Gypsy Rose Blanchard has said that she doesn’t think she should have to spend as long in jail for killing her mother as she did.
The 31-year-old woman did an interview with Dr. Phil while she was in prison. Small bits of it have been showing up online recently, along with news that she will be freed in 2025. In 2015, the dead body of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, was found at their home. In November 2018, she was given a 10-year prison sentence.
Gypsy Rose, whose mother said she had both physical and mental health problems, was missing at the time and was thought to have been kidnapped because all of her wheelchairs, medicines, and other equipment were still at their house. But when police found her in Wisconsin, they saw that she didn’t have any of the long-term mental problems that Dee Dee had said she had.
It turned out that Dee Dee had a condition called Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), which is also called Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This means that she was obsessed with making up fake health problems for her daughter. This meant putting Gypsy Rose in a wheelchair, telling people she had a mental delay, and giving her pills she didn’t need.
After Dee Dee’s death, the police looked into it and found that Gypsy Rose had persuaded Nicholas Godejohn, who was her boyfriend at the time, to kill her mother at their home after years of physical and mental abuse. A source reported that she helped Godejohn kill Dee Dee because she gave him duct tape, gloves, and a knife. This showed that she was involved in the killing.
But Gypsy Rose doesn’t think she should have been sent to prison for as long as she was. She told Dr. Phil that she went to prison for 10 years for second-degree murder.
Then Dr. Phil asked her if she thought she should be in prison, and she said,
To be honest, I have complicated feelings about that. I believe firmly that no matter what murder is not okay. But at the same time, I don’t believe I deserved as many years as I got.
He then pressed again:
But for you initiating the sequence of events she would still be alive? So in that sense you are responsible for her death? What would be a just punishment?
In the end, Gypsy Rose agreed that she was to blame, saying:
I’m not really certain on that. I do believe that I do deserve to spend some time in prison for the crime, but also, I understand why it happened and I don’t believe I’m in the right place to get the help that I need […] At the time I knew I was being abused but I didn’t know exactly what kind of abuse it was.
She continued:
I just knew that I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things and my mother was the reason. She would force me to be in a wheelchair and forced me to go to doctors appointments that I didn’t need. I just wanted that life to stop. Ultimately I didn’t want her dead, I just wanted that life to stop and that life to be dead.
