The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, parts 1 through 3 (Category 6 Media, Wonderland West, Arts & Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023, released 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 6) Lifetime showed a TV miniseries called The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard – or at least the first three episodes of what turned out to be a four-part series. (They’re planning to run the final episode tonight, but I’ll probably be watching the Golden Globe Awards on CBS instead.) Gypsy Rose Blanchard was the woman born in Louisiana on July 27, 1991 to Dee Dee Pitre and her husband, Rod Blanchard. The two had been having an affair when Rod got Dee Dee pregnant and went ahead with the marriage because he felt obliged to even though he didn’t love her – in fact, he was already dating another woman, Kristy, who after he and Dee Dee broke up became his second wife (a marriage that lasts to this day). Rod told Dee Dee flat-out he wanted to be a father but not a husband, at least not to her. Dee Dee reacted to his leaving her by channeling all her energies onto raising Gypsy Rose as a single mother and ultimately falling into a mental illness awkwardly named “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” (or, even more awkwardly, “factitious disorder imposed on another”), in which a person in a position of responsibility for another invents a series of bogus “illnesses” and then presents himself or herself as the only person who can help the victim through them. I first encountered the story of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard via Love You to Death, a 2019 Lifetime TV-movie which dramatized the story and, though they changed the character names (Dee Dee became “Camile Stoller” and the hapless daughter became “Esmé”), they got first-rate actresses to play the pair (Marcia Gay Harden as “Camile” and Emily Skeggs as “Esmé”) and hired director Alex Kalymnikos and writer Anthony Jazwinski, all of whom did fine jobs dramatizing this tale. Though my moviemagg blog post on this film (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/01/love-you-to-death-sony-pictures.html) got Emily Skeggs’ last name wrong, it was a rave review that the film (which Lifetime showed immediately before running their multi-part documentary on the real story) thoroughly deserved.

I’d first heard of “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” in connection with people who are both arsonists who set fires and firefighters who “heroically” put out the blazes they set, but it turns out it’s usually exhibited by parents who seek to keep their kids in a totally and permanently dependent state, generally by faking “illnesses” the children supposedly have. The reason for the clunky name is to distinguish it from “Munchausen Syndrome,” in which the mentally ill person fakes their own illnesses to garner sympathy from others (and there’s apparently some evidence that Dee Dee Pitre Blanchard did that in her own childhood). Often “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” is kicked off when the child has a real illness with potentially catastrophic results, and this was the case for Gypsy Rose Blanchard: before she was one year old her “wandering eye” – an eye which can’t stay in one place in its socket – was diagnosed as a vision disease called strabismus. Dee Dee’s doctor told her that Gypsy Rose needed immediate surgery on the “wandering eye” or she could go blind in later years. This triggered Dee Dee to assign all manner of illnesses to her daughter, including muscular dystrophy and cancer. Dee Dee bought Gypsy Rose a wheelchair and forced her to use it even though the girl protested she didn’t need it. She also shaved Gypsy Rose’s head and passed it off as hair loss due to chemotherapy. Dee Dee had a feeding tube installed in her daughter because she told the doctors her daughter had a fear of eating normally (which she didn’t), and she even turned it into a game, singing a version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song about it. Dee Dee became expert at scamming local charities for “help” for her daughter, and when Hurricane Katrina wiped out their home in New Orleans she wangled a grant to move them to Springfield, Missouri and got Habitat for Humanity, Jimmy Carter’s post-Presidential organization to help house the homeless, to build a home for her and her daughter including a long ramp for the wheelchair Dee Dee insisted Gypsy Rose needed. The construction of the house was covered by local newscaster Frances Watson as a feel-good story (Watson was one of the people interviewed for this show, along with Gypsy Rose’s father, stepmother and half-sister Mia).

Gypsy Rose’s doctor, Robert Steele (also interviewed here), started getting suspicious when Gypsy Rose’s documents revealed three different birth dates for her – they all said she was born on July 27 but the year varied as 1991, 1993 and 1995 – and he reported the case to the local family services agency. But unfortunately he guessed wrong – he decided Dee Dee wasn’t really Gypsy Rose’s mother and reported the case as a suspected kidnapping – and the family service agents who investigated didn’t do anything once they determined that Gypsy Rose was really Dee Dee’s biological child. Also, in 2000 Dee Dee had been in an automobile accident that led to her hospitalization for six months, and during that time Gypsy Rose stayed with her grandfather, Claude Pitre. Alas, that was just going from the fire into another fire: according to Gypsy Rose, Claude regularly took her into his woodworking shed and sexually molested her there. Claude was interviewed for this program and hotly denied it, but the moment he said that it was Gypsy Rose who’d come on to him, I thought, “Typical pedophile B.S.,” and was sure he was guilty as charged by Gypsy Rose. During their stay in Missouri, Dee Dee kept Gypsy Rose in as much of an infantile state as possible, never letting her go out on her own. They would attend movies together, but only the most anodyne ones, and Gypsy Rose grew up thinking of herself as a Disney princess whose Prince Charming would come one day and rescue her – which gave her a nightmarishly inaccurate view of real-life relationships and made her a sitting duck for men out to exploit her. Dee Dee agreed to give Gypsy Rose a laptop, and Gypsy Rose created her own Facebook account (though after her mom caught her she had to open another one under a different name, “Emmarose”) and used it to stay in touch with a man she’d met at “Vision-Con,” a sort of low-rent version of Comic-Con. She’d gone to Vision-Con as a Disney princess (what else?) and he’d gone as a storm trooper from Star Wars (which should have been a warning to her), and she revealed to him that she could really walk and was hoping that they’d run off together. Then he, whose name was Don, revealed that he was on parole and therefore couldn’t leave Missouri. Gypsy Rose had never heard the word “parole” before and didn’t know what it meant – ironic since this whole show was building up to her own parole hearing on December 2021 – and when the two finally did run away, Gypsy Rose accidentally dropped her cell phone and her mom was able to use it to trace her and bring her back.

