Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was convicted of murder after her former boyfriend killed her mother, announced Tuesday that she is pregnant and hopes to provide her child with everything she lacked growing up.
Blanchard said that the baby is due in January, which will be just a little 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 gained widespread media attention after reports surfaced that her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was killed in 2015, had essentially kept her daughter imprisoned, forcing her to use a wheelchair and feeding tube.
Dee Dee Blanchard deceived doctors into performing unnecessary procedures by claiming that her daughter’s medical records were lost in Hurricane Katrina, Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s attorney said.
The attorney stated that the mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder where parents or caregivers seek sympathy by exaggerating or fabricating their children’s illnesses.
The mother-daughter duo received charitable donations, including 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. Then Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating website, traveled by bus to Godejohn’s home in Wisconsin, where they were apprehended.
Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors offered Blanchard a plea deal due to the abuse she had endured. Ultimately, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of 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 stated in the new video that she knows some people believe she isn’t ready to be a mother, that it’s too soon. But she dismissed those concerns, saying no one is ever truly prepared 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 to her when Blanchard was incarcerated. They later broke up, and she married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special education teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana. Soon after her release from prison, however, Blanchard and Anderson separated, 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.”
