 Before we get into the video today, I just want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors, Nostik TV. Nostik TV is ancient wisdom reimagined. This is a Netflix for those who are spiritually curious and want a place to go where there is no censorship. I personally am doing a whole series on Nostik TV called The Esoteric Explorer, where I am providing exclusive content to Nostik. Nostik TV is a host to all sorts of different content creators, many of whom are your old favorites. If you would like to check out Nostik TV, there is a link down in the description box below. Alright, you guys, we're going to do this episode a little bit differently than how I normally present my deep dives, because this isn't really a deep dive video. This is more of a discussion video. Now, with that being said, I am going to give a little bit of a backstory for our friends from other countries who are not familiar with this story. If you're an American and you're not familiar with this story, then I'm going to ask what rock have you been living under? Because this story, especially as of recently, has been gripping the American pop culture. It's a cultural phenomenon case. It's an incredibly baffling true crime case, and a lot of people have a lot of very different opinions over this particular case. And so I really, really want to talk about it because I personally have been obsessed with this case since it was first reported in 2015. Now, this is the case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. And Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison on December 28, 2023 after serving eight and a half years of a 10-year prison sentence for unaliving her mother. Now, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was a victim of munchausen by proxy. Now, I am aware that it does go by a different medical term now, but I'm going to continue to call it munchausen by proxy because that is the term most of us know, and it's the most recognizable term. For those who don't know what that is, the definition of munchausen syndrome by proxy is a psychiatric disorder in which a parent or other caregiver seeks attention from medical professionals by causing or fabricating signs or symptoms of illness in a child. Now, it's munchausen syndrome by proxy because there is also a munchausen syndrome in which a person enacts these illnesses, these fake fictitious illnesses on themselves, and this is, again, a way to get attention. And this is basically what Gypsy's mother, Dee Dee, was doing to her for her whole life. I am so fascinated by the psychology behind all of this that I have a lot of opinions myself over this. And again, I just, you guys, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a licensed therapist, so these are just strictly my opinions. And the reason why I'm setting this up as a premiere is so that you guys can share your opinions in the live chat and discuss your feelings on this case as well. I will just ask that you guys just be kind and respectful to each other. I, you know, when I opened this channel almost four years ago, I, I opened it so we could look at these crazy stories and have respectable conversations about different perspectives over these particular stories. And just the level of A-B-U-S-C, I'm trying to watch my words for YouTube's algorithms, but just the level of A-B-U-S-C I personally have received in the comment sections. And I've seen some of you guys receive from random people in the comment section has been very appalling. So please just make sure you're respectful to each other. It is absolutely fine to have a totally different opinion from me or from anybody else in the chat. But when people resort to name calling, that basically means that they don't have a strong opinion and they don't have any evidence to back their opinion. So just be very respectful of that. And yeah, debating is totally fine, but I want us just to continue to be kind to each other when we're in that debate. No name calling. If there's any name calling, you will be blocked from this channel. We don't, we don't play that game here. So let's get into this case. I'm going to give a brief intro into the backstory of Gypsy Rose so that you guys who are not from the United States, who aren't familiar with this story kind of know what's going on. Now, with that being said, there are multiple documentaries out there about Gypsy Rose. There is a multi-part documentary created by Lifetime that just came out. I've watched it. It's really well done and you can find that on Amazon Prime. I think it's called Confessions from a Prison or something. Just if you go on Amazon Prime and type in Gypsy Rose Blanchard, it'll, it'll pop right up. There's also an HBO documentary called Mommy, Dead and Dearest. And there's also a made for TV movie called The Act about this case. Because again, this case has taken this country by storm because it is so horrific and it is so baffling. And I think most of us just want to know how this happened. How did Gypsy Rose fall through the cracks? What was she supposed to do in order to free herself from her perpetrator? From what I understand from Munchausen by proxy specialist. She is the only case on record to free herself from her perpetrator by unaliving them, which we're going to get to. All right. So let's just start at the beginning of Gypsy Rose's life. Gypsy Rose Blanchard was born on July 27, 1991. Her mother was a woman named Claudine, or Didi, as she goes by Didi. And her father was a man named Rod Blanchard. Now, something's really important here because we're going to see her mother was a very interesting cat. Okay, she was a very interesting gal to say the least. And it seems that her mother kind of grew up with the mother herself who wasn't the most honest person in the world. It seems that Didi's mother, Gypsy's grandmother, also had a reputation of running scams, of shoplifting, all that kind of stuff. And Didi was the youngest of six children. Now, a lot of the siblings and cousins, nephews and nieces, are interviewed in some of these documentaries. And they talk about how Didi was, in fact, their mother and grandmother's favorite child. The mother doted a lot on Didi. And it does seem one of the family members did bring up the fact that it does appear that what was done to Gypsy was probably also done to Didi, just not to the extreme that Gypsy went through. Apparently, Didi had a heart murmur, so her mother really took advantage of that. And basically, when you got a much housing by proxy case, the caregiver is getting emotional fulfillment and attention. From the outside world because they're the doting caregiver of this sick child. So it's all about them getting that attention because they're caring for a child that is very, very sick. And so it's a psych, again, it's a psychological disorder. I probably would guess it's pretty rare. If we have any therapist or anybody who specializes in this disorder and watching right now, please feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions