Gypsy Rose Blanchard was born on July 27, 1991, and from that moment on, she went through years of abuse at the hands of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Her mother was suspected to have a mental disorder called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where the caretaker of a child makes up fake symptoms or illnesses to make the child look sick. When Gypsy was three months old, Dee Dee claimed she had sleep apnea and took her to the hospital repeatedly, even though she had no signs of having the disorder. Dee Dee went on to make Gypsy believe she had multiple illnesses, including a muscle disease that would make her wheelchair-bound. Dee Dee convinced doctors Gypsy had all these illnesses, causing Gypsy to get many unnecessary surgeries and medications.
As Gypsy got older, it got harder for Dee Dee to control her, and she started to physically abuse her. When Gypsy was around 19 years old, she started meeting people online and making attempts to escape, but they never worked out until she met her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, in 2012. Around this time, she finally figured out that her mom had been lying to her all her life and that she wasn’t sick like her mom made her believe. So she told her boyfriend everything, and in 2015, she convinced him to kill her mother so that the abuse could end and they could be together. In June of that year, Nicholas stabbed Dee Dee in her sleep 17 times while Gypsy was in the bathroom, covering her ears. They weren’t that good at hiding the fact that they killed her mother, so a couple days later they were arrested. In 2016, Gypsy was sentenced to 10 years in prison for second-degree murder, and in 2018, Nicholas was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
