Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who recruited her former boyfriend to kill her mother after years of being forced to pretend she was gravely ill, announced Tuesday that she is pregnant and hopes to give her child everything she lacked growing up.
Blanchard said in a YouTube video that the baby is due in January, which will be just a little over a year after she was freed 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 sparked national tabloid interest after reports emerged that her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was slain in 2015, had essentially kept her daughter prisoner, forcing her to use a wheelchair and feeding tube.
Dee Dee Blanchard duped doctors into doing unnecessary procedures by telling them that her daughter’s medical records had been lost in Hurricane Katrina, Gypsy Rose Blanchard's attorney said.
The attorney said the mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder in which parents or caregivers seek sympathy through the exaggerated or made-up 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 supplied a knife to her then-boyfriend, and hid in a bathroom while he repeatedly stabbed her mother, according to the probable cause statement. Then Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating website, made their way by bus to Godejohn’s home in Wisconsin, where they were arrested.
Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors cut Blanchard a deal because of the abuse she had endured. Ultimately she found a way to forgive her mother and herself, she said soon after her release while promoting the Lifetime docuseries, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” and her own e-book, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom.”
Earlier coverage includes the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the 2019 Hulu miniseries “The Act.”
Blanchard said in the new video that she knows some people think she isn’t ready to be a mother, that it is too soon. But she was dismissive, saying 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 said the baby’s father is Ken Urker, a prison pen pal who proposed when Blanchard was incarcerated. They later broke up, and she instead married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special education teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana. Soon after her release from prison, however, Blanchard and Anderson split, and now she is back with Urker. Blanchard said the pregnancy wasn't planned but both she and Urker are excited and committed to creating a family together.
“I couldn't be happier," she said, while 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.”
Heather Hollingsworth, The Associated Press