in the comment section. I have reached out to some therapists that I would like to come on and discuss this case from a clinical perspective. Because again, I'm just, I'm just a layman when it comes to this, but I find it all very, very fascinating, fascinating. Well, from the beginning of Rod and Didi's relationship, there was deception. So Rod was 17 years old when he met Didi. He claims he met her at a bowling alley and they just started kind of dating and hanging out. And I believe he said that she told him she was like 21 or 22, but she was actually 23. And some reports say she was 24. Now, let's say she's 24. That's what seven years difference. Yeah, seven years difference in the big scheme of things when you're probably well into your 30s. A seven years age gap is really not that big of a deal, but when we're talking about a 17 year old to a 24 year old, that's a pretty big maturity level. There's a huge difference, right? But Didi after a few months of dating, Didi got pregnant and Rod claims being the good Southern boy that he is. He married her, which makes sense to me. That's what we do here in the South. You knock a woman up. You got to marry her. And however, they were divorced by the time Gypsy was born. Rod goes on to say that when he woke up on his 18th birthday, he realized he was not in love with this woman and he did not want to spend the rest of his life chained to her. However, he was very much interested in being a father to their child. And he promised Didi that he would make sure to financially provide for them that he would still take responsibility for his child and for the mother of his child. I actually really like Rod. I like her father a lot. And I feel a lot of empathy towards him as to his role in this whole fiasco. And we're going to get into that because I think he was done dirty too by Didi. And I think he definitely, Didi kept Gypsy very isolated from him. We know abusers do that. And so we're going to get into that. But Rod does seem like a pretty good guy when he's being interviewed and very invested in his children. He then got remarried to another woman who Christie, her stepmother, who's been very active with Gypsy. She's very much embracing Gypsy as her own daughter in this current timeline we're in. But nonetheless, Rod and Didi were divorced by the time Gypsy was born. Now they lived in South Louisiana, the Bayou area. So even south of New Orleans, this is one of my favorite accents in the whole wide world. Although it is a very hard accent to understand if you're not from the area. The New Orleans accent is the Bayou accent. It's a very clipped accent. And they all have very, very thick, besides Gypsy. They all have very, very, very thick Bayou accents. So in a lot of these documentaries, they do have to put subtitles on for people to understand. I quite enjoy it. You know, the coast of South Carolina where my mom's family is from, the Gheechi Gullah people have a clipped accent too. It's different from the New Orleans accent. But I think I just love listening to them talk because it's such a specific, specific accent to a very specific area. But with that being said, because of where they lived in this very, very much down in the Bayou, in order for Rod at a young age to make enough money to support himself, he had to take jobs that required him to travel a lot. And it looks like he maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, but just from the documentaries, it looks like he works in oil, does stuff with oil maybe? I'm not 100% sure, but he does have to travel a lot for work. So with that being said, that was already kind of putting him in a position where he's not going to catch some of these things because A, Rod himself is really young. Remember, our brains don't stop developing until we're like 25, 26 years old. He's an 18-year-old kid with a new infant baby. He's trying to support. He's trying to do the right thing. He's going off on these jobs and working hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Louisiana. And then when he comes back, he's got a few days back, sees his baby, then he's off again. And Rod said that it started at about three or four months old, where Didi told Rod that Gypsy was not breathing at night. She was having a hard time breathing. And so she immediately was diagnosed with sleep apnea or apnea, however you say it, and had to sleep with an actual breathing machine, which I find really fascinating. I kind of always assume that this disorder happens more to people who are older and especially to people who are perhaps slightly overweight. I haven't really heard of this as being a common occurrence in infants or kids. But as we see with a lot of these medical doctors moving forward, you know, their hands are kind of tied. I would, we're going to get into some of the doctors and why didn't the doctors do anything or, you know, because most of the doctors from what we see did suspect that something was wrong. They just didn't know what. But regardless, Gypsy Rose at three or four months old was put on a breathing machine as a tiny baby. Didi had moved back in with her parents at this point. And even her grandfather, Claude, talks about this machine beeping. And alarming the parents that Gypsy had stopped breathing so they would have to go wake her up. Now, one of the real medical issues that Gypsy actually had was a wondering eye or a lazy eye. Now, I'm not quite sure what the proper medical term is for this condition. I know there's a big Latin term for it, but I'm just going to speak in layman's terms. And we do see this in some of her pictures as a young child. And again, I'm not a medical professional, but this doesn't seem like something that's that uncommon. It does need to be treated. It's just when the eye just kind of wonders. And it can, if it's not treated, it can eventually cause blindness. But usually it's caught pretty quickly because you can actually see it with the pupil. You can see the pupil wondering. And usually they start with the kids in glasses and sometimes there's some surgeries that are involved. But once it's caught, it can be corrected. You know, we're not living in the dark ages, right? It's these these issues that happen to a lot of us are can't end up being really bad, but when caught can be course corrected pretty easily. And a lot of the therapist and munchausen by proxy specialists that have been interviewed on some of these documentaries have stated and I'm paraphrasing that they believe this is really when the munchausen by proxy kicked in. Because typically from what I understand in these munchausen by proxy cases, normally the child something will happen, right? Like the child will get sick, they'll have, you know, a wandering lazy eye or maybe they'll have a little bit of asthma or something. And when the parent typically the mother takes the child to the doctor, they start to receive attention for taking care of this sick child. And usually that's when it starts to snowball because once the child is healed and