- Gypsy Rose Blanchard, known for her role in the murder of her mother, announced her pregnancy and expressed her desire for her child to receive a better education than she had received.
- She revealed that she is due to give birth in January, exactly one year after being released from a Missouri prison.
- Blanchard spoke of her desire to be a nurturing mother who could give her children everything she felt was taken from her as a child.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who asked a former boyfriend to kill her mother after being forced to pretend to be seriously ill for years, announced Tuesday that she is pregnant and wants to give her child everything she lacked growing up.
Blanchard said in a YouTube video that the baby is due in January, just over a year after she was released from a women’s prison northeast of Kansas City, Missouri.
“I just want to be a good mother to my children,” she said, her voice trembling. “I want to be everything my mother couldn’t be.”
Gypsy Rose Blanchard becomes an overnight internet star after being released from prison
Blanchard’s case attracted national tabloid attention when reports emerged that her mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was murdered in 2015, had effectively imprisoned her daughter and forced her to use a wheelchair and a feeding tube.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard speaks onstage during an event at The Grove in Los Angeles, California on May 1, 2024. After being forced to pretend to be seriously ill for years and asking a former boyfriend to murder her mother, Blanchard announced she was pregnant on Tuesday. (Philip Faraone/Getty Images)
Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s lawyers say Dee Dee Blanchard deceived doctors into performing unnecessary procedures by telling them her daughter’s medical records were lost in Hurricane Katrina.
The lawyers said the mother suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder in which parents or guardians exaggerate or invent their children’s illnesses to gain sympathy.
The mother and daughter duo received a charitable donation from Habitat for Humanity and were even provided with a home near Springfield, Missouri.
According to the indictment, when Gypsy Rose Blanchard was 23, she gave a knife to her then-boyfriend and hid in a bathroom while he stabbed her mother multiple times. Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating site, then traveled by bus to Godejohn’s home in Wisconsin, where she was arrested.
Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors offered Blanchard a settlement because of the abuse she suffered. Shortly after her release, she said while promoting her Lifetime documentary series “Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Prison Confessions” and her e-book “Freedom: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom,” that she had finally found a way to forgive her mother and herself.
Previous coverage includes the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the 2019 Hulu miniseries “The Act.”
In her new video, Blanchard said she knows some people think she’s not ready to be a mother, or that it’s too early, but she denied that anyone is ever truly ready to be a parent.
“It’s an amazing feeling to have your world change and suddenly it’s not about you,” she said. “It’s nothing but this little life inside of you that you now have to protect. And that little life is a baby, it’s yours, a little human being that you have to protect and love and care for. And it’s everything I wish I had when I was a little girl.”
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She said the baby’s father is her prison pen pal, Ken Aaker, who proposed to her while she was incarcerated. The two later broke up, and Blanchard married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special needs teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana. However, shortly after her release from prison, Blanchard and Anderson broke up, and she has now reconciled with Aaker. Blanchard said the pregnancy was unplanned, but that she and Aaker are both excited and determined to start a family.
“I couldn’t be happier,” she said, while acknowledging the relationship’s unconventional nature. “Everything that’s happened in my life suddenly doesn’t matter, because it’s all shaped who I am and it’s all led me to this moment, and it’s a blessing.”
