The Macabre Spectacle of 'Gypsy Rose Life After Lockup' (2024)

Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been released from prison, on parole, for participating in her own mother's murder in 2015. Gypsy's level of culpability in the crime has always been questioned, due to the role her mother played in faking illnesses throughout Gypsy's childhood to defraud charitable organizations, through a syndrome known as Munchausen by proxy. It is a psychiatric disorder where a parent or caregiver seeks attention from medical professionals by causing or fabricating an illness in a child. For Gypsy, this meant a childhood restricted to a wheelchair, unnecessary surgical procedures, and years of emotional and physical abuse.

Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard kept Gypsy under "lock and key," as her stepmother Kristy Blanchard recalled in the Lifetime documentary series The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose. This confinement led to an understandable desperation to escape her mother's "care." As a young adult, Gypsy planned and coordinated her mother's murder with her then online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn. Due to her abusive upbringing, Gypsy's role in the murder was reduced to a second-degree murder charge, for which she received a sentence of 10 years in prison. Prison Confessions features interviews with Gypsy as she prepares to face the parole board and request early release after serving 8 and a half years of the sentence, a release which would then be documented in Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup.

Gypsy Rose Faces The Cameras After Leaving Prison

Life After Lockup is a hybrid documentary and reality TV series that follows Gypsy from the moment she is released after prison and captures her transition into society as a newly independent woman. Gypsy's desire to put her past behind her and demonstrate to the world her personal growth is a fascinating topic to land in the world of reality TV. In Prison Confessions, Gypsy is forthright in admitting that living with her mother meant learning to lie and manipulate as a way of life. Although Gypsy speaks about a desire to now live an honest life, she also admits that every action she took in prison was geared towards earning her freedom. Which includes the choice to film Prison Confessions and Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup. Knowing that her intention is to show the world she is reformed, and that she will do anything to ensure her continued freedom, while also knowing that reality TV is designed to present a "reality" that is highly produced and edited, the question of authenticity rears its head while the viewers are asked to take Gypsy at her word.

Gypsy's mother, Dee Dee, had a history of financial fraud, taking out credit cards in family member's names and passing bad checks earlier in her life. After she had Gypsy, she incorporated her daughter's feigned illnesses into a lengthy financial fraud scheme, in order to defraud charities and celebrities, preying on their generosity. Dee Dee also documented moments during Gypsy's "illnesses" with an eerie high-pitched forced positivity, like an influencer trying to trend. A major aspect of her fraud involved infantilizing her daughter, forcing her to affect a personality that was much younger than her age, and even providing an inaccurate birthday to convince her she was 15 years old when she was actually 19. Gypsy's stepmother Kristy framed Dee Dee as an "insane, compulsive liar." In the HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, Dr. Marc Feldman, an expert on Munchausen by proxy, noted that part of the syndrome involved emotional gratification from seeking and receiving attention. It is a challenge not to be suspicious of the sweet and innocent persona that Gypsy seems to have perfected, knowing the environment she was raised in.

Gypsy's Crime and Punishment

After she established an online relationship with Nicholas Godejohn in 2014, their relationship began to incorporate elements of BDSM, and Gypsy would post provocative photos for him to see. Eventually, she confessed what her mother was doing to her at home, and the pair sent messages back and forth, planning the murder step by step. In Mommy Dead and Dearest, Dr. Feldman discussed the Facebook posts that Gypsy wrote in the days following her mother's murder, which included one that read, "The bi--- is dead." In another post, in which it appears she wanted the readers to assume "the killer" wrote on her page, Gypsy wrote about having "slashed" Dee Dee and then suggested that the killer raped "her sweet innocent daughter." When discussing these posts, Dr. Feldman seems genuinely off-put, describing them as "perverse," and noting that it implies the author presents a "fair degree of sociopathy."

The text message exchanges between Gypsy and Nicholas plotting the murder are chilling. So too are the instructions she gave him on how to enter the house, texting to tell him to avoid the "skweeky" screen door, and filming a video where she walked through the home to show the path to her mother's bedroom, with Gypsy pointing out exactly where she would be lying and making a stabbing gesture. The giddy footage from the hotel room she recorded just one day following the murder is also hard to put out of mind. But in Prison Confessions, Gypsy claimed to regret her actions, and to even miss her mother in some ways, once she understood the gravity of both her upbringing and the actions she took to free herself from it.