the problem is taken care of, there's no more attention on the parent. And so we have to keep this feeding this fueling that attention seeking inside of the parent. And so a lot of these these specialists do believe this is when the munchausen by proxy by proxy really kicked in. I'm still got questions about the whole sleep apnea thing when she was a baby. I'm so questioning of whether that was legit or not. But we do again know that the lazy eye was legit. Now, it's also important to note that DD was a nurse's assistant. That's what she did professionally before she started munchausen by proxy professionally, which we'll get into, which is how she ended up making her money at the time of her death. But because she was a nurse, our nurse's assistant, she was very familiar with a lot of different illnesses and ailments that people went through and so she could look up stuff and then learn how to kind of fake these diagnoses for gypsy. Now, as far as gypsies education, this is what really, really breaks my heart. Well, the whole case breaks my heart, but this and we're going to get back to this because I think in some of the there's been a lot of forensic people, therapists and stuff that I've watched. And I think they're missing a really key element about gypsy. And and we're going to kind of come back to this point, but gypsy didn't really go to school. She, according to, I believe it was her stepmother. I might be wrong about that, but I do believe it was her stepmother that said gypsy only really spent about half a year to a year in total in a school. And this was because Didi was afraid that the school would not administer gypsies medicine appropriately. This was before the wheelchair. This was before this was like when she was really, really young. So this was before things really started picking up. Like at this point, all we really know about gypsy health-wise is that she had sleep apnea and she had a lazy eye. So we're already seeing the control coming out of her mother to want to control gypsy. And so she pulled gypsy out of school. Now, what's interesting is when gypsy was arrested in like 2015, there are, there is a court video where she talks about the judge ask her her level of education. And she says second grade and she was like, what, 22, 23 at the time. So it's not necessarily the academic perspective, academic, academic, you know, like anybody can read a book and learn. What is interesting to me about this is her interaction with other children and her interaction with other adults. And I think that this is the, this lack of interaction with other children and lack of interaction with other adults. It's going to inform how gypsy responds later in life. Which again, we're going to get back to that because once more, I believe a lot of forensic psychologists that are talking about her are missing this. They're totally missing this. She does not have a point of reference as to what it's like to be quote-unquote normal or to have like social interactions with other people apart from her mother. As time goes on, her mother starts to isolate her more and more and more and more from other people. And I know in today's world, a lot of people are opting to homeschool and I totally get that. And thank God I'm, in that respect, I'm not a parent. I don't have to make those decisions because there is a lot of wackadoo stuff that's happening in our school systems recently. There is a lot of draconian measures happening in school systems as of recently. So I do not fault parents at all from wanting to homeschool. However, in my opinion, to play the devil's advocate here, one of the most important things about being in school is the education you receive outside of the classroom, meaning the education that you receive on the playground, the education you receive in social interactions, the education subconsciously that you receive from watching your friends who come from different family backgrounds and how they culturally perceive things. You start to gain autonomy by having these different experiences throughout school. In my opinion, that is the most important thing that school provides. It's not the academics. The academics are secondary, in my opinion, to the social interactions that you receive as a child, and it allows you to slowly grow more and more and more independent from your family so that by the time university comes around, you're prepared. You know how to go off and live in a dorm with another person and handle disagreements and handle social situations, and you just have a more well-rounded approach to the world at large. If you're homeschooled, you're a whole life, especially without siblings, especially without any type of afterschool activities to participate in to make sure you get that social education, you're not going to have a reference point to reality. In fact, one of the specialists who spoke about this case said that a lot of munch-housing by proxy victims have a really hard time understanding fiction from reality because their whole life has been one big fictitious plot. From a person that's supposed to love them and protect them. And again, we're going to get back to this because I think this is such an important thing we have to remember when we're looking at the psychology of Gypsy Rose herself. Now, as I said previously, after Rod and Dee Dee divorced, Dee Dee had moved in with Gypsy's grandparents, her mom's parents, and the first part of her life basically was spent living at her grandparents' house. And Dee Dee's father, Claude, rode a motorcycle. And when Gypsy was five years old, she was in a motorcycle accident with her grandfather. Now, the accident wasn't that bad. All the accounts was she basically scraped her knee. Kind of like when a kid falls off of like a pedal bike and scrapes their knee. It wasn't bad at all. Just put a little knee a sprain on it, stick a princess band-aid on that sucker, give it a kiss for a good measure and let the kid go out and run and play. No big deal. But this is when we see Dee Dee take an extreme turn in her own psychosis, in her own munch-housing by proxy. And she basically treats this scraped knee like it's a cancerous limb that needs to be amputated. She braces Gypsy's leg. She won't let Gypsy move. And then eventually, she comes in with a wheelchair and tells Gypsy to get into the wheelchair. This wheelchair will be a part of Gypsy's life until the night that her mother is unalived. Now, as time is going on, once again, Dee Dee is doing everything she can to keep Rod away from his daughter. So again, he is traveling a lot for work to send them money. He's been, he's remarried up this time. He's got a new wife. He has a son and a daughter. Gypsy has a half-brother and a half-sister with Christie, the new wife. And there's a lot of manipulation that's happening. Rod does tell a story in one of the documentaries, one of the series, I can't remember which one, where he says he goes to see Gypsy and she acts like she's terrified of him and he can only imagine that Dee