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Gypsy Rose Blanchard ‘Regrets’ Murdering Mother Amid Prison Release: ‘Didn’t Deserve That’
Gypsy Rose Blanchard reflected on the 2015 murder of her mom, Dee Dee Blanchard, amid her prison release and admitted Dee Dee may not have “deserved it.”
“She was a sick woman and unfortunately I wasn’t educated enough to see that,” Blanchard, 32, told People in an interview published on Wednesday, December 27. “She deserved to be where I am, sitting in prison doing time for criminal behavior.”
Blanchard, who is set to be released from prison on Thursday, December 28 after eight years behind bars, revealed she would’ve done things differently if she had a chance to re-do everything.
“I don’t know if I would go back to when I was a child and tell my aunts and uncles that I’m not sick and mommy makes me sick,” Gypsy told the publication. “Or if I would travel back to just the point of that conversation with Nick [Godejohn] and tell him, ‘You know what, I’m going to go tell the police everything.’ I kind of struggle with that.”
However, the 32-year-old added, “Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did. I regret it every single day.”
Blanchard, who told her story in the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest and portrayed in the 2019 Hulu show The Act, pleaded guilty to murder for her role in the killing of her mother in July 2016.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was granted parole in September, completing only 85 percent of her sentence. On September 26, In Touch exclusively confirmed Blanchard’s release date.
Her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met online, was convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Blanchard’s mother and was eventually sentenced to life without the possibility of parole plus an additional 25 years for armed criminal action in February 2019.
After the couple was arrested for the crime, it was revealed that Dee Dee had fabricated all of her daughter’s many medical diagnoses and that she suffered from Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome — a rare form of abuse in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy.
Blanchard explained her motivations for her mother’s murder ignited after Dee Dee tried to force her into having another needless procedure on her larynx. “I just wasn’t having it,” Gypsy explained, adding she fled her home but was eventually tracked down. “She found me, brought me back and put in place paperwork saying I was incompetent and she had power of attorney over me.”
The abuse Blanchard suffered at the hands of her mother was determined to be her motive in the June 2015 killing of her mother.
“It’s a journey. I’m still really trying to come to a place of forgiveness for her, for myself and the situation,” she concluded. “I still love my mom. And I’m starting to understand that it was something that was maybe out of her control, like an addict with an impulse. That helps me with coping and accepting what happened.”
Following her release, the Louisiana native is set to tell her story in her own words in Lifetime’s new docuseries The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, set to premiere on January 5, 2024.
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