Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the famed victim of Munchausen by proxy who's set for early release from prison on Dec. 28, opens up to PEOPLE about what she's learned after eight years behind bars.
Fuck that, her mother deserved it and I'm glad that Gypsy will finally be free. What she did was self defense through and through. It's heart breaking that her (now ex) boyfriend is in jail for life because of this.
Agreed, any mother that would medically torture their own child for years is irredeemable in my book. That being said, I'm glad Gypsy Rose is being released because she should not have been jailed in the first place. She was painted into a corner by her mother when she was "declared unfit" if she called the police they would have likely assumed she's an unreliable witness. That being said, it's awful that her ex is paying the price for her freedom. This to me seems like an open and shut case of "crime of passion" and the sentence doesn't reflect that, at all. It's a terrible situation all around.
She did deserve it. It would have been better if they would have gone through the proper criminal procedure process, and that would not have left the former boyfriend in prison. But what happened is better than the situation she was in continuing until she died.
There's a documentary and a dramatized show about her life on Netflix. CPS had been there. Doctors had suspected Munchausen's but couldn't do anything. Their neighbors knew something was wrong but couldn't prove anything. What she did isn't necessarily justifiable. But "they should have gone to the cops" is ignorant af.
He was acting in defense of another, which is morally equivalent. She was used to being mistreated by authority figures (her mother, every single doctor...) - why would she trust armed authority figures?
She wasn't acting in self defence either. With his help they were fully capable of just running away. If they needed something from the house they could have just robbed her. There need to be some good faith effort to escape a situation before resorting to murder, but they chose to kill her out of hate and that should land you in jail or we all go mad max.
I’m happy that she’s getting released, but there are probably a lot of other people stuck in prison for crimes that they committed out of desperation. It’s like the Gabby Petito situation, where young white women get a lot of attention for things that happen to other people who get completely ignored.
While I agree for the most part, you don't think that maybe in this case it's because:
It involves Munchausen's by proxy which is a pretty rare diagnosis,
She endured years of horrific medical, mental and physical abuse by the mother which brings up some serious moral questions in terms of what else she could have done to escape,
She didn't actually commit the murder, it was the boyfriend she met online who is intellectually disabled and is now serving a life sentence.
Idk, that sounds like enough to make a headline without her gender or skin color brought into it.
Doesn’t necessarily need to be munchausen, plenty of people kill their abusers and get locked up for it. People get abducted and their bodies aren’t found in state parks, it doesn’t need to match the original story 100%
I know a woman like her mother. She has crippled her own children and made them all dependent on her entirely. Her oldest is in his 40s now.
She made a junkie out of him when he was a preteen. She’d send him out to sell her oxycodone. “If you don’t get at least 40 of these sold I won’t give you any and you’ll have to deal with that.”
That only worked for so long until he started stealing them all. He’s been in and out of jail. “What would you do without mommy? Who would bail you out?” Of course she still supplies his habit enough to keep him dependent and takes only what she needs to take to have them in her system for a doctors visit.
She told the next kid she was schizophrenic. Had her on meds and totally dependent. Once her daughter had a son, she convinced her to sign over her rights and let her go. Her son thinks she’s his sister. Now she’s the “bad kid who ran off and left us to fend for ourselves.”
Her third child was a brilliant kid, super intelligent, but he’s been convinced he has schizophrenia too. He’s in his 30s now and had lost all of his teeth by 25. Still lives with mom and she won’t let him out of her sight. He’s also a junkie who is supplied entirely by her.
The grandson was twice as smart as her last kid. He could’ve been anything he wanted to be. Instead, he’s “schizophrenic” too and entirely dependent on his grandma. High functioning autistic, maybe. Schizophrenic, no fucking way.
It breaks my heart thinking about them.
The oldest is an insanely talented guitarist, but he’s a slave to his mother and never had a chance to be anything but what she wanted.
I would bet the daughter ends up living back at home too if she isn’t already.
Their father died from cancer when they were very young and she just lost it and did everything she could, the wrong way, to keep them close.
On top of verbal abuse, Gypsy claims Dee Dee began "hitting, punching, slapping" her to get her way. "It was very similar to a domestic violence type of relationship," she says. "As long as you're complacent everything's fine. Put your foot down, then it's bad."
That's it similar to domestic violence. It is domestic violence.
As for the rest of it, Gypsy and like a better person than me. I don't think I could regret ending the years and years of torture that woman did.
What was she supposed to be reformed from? Lashing out at the guardian who lied about her age and abused her with munchausen by proxy to the point of matricide? Something tells me she won’t be a repeat offender.