Her Docuseries Reveal More Than Gypsy Bargained For

Gypsy says that she has "outgrown" the prison version of herself, making the valid point that people evolve. But viewers will have to take her word for just how much she has changed. In Mommy Dead and Dearest, journalist Michelle Dean speaks about the tabloid nature of Gypsy's story. She also wonders if anyone that Gypsy has spoken to feels like they are getting the full story from her, noting that Dee Dee was a "master manipulator," and so it is "impossible" to think that Gypsy would not have picked up on ways to lie and manipulate throughout her upbringing. Footage of Gypsy convincingly lying to police officers in her childlike voice in the early days of the murder investigation, and the recorded phone calls where she lied to her family during the pre-trial about her involvement in the crime, seem to support this assertion.

How reformed Gypsy really might be is part of the fascination following her release from prison on reality TV. Her childlike voice, proven history of violence, and her admitted comfort in lying and manipulating people are hard to put out of mind. In Prison Confessions, Gypsy blamed the smoking habits and drug use she turned to in her first years in prison on peer pressure. She also mentioned her addiction to painkillers at the time of the murder, emphasizing how they made her feel disconnected from reality. Even though Gypsy does note that she knows she cannot use such excuses, by strategically including this information it forms a picture of someone who is weak willed and naive, which may have the effect of convincing audiences that she was less responsible for the murder plot than in reality she was.

Mommy Dead and Dearest

In an interview for Mommy Dead and Dearest, Gypsy tells the interviewer that this would be the first time she was being "completely honest," and then jokes that while she was honest with her attorneys during the trial, she admits while laughing "I haven't been completely honest with them." All of this speaks to Gypsy as an unreliable narrator, one whose facade of a sweet innocent woman happy to finally have her freedom sometimes slips, suggesting a darker persona that is also part of Gypsy's reality.

The way that Gypsy started to plant seeds, even before her release, that she is still in contact with her first prison fiancé, Ken Urker, seemed to be more than just an effort to illicit a reaction from her new husband, Ryan Anderson. In Life After Lockup, Ryan was visibly angry when Gypsy mentioned to him on their journey home from her prison release that Ken had been messaging her stepmother. Gypsy also says in an interview that she has always had a hard time letting go of her first prison love. So, the fact that Gypsy then in fact left her husband in April 2024 to reunite with Ken has the tendency to feel like it was taken straight from a reality TV producer's dream scenario. And it's in moments like this, where Gypsy carefully laid out over the course of two documentary series her continued interest in her ex-fiance while marrying another man, that viewers may be reminded of Gypsy's history. It is tempting to buy into the wholesome narrative of a reformed prisoner experiencing the world, in many ways for the first time, with childlike glee. But her motives remain murky, and how calculated the scenes she shares on the reality series comes into question.

Gypsy's Family Offers Help After Her Release

The most emotional and authentic scenes in the documentaries and reality series about Gypsy involve her father, Rod Blanchard, along with his wife, Kristy, and their daughter, Mia Blanchard. Dee Dee had told lies about Gypsy's father over the years to her daughter so that she would not trust him. Now they are trying to build a true father-daughter relationship moving forward. Gypsy claimed that the only thing she knows now she could have done differently, is that she could have reached out to her father for help. In their first contact visit after Gypsy was sent to prison, filmed for Mommy Dead and Dearest, her father wraps Gypsy up in his arms, kissing the top of her head, and reassuring her that she can get through anything. Kristy then reminds her stepdaughter to "follow the rules" and "set a good example."

On her release, when asked what he thinks about the social media frenzy surrounding Gypsy posting on social media about wanting to attend a Kansas City Chiefs game the weekend after her release, Rod said that considering the history of Dee Dee using her daughter's fake illnesses to gain notoriety, now that Gypsy is released he does not want to see that fame seeking behavior "fester" in his daughter. And that is one of the questionable aspects of Gypsy's decision to film a reality TV series about her adjusting to life outside of prison, and ultimately the downfall of her marriage with Ryan, to post so freely on social media, and to engage in a media tour​ so soon after her release.​​

Life After Lockup showed Gypsy being evasive about the reason she chose not to live with her supportive family, choosing instead to enter a rushed marriage after her failed engagement to another man. On the one hand, this is an adult woman who spent almost two decades in confinement with her mother, then another decade in prison, eager to start an independent life, not under the umbrella of a parent's authority. Not being under the same roof as her straight-laced father and her stepmother's watchful eye means Gypsy now has an independence that she has certainly fought for. And as she reminded viewers several times throughout the course of Life After Lockup, maintaining her freedom will always be her top priority.

Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup is available to stream on Lifetime Watch on Lifetime