Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who conspired with her former boyfriend to kill her mother after years of being forced to pretend she was gravely ill, announced on Tuesday that she is pregnant and hopes to give her child everything she lacked growing up.
In a YouTube video, Blanchard shared that the baby is due in January, just over a year after her release from a women's prison northeast of Kansas City, Missouri.
“I just want to be a good mother for my child,” she said, her voice catching. “I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”
Blanchard’s case drew national attention when reports surfaced that her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was killed in 2015, had essentially kept her daughter prisoner, forcing her to use a wheelchair and a feeding tube.
Dee Dee Blanchard deceived doctors into performing unnecessary procedures by claiming her daughter’s medical records had been lost in Hurricane Katrina, according to Gypsy Rose Blanchard's attorney.
The attorney stated that Dee Dee had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder where caregivers seek sympathy through the exaggerated or fabricated illnesses of their children.
The mother-daughter duo received charitable donations and even a home near Springfield, Missouri, from Habitat for Humanity.
When Gypsy Rose Blanchard turned 23, she provided a knife to her then-boyfriend, and hid in a bathroom while he repeatedly stabbed her mother, according to the probable cause statement. Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating website, then traveled by bus to Godejohn’s home in Wisconsin, where they were arrested.
Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors offered Blanchard a deal due to the abuse she had endured. She later forgave her mother and herself, as she mentioned while promoting the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” and her e-book, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom.”
Previous coverage includes the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the 2019 Hulu miniseries “The Act.”
In the new video, Blanchard acknowledged that some people believe she isn’t ready to be a mother and that it’s too soon. However, she dismissed these concerns, stating that no one is ever truly ready for parenthood.
“It’s an amazing feeling when your whole world shifts and suddenly it’s not about you,” she said. “It’s not about anything other than this tiny little life that’s inside you that you are now in charge of protecting. And that little tiny life is a baby, a little tiny human that’s yours and that you have to make sure that you protect, you love, you take care of. And all of the things that I wish I could have had when I was little.”
She revealed that the baby’s father is Ken Urker, a prison pen pal who proposed while Blanchard was incarcerated. They later broke up, and she married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special education teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana. However, soon after her release from prison, Blanchard and Anderson split, and she reunited with Urker. Blanchard said the pregnancy wasn't planned, but both she and Urker are excited and committed to building a family together.
“I couldn't be happier,” she said, acknowledging that the relationship is unconventional. “Everything that has ever happened to me in my life suddenly doesn’t matter because it all led me to be who I am today and it all led me to this moment right here, right now. And that’s a blessing.”
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