,’ Blanchard said while incarcerated. ‘Because now, I’m allowed to just live like a normal woman.’

“The 32-year-old’s ordeal gained national attention with Michelle Dean’s 2016 BuzzFeed longread, ‘Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered,’ then hit screens in 2017 when documentarian Erin Lee Carr’s Mommy Dead and Dearest dropped on HBO. Years later, Carr's film remains a fixture on ‘best true crime documentary’ lists.”

Additional reading:

Vulture, March 14, 2019: The Act Explores a True-life Tragedy in Wrenching Detail

The Guardian, August 27, 2017: ‘Would you kill my mother for me?’: a dark case of abuse and revenge