Dee was probably scaring her about Rod behind Rod's back. And Gypsy does say that one of the biggest pains in her mother's life was losing Gypsy's father Rod. And in one of the series, Gypsy does say that her mother used to blame her for the fact that her father left because she was a girl and not a boy. But as Gypsy points out, she wasn't even born yet. They didn't, you know, so she wasn't even around. But so she's playing this double-edged sword where she's manipulating Gypsy to be afraid of her father, telling Gypsy that her father doesn't love her, telling Gypsy that her father has a new daughter now and they don't, he doesn't care about Dee Dee or Gypsy anymore. And then she's also manipulating Rod and trying to keep Rod away by just telling him how sick Gypsy is. She doesn't need to be around people at the moment. And so it's just a bunch of gaslighting nonsense going on and manipulation with Gypsy, excuse me, with Dee Dee, the mother being the puppet master behind this. There's an interesting story too that involves a trampoline that one of Gypsy's uncles talks about in one of the documentaries where she's a young kid, she's already in the wheelchair by now and her mother, Dee Dee, went to the store to get something and there's a trampoline out back and all these kids are playing and she asked her uncle if she can get into the trampoline. And the uncle says, of course, go ahead, jump. And she's having the time of her life jumping on the trampoline and then the mother comes back, pulls in the driveway, comes back and Gypsy kind of drops and looks terrified and her mother grabs, Gypsy puts her in the wheelchair, starts screaming at everybody that how dare you, she's a cripple, how dare you. And one of the experts on Much Housing by Proxy does point this out, that this is very common when you see kids who are victims of Much Housing by Proxy that they act like two totally different people when the parent is away, when their perpetrator is away, they act vibrant, healthy, when they basically, when they feel safe, they want to play in a minute, the perpetrator is back in sight. They all of a sudden will go back to playing that part of being a sick kid because if they don't, they're going to feel the wrath of punishment from their perpetrator. Now we do hear in some of the documentaries where Rod the father is in communication with some of Dee Dee's siblings where they're telling Rod, like, Rose, she can walk. We don't know why Gypsy is in a wheelchair. At this point, Dee Dee is whispering things like muscular dystrophy. Like there's all sorts of other elements Dee Dee is throwing out there to explain why Gypsy has to be in a wheelchair. Rod does, I believe, confront Dee Dee about this. Like, I'm hearing she can walk. Why is she now confined to a wheelchair? Dee Dee kind of brushes it off. Well, you know, she has good days and she has bad days and with the muscular dystrophy, which by the way, she never had, never had had muscle. She's perfectly healthy. But she's telling Rod these things that she needs the wheelchair because sometimes it's so painful she needs to sit down. So he just kind of goes, okay, okay, I get, I get you. Okay, okay. And so it's all again this master manipulation from Dee Dee. Now I want to reiterate that Gypsy Rose is really young and this A-B-U-S-C started for her basically from her earliest memories. And because she's been pulled from school again, remember, she has no other reference point outside of her mother. How is she to know that she doesn't have these sicknesses? And we hear that from Gypsy throughout all of her interviews. The only thing she knew about herself was that she could walk. She knew she could walk. But other than that, she didn't know that she didn't have all these other illnesses that her mother claimed she had. She had been in a regular school system with other people. I think over time because of the education she was receiving from other people with other authority figures around like teachers, stuff like that. She would have figured out that, hey, I don't have the symptoms of these diseases, these issues, these sicknesses my mother says I have. So I think she would have become more aware. But as you can see, Didi has isolated her from having those experiences. So she is totally at the mercy of Didi, her mother. Now, Didi also had issues with the law. Like her mother before her, Didi was kind of notorious for writing bad checks. You know, maybe some from what I understand, allegedly some shoplifting. And so there were constantly like active warrants around for Didi's arrest. So they would move a lot, right? So they would move around a lot. Even Gypsy herself said that they moved three to four times a year just to evade the law. Of course, Gypsy didn't know that she was so young. She had no idea why they were moving around. And then at some point at this time, and I'm not quite sure when this happened, Gypsy was giving a feeding tube. This is horrifying. I can't imagine how painful that must have been for Gypsy. And one of the specialists for Munch Housing by Proxy did say that feeding tubes are common, very common for Munch Housing by Proxy cases. Now in the records, it's stated that Gypsy was afraid to eat. So that is why the doctors put in a feeding tube, which is basically they cut a hole in the stomach and they connected tube to your colon. And so your caregiver is now responsible for giving you your food through a feeding tube. So not through your mouth, but through a feeding tube in your body. And with the Munch Housing by Proxy case, this now gives the caregiver the ultimate power over their victim. You can starve the victim if you want to. You can overfeed the victim if you want to. You can also over-medicate the victim if you want to. And as one of the forensic psychologists from the Hidden True Crime Channel stated, in a lot of Munch Housing by Proxy cases, the parent, the caregiver, that's the one doing it to the child actually does make the child sick. They will poison the child. They will do something. So the child legitimately does get sick, which usually ends up being a very, very baffling situation for the physicians, for the pediatricians, because they'll run all these tests on the children, which will all come back negative, but they can see the child is sick. So they're scratching their head and they have not thought to check for poisoning because I don't think you would ever assume a parent would do that to their kid. And so it does leave the child baffled. But again, remember, in most cases, the child is actually sick. In Gypsy Rose case, a lot of the time, she wasn't actually sick. She was just being made to feel like she was sick. And when she started to be given medications, I do believe that that did impair her in a lot of ways because all these pharmaceutical drugs being pumped through you for diseases that your mother claims you have, which you don't actually have, probably messes a lot with your system. And now we've got this feeding tube, which... Who knows what Didi