Her TikTok account has only existed for a month, but Gypsy Rose Blanchard already has nearly ten million subscribers. Behind this dazzling success, a sordid story. Because Gypsy Rose Blanchard is not an influencer like the others. The 32-year-old American was released from prison on December 28, eight years after being tried for complicity in the murder of her mother, who had mistreated and confined her all her life.
The story of the young woman is fascinating. From prison to red carpets to the hope of meeting Taylor Swift, his redemption is being written and filmed on social networks. But who is Gypsy Rose Blanchard? How did she become so famous? And why is his case so fascinating, in the United States and beyond? 20 minutes make the point.
Who is Gypsy Rose Blanchard?
Born July 27, 1991 in Louisiana, Gypsy Rose Blanchard quickly returned to the hospital. At the age of three months, his mother Dee Dee was convinced that the toddler had sleep apnea. The start of a choppy, complex, and above all invented medical journey. Dee Dee attributes her daughter’s chromosomal disorder, muscular dystrophy, to dropping her out of school early and forcing her to use a wheelchair. She also falsifies her birth certificate to make her look younger and claims that her daughter has a mental disorder.
In reality, Gypsy Rose’s mother probably suffers from reverse Münchhausen syndrome, which causes her to invent bad health conditions for her daughter in order to keep her close and attract compassion. This is how she anesthetizes the young girl’s jaw before taking her to have her salivary glands removed, shaves Gypsy Rose’s head to prepare her for the effects of treatment for supposed leukemia, and makes her swallow loads of medications that eventually cause his teeth to fall out. After the passage of Hurricane Katerina, Dee Dee Blanchard also relied on the state of health of her daughter to arouse emotion in the media and to be offered a new house by viewers.
After years of manipulation, Gypsy Rose realizes the control and abuse her mother puts her through. She then hatches a plan with her boyfriend she met online, without Dee Dee’s knowledge, to eliminate her mother. Nicolas Godejohn, met on a site for Christian singles, broke into the Blanchard house one night in 2015, fatally stabbed Dee Dee and fled with Gypsy Rose. Nicolas was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and Gypsy Rose to ten years in prison for complicity.
How did Gypsy Rose Blanchard become so famous?
Already well known to the media after Hurricane Katerina, Gypsy Rose Blanchard became a real media object during her trial. From 2017, a documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest, is dedicated to the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard. In 2019, the series The Act traces the story of the young girl and met with immense success with the American public. Gypsy Rose is played by Joey King, Patricia Arquette plays the role of her mother, and the series won a Golden Globe award in 2020.
From her cell, in the months before her release, Gypsy Rose Blanchard gave new filmed interviews. Thousands of photos and videos of the young woman, dating in particular from her childhood, were circulating on the Internet, and the #gypsyroseblanchard has more than three billion views. His TikTok account was created a few weeks before his release from prison, in order to promote his biography published on January 9.
Since her release from detention, the young woman has been followed everywhere by cameras and each of her videos has millions of views. The prize goes to a twenty-six-second video in which she wishes a happy New Year’s Eve to her 9.8 million subscribers on TikTok: it records 83 million views. Gypsy Rose Blanchard also does the promotional tour for the documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchardbroadcast on the Lifetime channel, the broadcast of the first episode of which created an event.
Why is Gypsy Rose Blanchard so fascinating?
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is now trying to rebuild her life and is in redemption. His latest video is also dedicated to Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, from which his mother allegedly suffered. “She was first a child victim, we are attracted by empathy,” explains Michael Stora, psychoanalyst and expert in digital worlds. Sympathy for Gypsy Rose Blanchard has also gone far beyond the borders of America, and dozens of messages of support in French can be found under her videos. The young woman takes care of her communication, playing on her admiration for Taylor Swift whom she “hopes to meet” on her way to a football match. After serving her sentence, she is a married woman and a “swiftie” like the others.
Which may still seem strange. We must not forget that she went so far as to plan “the death of her mother, but murder is never a solution,” warns the psychoanalyst. The fascination with “a society where violence remains a solution to a problem” worries the expert all the more as the trend is not new. And if “gangster films were already successful” before the Internet, the series devoted to the Russian con artist Anna Delvey or the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer accentuate this glamorization of crime, even murder. “In a society that polices itself, in which we make an effort to be moderate, the fascination with criminals allows us to achieve catharsis, to relieve aggression,” deciphers Michael Stora, and to realize by proxy “a fantasy that can pass through any human being.