Gypsy Rose Blanchard is hitting reset as she continues to adjust to life outside of prison. The 32-year-old was released from Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center in December, having served close to eight years for her role in the murder of her mother. Almost immediately upon her release, Blanchard became the internet’s latest fixation, spurred on by her unhinged comments defending her husband, Ryan Anderson, against trolls on Instagram. She recently announced she would be taking a step back from social media but returned to Facebook to announce her separation from Anderson.
“People have been asking what is going on in my life. Unfortunately my husband and I are going through a separation and I moved in with my parents home down the bayou,” Blanchard explained in the post. “I have the support of my family and friends to help guide me through this. I am learning to listen to my heart. Right now I need time to let myself find… who I am.”
Blanchard and Anderson married in 2022 while she was still in prison. Earlier this year, in an interview with 20/20, she addressed the intimate nature of her social media content regarding their relationship, stating: “Well, I’m a newlywed. I’m newly married and I just came out, so I’m living my best married life with my husband. I don’t think that’s any different than any other wife would.”
Blanchard’s Instagram has been deleted, as has her TikTok account. Her Facebook page is set to private, too. The decision to step away from the spotlight she was placed under upon her release, she said at the time, was prompted by guidance from her father. “That guidance was to show me that real life is something you can touch, something you can feel, people you can actually hug,” she said. “And with the public scrutiny as bad as it is, I just don’t want to live my life under a microscope.”
Blanchard’s father, Rod Blanchard, separated from her mother before she was born and was estranged from his daughter from around the time she turned 10 years old. “I think Dee Dee’s problem was she started a web of lies, and there was no escaping after,” Rod told Buzzfeed News in 2016 about Blanchard’s mother. “She got so wound up in it, it was like a tornado got started, and then once she was in so deep that there was no escaping. One lie had to cover another lie, had to cover another lie, and that was her way of life.”
Blanchard suffered physical and emotional abuse from her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, for most of her life. Experts believed she suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder in which caretakers induce or lie about sickness in others. According to legal testimony, Dee Dee raised Blanchard to believe she was physically disabled and mentally ill. Wanting to escape the control her mother had over her, Blanchard conspired with her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to murder Dee Dee and then escape to Wisconsin together.
“I do my best to live my authentic life and what’s real to me, and what’s not real is social media. Social media is literally a doorway to hell. It’s so crazy,” Blanchard shared when she announced she would no longer be online. “I can’t even wrap my head around what social media is. I thought that once I got out of prison, I’d come out, and I’d enjoy social media like the next person, taking selfies and just acting goofy. It’s the simple stuff in life, right?”