can insert into Gypsy at this time that she has now this feeding tube? At some point, Didi was in a pretty bad car accident. And she actually almost lost her foot. So she had to be hospitalized for a little while and Gypsy was sent to live with her grandparents. And the grandfather claw did notice that Gypsy was able to eat. It's like she would sit at the table and eat with them. She had no problems. So they were starting to notice that there were things that just were not adding up. You know, away from her mother, Gypsy would not use her wheelchair. She would walk just fine. No problem. And again, she's very young at this point. So in Gypsy's mind, she doesn't really understand that what her mom is doing is a BUSC and is also a con. Now, Gypsy does claim that when she lived with her grandparents that her father did a BUSC her as well in the not appropriate kind. I'm really trying to be careful with the algorithms here, guys. But you guys, in the predatorial kind when it comes to inappropriate things with a child, right? And her grandfather has denied this. But I believe Gypsy, just the way the grandfather reacted to it. I absolutely do believe Gypsy. And apparently there was some speculation that maybe the grandfather had done this allegedly to Didi as well when she was a child. Some of Didi's siblings don't believe this. And I think this was something that Didi trained Gypsy to say and Gypsy doesn't. Gypsy is believes 100% this happened. But they think that it was just a mind trick played on Gypsy by Didi. I can see their point. I absolutely can see their point. But just the way that her grandfather responded to that accusation in my opinion, makes them seem like he actually did do it. But, you know, love to hear your thoughts on that. Just be careful with the words you use. Well, at this point, her grandfather is remarried to another woman. Her grandmother had passed away in like 1997. And so grandpa is remarried to Grandma Laura. Didi's stepmother, Gypsy's step grandmother. And when Didi moves in back in with her grandparents after the surgery, there comes a day where Gypsy accidentally kind of wraps her mother out. Her grandfather pulls up some roundup and roundup is what we use in yards to like kill weeds. And Gypsy makes the comment, oh, those are the vitamins that mom puts in Grandma Laura's food. Now, Grandma Laura had been getting sicker and sicker and sicker. So we do see, we do see at this point, Didi using essentially poison to hurt someone. Well, grandpa confronts Didi, a big fight erupts. Didi packs Gypsy up and they move about two hours away. And at this point, Didi gets in touch with Gypsy's stepmother, Christy, Rod's wife and basically set tells them where they're living, but tells them not to tell her family. They have totally disconnected from Didi's family. So this is when the intensity of the A-B-U-S-C gets even worse because now Didi has total, she's totally isolated Gypsy. She rarely sees her father. She does now not see any of her aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins from a mom's side. It is just Didi and Gypsy. In 1999, while in New Orleans, there is speculation from Didi that Gypsy now has leukemia. She makes a phone call to Rod and Christy and says she's got leukemia. We at this point see Didi start to shave Gypsy's head. And Gypsy says that her mother would say that your hair is going to fall anyway. We might as well go ahead and cut it off and keep it neat. But what Gypsy doesn't understand is that when you do go through cancer treatment, radiation chemotherapy, your hair will stay. Once a lot of people do shave it off, like I've had a lot of family members go through this where the hair starts to fall out. So they just go ahead and shave it off. But it stays off. It doesn't grow back until the treatment is over. And so every few weeks, Gypsy's having to reshaver her hair because no such treatment is happening. But from the outside looking in with this little skinny, sickly girl, looking girl in a wheelchair with a shaved head, it looks like she is on death's doorstep. And here's this heroic mother giving her life to take care of Gypsy. At this point, because Gypsy is sick, there's a lot of programs parents can get on to help them financially provide for Gypsy. So now Munchausen by proxy, in my opinion, isn't just Munchausen by proxy, but it's actually conning people too, which a lot of times from what my research, what I watch other people say that specialize this in this is that a lot of Munchausen by proxy cases, there's no financial reward. The only reward that the parent is getting is glorification and admiration from other people watching her take care of her sick child. But there's two things going on with Gypsy Rose, the Munchausen by proxy and the conning, the scamming, that they're grifting, that that DD is running and Gypsy too, although Gypsy doesn't know that. Gypsy has no idea that she's actually her mother's meal ticket that without Gypsy, her mother would not be able to run these scams and Gypsy is not aware of this because again, she is just with DD. And as far as homeschooling goes, there's no homeschooling to speak of. In fact, the only thing Gypsy did all day was watch Disney movies, which is going to give her a warp sense of reality when it comes to relationships. She had this idea that as a female, she's the princess and she needs a man to come save her, which is going to play into the unaliving of her mother. So Disney is literally the only education that this child is getting for most of her life. It's amazing the girl could even read and write. Well, Gypsy, the problem with Gypsy too for DD is that like every child, she's going to get older. And so we start to see when Gypsy gets to her adolescent years, her preteen years, where she's being made to look even younger than she is. She's still wearing little kid dresses. She's being dressed up in Cinderella costumes and most doctors said she would come in at like 12, 13 years old but would act like a kindergartner because that is how her mother trained her to behave. And there was an interesting story about when Gypsy got her period. Her mother had never talked to her about a period. So when she got her period, she was horrified. She was bleeding. And so her mother made her wear an actual diaper instead of talk to her about tampons and pads. And then in 2005, everything shifted for almost the worst. We're getting to the climax of this story because on August 28th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and everything shifts with this hurricane. But before we go deeper into this story, just a brief word from our sponsors. So at the time of Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother DD Blanchard were living in Slidell, Louisiana about two hours away from her family. It is safe to say that Gypsy was basically exiled from any other human being that could have potentially helped her with her situation with her mother. Now, as many of you know, you don't have to be from the United States to know