She's free – tell me everything.
Inmate-turned-influencer Gypsy Rose Blanchard reveals her past of abuse and her experiences in prison through letters, phone records and photos in her new e-book, Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom, released Tuesday. revealing the time.
The 32-year-old was released from a Missouri prison on Dec. 28 after serving seven years of a 10-year sentence for his role in the 2015 murder of his mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. Details have been revealed that he was abused by his mother and grandfather, but he says he regrets his crimes.
Blanchard also revealed that she battled an opioid addiction while in prison, claiming she served her sentence in solitary confinement because a superfan tried to break her out.
“I now know that you were mentally and emotionally unstable when you raised me,” Blanchard wrote in an open letter to her mother from Chillicothe Correctional Facility in Missouri. I want you to know that.” “All I knew about your kind of 'love' was fear, manipulation, and isolation.”
In the book, co-authored with Melissa Moore and Michele Matriciani, who interviewed Blanchard while in prison, Blanchard recalls undergoing unnecessary surgeries because of her mother's Munchausen surrogate. For their child to gain sympathy.
As a young girl, Blanchard was forced to use a wheelchair despite being able to walk, and was forced to take drugs that left “physical and emotional scars on my body.'' The rest,” had his head shaved to make the world think he had leukemia. , muscular dystrophy and other diseases.
She wrote that Dee Dee had told her for years that he was terminally ill and could not receive an education beyond first grade because he had the intellectual capacity of a young child. Her fake illness attracted attention and was used to collect gifts, including a Habitat for Humanity home and a free trip to Disney World.
In June 2015, Dee Dee was stabbed to death by Blanchard's boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met online. Godejohn is serving a life sentence for murder in Missouri.
The headline-grabbing case was the basis for the HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the Hulu scripted series “The Act.”
Here are the most shocking reappraisals of Blanchard's new book.
horrible abuse
Blanchard recalled the daily abuse and told Moore on the phone from prison how her mother kept her locked away. Ms. Blanchard claimed that her mother tied the girl to her bed for two weeks as punishment when she once tried to confide in a man she had met.
“After she hit me, she used the dog leash to do it,” Blanchard says in the book.
She also alleges that her maternal grandfather, Claude Pitre Sr., sexually abused her after Dee Dee was in a car accident in 2001 and the two lived together for three months.Pitre denied these allegations.
“I have a memory from when I was five years old, and I knew it was strange. My grandfather would draw a picture of a bath and let my mother and I take a bath together.” Blanchard talks about it in the book. “Her mother told me…that he would take her to her other room and continue to sexually abuse her. He denies it, but she told me… I did the same thing for you.”
“It was her who was trying to touch me. I said no, please don't do that,” Pitre tells the camera in the Lifetime documentary “Gypsy Rose Blanchard's Prison Confessions.” spoke in front of. “She started doing it when she was about 4 years old.”
I committed a crime such as shoplifting when I was a child.
Blanchard claims her mother used her perceived disability to teach her to shoplift.
“Sitting in a wheelchair makes it easier to bump things into your lap or shove them under your princess dress,” she writes.
“My mother taught me how to exchange barcodes. Peel off the barcode stickers from cheaper items and stick them on top of more expensive items. In that case, use the self-checkout.”
Opioid addiction in prison
Blanchard has admitted to battling opioids and once obtained $50 by lying to her mother-in-law that she needed to pay back a friend who broke her CD player.
“I used the money to buy drugs,” she wrote.
“Four or five years ago, I was addicted to Suboxone. [a medication to treat opioid addiction]. I succumbed to opioid addiction, overcame it, succumbed to it again, and overcame it again…”
solitary confinement by strangers
Blanchard claims she was sent to solitary confinement for two weeks after a stranger's social media posts sparked the investigation.
She claims in the book that one fan “said something like, 'She shouldn't be in jail.'” She wished she could get rid of her. ”
Blanchard said the post was reported to the jail.
“It was traumatic,” she wrote. “I was there for two weeks, and during that time they were going through my belongings, looking for writing, plans, correspondence that indicated I knew who posted it. I didn't. .”
Dee Dee's divorce caused years of loneliness
In December 1990, Dee Dee met Blanchard's father, Rod, at a bowling alley. He was 17 and she was 24. Blanchard was born seven months later in Louisiana, but his parents soon divorced and he rarely saw his father, even after moving away. He went to Missouri.
“I now know that my father did not love my mother. She was bitter towards my father and men in general,” Blanchard wrote.
By the age of 10, she lost contact with her father and began lying about her age as Dee Dee gained more control over her life.
Isolated from friends and family, Blanchard learned how her mother only homeschooled her to first grade level, and how that disruption to her learning negatively affected her ability to form relationships. I will explain in detail how it affected me.
“I didn't know anything except a little bit of addition and subtraction,” she told Moore from prison, where she eventually earned her high school diploma.
Rod and his wife Kristy reunited with their daughter while in prison after learning that she was a victim of Dee Dee's Munchausen by proxy.
Finding love — and regrets
Blanchard met Ryan Anderson in 2020 when she wrote him a letter, starting a years-long friendship, and the two will marry in July 2022 while she is still in prison. It reached its climax in form.
She says that her mother's diagnosis helped her let go of resentment, or feel sorry for the role she played in her mother's death.
“Murder was never the answer or solution,” Blanchard wrote. He expressed that he still carries with him the memories of his mother, saying, “I will carry this feeling of regret and remorse with me for the rest of my life.''
“I miss her so much, even if it doesn't make any sense.”