Once they returned, mom literally chained and handcuffed her to their bed – they had always slept together, which gives mom’s domination a kinky aspect not dwelled on here – and forced Gypsy Rose to ask for permission to do anything, including using the restroom. Gypsy Rose also developed an addiction to prescription pain medications, both from her own prescriptions and the ones mom was getting for the lingering injuries from her 2000 car accident. At that time she had no idea what an addiction was. She sneaked time on a computer and logged onto a “Christian Dating” Web site, through which she met a man named Nick Godejohn, and the two of them started an online conversation in which Nick revealed to her the existence of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) and said he’d like to engage her in it. Nick also said he had an alternate personality, a 500-year-old vampire named “Victor” who loved to kill people, and between them they hatched a plot to get rid of Dee Dee once and for all. Part of Nick’s fantasy involved him raping Dee Dee just before he killed her, and after discussing various weapons – including poison and a gun – they decided on a knife, which Gypsy Rose obtained by shoplifting one from Walmart. (They’re right: you can get anything at Walmart.) Earlier Gypsy Rose had tried to kill her mom on her own, using a gun she grabbed from mom’s end table – only it was just a BB gun and, though she shot Dee Dee 10 times she didn’t do any lasting damage, and Dee Dee claimed that she’d been held up by a robber in a Walmart parking lot and thus turned the incident into yet another suck for sympathy. Gypsy Rose obtained the money for Nick’s bus ticket from his home in Waukesha, Wisconsin to Springfield by stealing it from her mom’s safe, and before he arrived she shot him a video of her mom’s bedroom so he could navigate it in the dark. When Nick finally arrived he sent her a text reading, “That bitch is dead!,” though Dee Dee wasn’t dead yet: he told Gypsy Rose to hide in her bathroom and wait while he did the deed. Ultimately they left on a bus to Wisconsin, though they had to wait two days longer than anticipated because Nick’s round-trip ticket covered him but there was no room left on the bus for her. Nick turned out to be just as domineering as her late mom, and within a week Gypsy Rose’s guilt feelings had reached the point where she posted an obscenity-laden screed on the Facebook page she and Dee Dee had shared to alert people in general and the police in particular that there was something wrong. (It’s indicative of the success with which Dee Dee had isolated them that no one had noticed her missing for a week. Most people have big enough social circles that if someone killed them, someone else would notice their absence and report it to the authorities.)

Ultimately Gypsy Rose was traced to Wisconsin, arrested there (the sheriff’s deputy who took her into custody, Alan Voss, was the last person interviewed for this show) and brought back to Missouri. Ultimately she pleaded guilty – she was sure she’d only do juvenile time because she’d bought into her mom’s lie that she was only 15 (bolstered by a forged birth certificate mom had made up), but when she found out she’d be tried as an adult (she was really 19) she and her public defender, Michael Stanfield (also interviewed here), agreed to a plea deal. Gypsy Rose ended up being sentenced for 10 years to the women’s prison at Chillicothe, where – ironically enough – she actually found prison a scene of liberation. She was still confined, but at least she could pick her own friends within the inmate population, and while at first she chose unwisely (she hooked up with a woman who provided her alcohol and drugs, then demanded $50 payment, and Gypsy Rose lied to her stepmother to get the money), ultimately prison for once worked as advertised. Gypsy Rose essentially rehabilitated herself and qualified for a parole hearing on December 9, 2021 – though through some quirk of Missouri law, even if the parole board granted her early release the quickest she could get out was December 28, 2023. It seems odd that she was so desperate to get out that she went through with the parole hearing even though her sentence would expire in 2025 and she’d get out then anyway, but she went through with it and the parole board voted to release her. Her father Rod had wanted to be there for the hearing, but as a man who makes his living working on boats he would be at sea for a month when the hearing date fell, and he sent his wife Kristy to represent the family and speak for Gypsy Rose’s release. Rod and Kristy had assumed Gypsy Rose would move in with them when she got out, but by the time her release date had arrived she’d already met and become engaged to a man named Ryan (who’s going to be the focus of the as-yet-unshown part four), after a previous outside/inside relationship with a man named Ken had broken up, and the last show ended with Rod and Kristy worried about Gypsy Rose’s rush to get hitched to this guy. I found The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard an odd mixture of moving drama and sheer endurance – Gypsy Rose’s ultra-high speaking voice starts to grate after a while and so does her mind-numbing naïveté, understandable given how she was raised – but I was impressed enough to follow it through to the end even though that meant missing the start of a Turner Classic Movies showing of a film that I’d been particularly interested in, a “Noir Alley” screening of Hugo Haas’s 1951 film Pickup.