the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was definitely one of the worst natural disasters that we have had in our modern history. Here in the United States, it was a devastating hurricane that hit the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, so Louisiana, Mississippi, parts of Texas, et cetera. And as far as I know, in 2024, almost 20 years later, they are still recovering from the effects of this hurricane. Now, Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother DD were living in already a pretty rough area of town in Slidell, Louisiana, and their apartment complex was absolutely destroyed. Gypsy Rose and her mother stayed in a shelter for about a month and a half and never won to miss a good opportunity to play out her con. DD was able to arrange to have herself in Gypsy airlifted basically to Springfield, Missouri. So for those who are not familiar with the geography of the United States, Louisiana is down in the Gulf and you've got Arkansas on top of Louisiana and then Missouri on top of Arkansas. So they basically just went straight north to Springfield. Now, interestingly enough, Springfield, Missouri does have really great medical facilities. So airlifting this child who looks like she's on death's doorstep, who's just lost everything because of this hurricane seemed like a really good deed to do. DD and Gypsy, for my understanding, then lived at Mercy Hospital in their hospitality unit. Now remember Gypsy was born in 1991. So at this point Gypsy was 14 years old. However, DD was telling everybody that Gypsy was 12. Now remember what I said earlier. Gypsy has no interaction with the outside world. Anytime she has interaction, any social interaction with anybody outside from her mother, her mother is there. And if you notice in a lot of the footage, her mother is constantly holding her hand, squeezing her hand, squeezing her shoulders, dominating control over what Gypsy says and the way that Gypsy behaves. I don't know if Gypsy realized this because again, she has no reference point. She's not really, basically we can say she hasn't really ever been in a social situation where her mother hasn't been there too for her to develop her own autonomy. We also know that as Gypsy claims, she was often coached by her mother on things to say. So as we're going to see as we get into the Missouri area where things really start to take a turn, Gypsy's age is going to be changed at least three times. Now because Gypsy doesn't go to school because she doesn't have any real interactions, when her mother tells her she's in age, she believes she's that age. She actually doesn't know that her birth year was 1991. So by her mother telling people she's 12 and telling Gypsy she's 12, it's pretty believable. And besides that, you know, Gypsy's wheelchair bound, she's had her head shaved. She looks and acts a lot younger than most 14 year old girls. Gypsy did however know that there was some sort of dishonesty going on because not only did Gypsy know she could walk when she couldn't walk, but she would hear her mother tell people that her life expectation or expectancy was short. So at first she heard when she was really little that she was only expected to live to age seven. Then she heard that she was expected to live to age 15. And then she heard she was expected to live to age 20. So Gypsy already kind of knew something was off, but I'm just going to remind you guys, she didn't know, she wasn't in on the con like her mother was. She had no idea what much housing by proxy was until she was in prison. The only thing she knows is that she can walk and that her mother keeps changing her life expectancy. Okay, so keep that in your mind. And I ask you to think back to your own childhood. I know most of you watching probably had a pretty normal childhood just like me as far as like going to school. But I do know about abuse though, which we're going to talk about that later on in the episode and the behavior patterns around trauma. But you kind of just take what your parents say as fact. And sometimes things that are pretty obvious to us as adults might not be obvious to us when we are children. After all, our brain isn't fully developed until the age of 25 anyway. And we do most of the time have a pretty deep trust in our parents. So DD starts to take Gypsy into these doctor's appointments into a pediatrician, all these specialists in Missouri. And this is where for the first time, we're really seeing DD hit some major obstacles. Now we know back in Louisiana that her parents were questioning. Her family was questioning a lot of DD's choices. But beyond that, she always had a pretty reasonable explanation as to why Gypsy was a wheelchair, all that kind of stuff. But here in Missouri, it's a different story. When we get to the pediatrician, he's the first one that kind of notices there's some red flags. DD tells the pediatrician that she cannot get a hold of Gypsy's medical records. This makes sense. I mean, a hurricane Katrina has just devastated the whole area of Louisiana. So it would make sense that things like medical records might be lost. Now, nowadays, I can imagine most medical records are digital anyway. But back in like 2005, we still had a lot of paper trails of like paper filing. And I'm sure the doctor was like, okay, I get it. You guys been through a hurricane. You've lost everything. I totally understand that your medical records are gone. However, she starts to give the doctor a list of all of Gypsy's ailments, asthma, muscular dystrophy, cancer, cerebral palsy, all these things. The doctor from these interviews I've watched said the thing that stuck out then the most was cancer. That was the most concerning. And so he was relying on DD to be the historian of Gypsy's medical procedures. And she basically told him from what I understand that she couldn't remember what kind of cancer it was and she couldn't remember the treatments, which seems very strange. I would think to any person, not just the doctor, I would think and if anybody watching, if God bless you, if you have been through an issue with childhood cancer or your child has had cancer, I can guarantee you you probably remember every diagnosis. You probably made notes about all the treatments. You probably remember everything they did to your child because you want your child to get better and you want to remember this because of the caregiver, you're responsible to help your child work through these issues. The fact that DD could not remember any of this was very concerning to the pediatrician. And so the pediatrician said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to run all these tests. We're just going to start from the beginning and we're going to run all these tests on Gypsy just to get to the bottom of what's going on. So he does that. He runs all these tests and all these tests basically come back saying that she's perfectly healthy. There's nothing wrong with her. Meanwhile, during this time, her father Rod and her stepmother Christy are