A woman who was recently released from prison after serving time for killing her abusive mother has received a message of support from Elizabeth Smart.
“Elizabeth Smart actually reached out to me, and I sent her a message back,” said Gypsy Rose Blanchard — who sees the Utah kidnapping survivor as a “great role model.”
Blanchard made headlines in 2015 when she and her then-boyfriend were arrested for the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. It turned out that Gypsy Rose was a victim of her mother’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy (also known as factitious disorder imposed on another) — Dee Dee falsely claimed that Gypsy Rose suffered from everything from asthma to leukemia to muscular dystrophy, and subjected her to unnecessary surgeries and medical procedures to gain attention and money.
Nick Godejohn, the boyfriend who stabbed Dee Dee to death, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Gypsy Rose was sentenced to 10 years and was paroled on Dec. 28, after about 8½ years in prison.
Now that she’s out of prison, Blanchard said she wants to emulate Smart, who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by Brian David Mitchell in 2002, when she was 14. Against all hope, Smart was rescued 16 months later, and has long worked as an advocate for children.
“I knew of her story a long time ago,” Blanchard, 32, said in a teleconference with TV critics. “I think that she’s an inspirational woman. And I definitely think that she’s a great role model for me to follow, because she took … a bad situation, and she made a wonderful person out of herself in spite of it.”
Blanchard tells her story in the six-part Lifetime documentary series “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” Episodes repeat Friday (4 p.m.-2 a.m.) and Sunday (8 a.m.-2 p.m.) and is streaming on mylifetime.com. Blanchard was interviewed three times in prison and many times by phone from prison over 18 months, and the episodes also feature interviews with friends, doctors and family members.
(Photo courtesy of Lifetime) Elizabeth Smart has reached out to Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
She wants to “bring more awareness to mental health issues, sexual abuse, physical abuse, because … I feel like I’ve experienced a little bit of everything.” (In prison confessions, she says that she was sexually abused by her grandfather. He appears and refutes that charge.) And she wants to be “a guiding light for anyone who feels like they just are in a hopeless, helpless place.”
“Prison Confessions” is not the first time Blanchard’s story has been told — to count the number of documentaries and based-on-fact dramas about Gypsy Rose would require all 10 fingers and a couple of toes — but it is the first time she’s told the story herself.
“All the documentaries and all of the dramatizations … the pen was being held by another author than Gypsy,” said Melissa Moore, the executive producer of “Prison Confessions.” “I’m really proud that she had the courage to just tell her story in her own way.”
Blanchard said the documentaries and dramas about her have missed the mark because “they just didn’t know the ins and outs of my case, or my life” And, she added, “That’s why it was important for me to do this docuseries because I can finally be, like, ‘OK, I’m ready. I’m emotionally stable at this point. I don’t want to keep being haunted by the past.’ So this series is me letting go of my past.”
(Lifetime | Courtesy of the Blanchard Family) Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother, Dee Dee.
She said the biggest inaccuracy in the dramatizations of her story that she’s seen is that her mother was portrayed as “mean all the time,” The truth, Blanchard said, is that her mother deceived everyone because she was “very charming, very relatable. She would give a hug to anyone. She would like to cook for people. Her personality was bubbly and friendly to the outside world. And then what you see behind closed doors is her hitting me, calling me names and the abuse.”
Blanchard wants people to see her as “just a person. I’m not a character from a TV show. … I hope they also look at my story and also take from it that this can happen to anyone.” She wants to raise awareness of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, which is “not talked about enough.” And encourage people to talk about her story and “say something … if you see something that just seems a little bit off” with a child.