Out of prison for less than two weeks, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has found freedom and fame. The Missouri woman who spent eight and a half years behind bars for plotting to murder her mother released a new book Tuesday, a new Lifetime series documenting her story debuted over the weekend and her social media accounts have gained millions of followers.
Spectrum News caught up with Gypsy on the red carpet in New York ahead of the premiere of “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard”, a docuseries about her own life.
“It's been a world wind. This is really something I never dreamed would happen,” she said.
The six-episode series was recorded over 18-months while she was at the Chillicothe Correctional Facility in northwest Missouri. Her story has been told before, but never from her perspective.
“I will finally share my story the way it should be shared,” explained Gypsy in the official trailer.
She was released from prison on Dec. 28 after serving 85% of her 10 year sentence after being convicted of plotting to murder her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Her then boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, is serving a life sentence for his role in Dee Dee’s stabbing death.
Gypsy says she was the victim of her mother’s pyschological disorder called Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, where a caretaker makes up a child’s illness and symptoms.
“I started to feel like it was either her or me,” Gypsy said in the series.
During the six episodes, she details how she came to the realization she was addicted to pain medication; what happened when she ran away from home to be with her new boyfriend; and upon her return, how she says her mother chained her to bed and put a voodoo hex on her. Gypsy said that led to her pulling a loaded gun on her mother.
“I grabbed the gun and threatened her with it and before I knew it, I pulled the trigger as many times as I could,” she said in the series.
Desperate to escape, Gypsy described in episode four how she and her boyfriend hatched a plan to murder her mother.
“He suggested poison, and so I Googled different types of poisons. Then he suggested arson, that I just drop a candle on the bed and it would just burn the house down. I suggested a gun, and he said a gun would be too loud and it would alert the neighbors. We finally settled on a knife as a weapon,” Gypsy said.
When asked what she says to people who say it is not fair that she is free while Godejohn is behind bars, she answered, “I did my time, I did what I supposed to do by the court system. I can't change anybody else's sentence.”
In her ebook, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom”, Gypsy shares a deeply personal reflection on her past, present and future.
It includes an exclusive collection of interview transcripts and journal entries as well as her own illustrations and photos, according to Penguin Random House.
The publisher says "Released" is a declaration of Gypsy’s resolve to turn her pain into perseverance, take accountability for her actions, and help others escape the trap that circumscribed her life for so long.
Meanwhile, Gypsy says she’s enjoying her new freedom with her husband, who she met and married behind bars.
She features husband Ryan Anderson in several of her Instagram and TikTok posts, and those accounts are growing by the day. Her Tik Tok account now has more than 9 million viewers and her Instagram account tops 8 million.
She acknowledges that her newfound found fame is attached to the fact that she helped plot her mother’s murder.
“I'm just making a situation that stemmed out of fear and isolation and trying to turn it into a positive,” says Gypsy.
She told producers in the Lifetime series that a year after release, “ I expect to be fully independent, have my own place, my own car, earning my own money.”