frantically looking for DD in Gypsy. Remember, Hurricane Katrina has just happened. There are so many people who lost their lives and Christy even goes on in the multi-part docu-series on Amazon Prime. Christy goes on to say that she actually even called a local news and gave her number publicly. There was a place back in that time where you could call and like leave your contact information when you're looking for someone to call up and say, I'm looking for DD in Gypsy Blanchard. Here's my phone number. Please call me if you know anything about with the location of these two people. So for like two months, her father and stepmother had no idea where she was. Didn't know if they had survived the hurricane. And then finally one day, DD just casually calls Christy. It's like, oh, yeah, we're fine. We got airlifted to Missouri. I cannot imagine the stress that her father must have been on even though her father had very little contact with Gypsy because of the mother's isolation. I cannot imagine how stressful that must have been for him. And then probably the relief, he felt when he realized they were not only safe, but had been airlifted to another state with a really good medical facility. So meanwhile, all of Gypsy's tests come back normal. So her pediatrician decides that he is going to send Gypsy to a specialist, a pediatric neurological specialist. This specialist is the one person who actually writes in his notes that he suspects that her mother has much housing by proxy. And if you watch any of these documentaries, they actually show you in the medical records where this specialist had actually written this down. Now the problem, and the problem that we're going to run into a couple of times here in Missouri is that having a suspicion of much housing by proxy is very different than having evidence. And when it comes to the court of law, the letter of the law, you need evidence. And so this neurologist really did not have a leg to stand on to go to the government or to go to the state, the family services and be like, I think this mother is doing this to her child. I don't have any evidence to prove it. All I've got is that her test kit came back normal, which the state could turn around and say, well, maybe she's just in remission. Like how dare you shame this mother for doing so much for her child? But he is the one doctor that really called it for what it was. Meanwhile, her pediatrician, the nurse's assistant or the nurse herself ended up finding basically three different birth certificates from what I understand where there were three different birth dates with same date, different years, basically re-aging gypsy. And she presents this to the pediatrician. At that point, the pediatrician does get in touch with family services. However, he thinks she's been kidnapped. And this is what's so interesting to me friends is that we hear tomorrow on my channel all the time if you're new to the channel, my friend Tamara, she's in Australia. She's an astrological chart reader, all this cool stuff. But she always talks about listening to your gut. Listen to your gut, listen to your gut, listen to your gut. It doesn't have to make sense. If something feels off, it's probably off. And I can't help but think about that with this particular pediatrician because from the get-go, he knew something was wrong. From the get-go, his gut was telling him something was wrong. He didn't know what it was, but he knew it was something. And when he had the evidence of the date change, he just assumed kidnapping. He calls the state, the state goes over to Gypsy's house, do an interview with Gypsy. They tell Dee Dee that she's going to have to provide a proper birth certificate. But the state never comes back to do a follow-up. Basically, Gypsy confirms that that is her mother. I'm sure they can do DNA testing, all that kind of stuff. And so they kind of drop the ball. But what I'm getting at is we've got two doctors here who have literally pushed back. And it was the state that wouldn't do anything. So when we say Gypsy fell through the cracks, it wasn't like people weren't trying. We have evidence from her family questioning, Dee Dee. We see the isolation from her father taking her out of school. Now we see these doctors doing what they can, how they can to try to intervene to figure out what is going on. Again, the specialist knew it was much hazelnut by proxy. The pediatrician knew something was wrong. He thought it was kidnapping. They just knew something was not right with this mother, daughter duo. Now Gypsy goes on to say in the documentary that her and her mother were bound by this lie. But I'm going to push back from Gypsy saying that because I don't think Gypsy knew. I really think that Gypsy was very naive and had been very sheltered and she trusted her mother. She literally was living in such isolation that her mother was the only source of outside conversation and knowledge that she had. She had no friends. Anytime she was in the opportunity to meet people outside of her mother, her mother was always there squeezing her hand, telling her what to say. I don't think Gypsy should take the responsibility for being in on this scam because I don't think Gypsy knew anything. I think she just thought, and we're going to talk about that because we're going to talk about some of the things she said about getting into prison and realizing she wasn't actually sick. So I think she really believed she was sick. She had no point of reference to see what real cancer patients go through. She had no point of reference to see what real muscular dystrophy looks like. In fact, we get to this place in Missouri where Dee Dee is certain that Gypsy has cerebral palsy, but all the tests come back negative. So one of the side effects of cerebral palsy, and remember Dee Dee is a nurse's assistant by trade even though she's not working as one anymore because she's getting assistance from the state. Gypsy is basically her meal ticket, but because she's familiar with the body and with medicine, she can study these diseases, these issues and know what to look for and what to trigger to make the doctors believe her, believe her manipulation. So one of the side effects of cerebral palsy is drooling, constant drooling, like uncontrollable drooling. And so Gypsy retails the story of how her mother coated her lips in or a gel to make her lips in her mouth go numb so that she would drool. So when she brings Gypsy to the doctor with all this drooling issue, you know, I don't think Gypsy realized until later on that that's what happened and you know, I don't think her mother slapped the or a gel on her and said this is to make you drool. I think she was just constantly medicating her and she just let her do what she was doing. Well, the doctors then decide in order, you know, to stop the drooling to take out her salvatory glands, excuse me, which I just, this just makes me sick to my stomach. Like what freaking human being would do this to their child? What human being would do this to a child anyway? To put a child through this extreme medical treatment for no reason is some of the worst forms of A, B, U, S, E. It's unbelievable. So they remove her salvatory glands. Now what I learned happens when that happens because thank God that's never happened to me nor do I know anybody in my personal life that's had that happen is that you do tend to lose your teeth and it can be extremely painful. So by the time Gypsy was like 14 years old, she was having her teeth removed and using dentures. This woman is sick. This is this woman talk about someone who doesn't have a soul. Now, something Gypsy spoke about in the more recent documentaries is her addiction to Vicodin and I don't blame her. Like I don't judge her at all for being addicted to Vicodin. Listen, I think most of us who are watching this, if you've been alive for a significant amount of time, I'm sure there has been some point in your life where you have experienced extreme physical pain, whether that is with a broken bone or heaven forbid, you're somebody who's actually been through cancer or been through muscular dystrophy or been through several or have several palsy, whatever it may be or been just sick for a long period of time. I know I've dealt with a lot of extreme digestion issues. When you are in physical pain for a prolonged period of time, it affects you and it can cause such mental anguish. And the problem with painkillers is that you do develop a tolerance. And Gypsy is being put through all of these medical procedures that aren't necessary that are causing extreme pain. She's also living in a highly toxic house with an extremely A-B-U-S-I-V-E mother. She doesn't know that at the time. I don't think she's aware that's what's happening to her. But her mother had some Vicodin for herself and Gypsy started stealing the Vicodin. I don't blame her. I probably would have done the same thing and I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we all would have done the same thing too. Not only do you want to stop the physical pain from these unnecessary procedures, but you're also living in a hellhole. We also know that her mother wasn't the cleanest person in the world. Crime scene pictures show a woman who was hoarding and was frankly filthy. So this girl is living in a filthy home. I don't blame her for wanting to check out basically. I would want to check out too. But this addiction would carry through into her prison sentence as well where she finally confronts the fact that she does have an addiction to pain medication. Around 2008, Habitat for Humanity gifts Gypsy and her mother a house. This would end up, this is the house of torture of hell where Gypsy ends up unaliving her mother to save herself. This is the first time that the duo have really had a permanent home of their own. They've been pretty nomadic up to this point because of Dee Dee's pinching for stealing and having warrants out for arrest and trying to isolate her and Gypsy from people, other members of their family that would know would it be able to pick up on what's going on? Not only have they now conned Habitat for Humanity or not they, Dee Dee. Not only has Dee Dee conned Habitat for Humanity for a new home. They've also again gotten so much assistance from the state, from different state programs. And of course they have tapped into the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which is a foundation here in the United States for children who are very sick or are dying where they get to do what they want to do. And of course she takes the opportunity to take Gypsy on trips to Disneyland or Disney World rather in Florida. And again, this is what Gypsy is raised on is Disney movies. Gypsy is a 14, 15, 16 year old girl. I didn't watch Disney movies when I was 16. You know, I was watching Dawson's Creek. Her developmental hormonal age, she should be starting to want to watch more grown up shows and have boyfriends and more dynamic female friends and be gossiping about boys and bras and all that kind of stuff. But instead she's being forced to continue living this lie that she's a lot younger than she actually is. There was also a neighbor down the street, which we're going to get to. I'm going to read a little something in a minute that she kind of, I think she felt like this girl was her friend. But I think she felt like she was her friend because they had said some nice words like hello to each other, you know, but that's just how desperate Gypsy was for a social circle away from her mother. It makes sense. She's coming to the age where she wants to flee the nest and go out on her own. I know most parents want to raise their children to be able to be functioning members of society once the age, their age appropriate to become functioning members of society. And a part of that education is parents loosening the reins on their children as they get older and allowing them time to spend time with their friends, their own age and boys their own age and giving them more responsibility like maybe different chores in the house. So they start to learn how to manage life on their own. But Gypsy on the other hand is still being treated like a five year old. It's like her mother's trying to keep her always young. And this is for many reasons. One, this is Dede's meal ticket. This is how Dede remains getting assistance from the state, getting money from the state because she's got a dependent. Gypsy is her dependent. Around this time too, and I'm not sure exactly where this falls in the timelines. So just make sure you watch all the other documentaries if you want exact timeline information. But we know around this time, Dede does have Gypsy rolled mentally incompetent. So what I'm suspecting is going to happen is that when she does, when finally Dede can't change her birth certificate anymore, she's going to be able to show the state that Gypsy is still a dependent on her. And so she's going to continue to have this money coming in from the state to support her in Gypsy because she's mentally incompetent. She's going to rely on Dede to provide for her. Meanwhile, we have the father Rod sending money to them constantly. We also know now that Rod was perpetually sending Gypsy letters and cards and toys and presents. And Dede withheld all of that from Gypsy, making Gypsy firmly believe that her father didn't love her and wasn't interested in her at all. With their habitat for a humanity house, it is also noted that the windows were blacked out so that I'm assuming nobody could see Gypsy actually walking around in the house. And then her 18th birthday comes around. And on her 18th birthday, Rod, the father calls the house to wish his daughter a happy 18th. It's a big year, right? You're now an adult. 18, that's a big birthday. And so when Dede answers the phone, she tells Rod not to mention to Gypsy that Gypsy is actually 18. Rod's confused about this. Like, of course, she knows she's 18. This is a big day. I want to wish my daughter, my first born child a happy 18th birthday. And Dede's like, no, no, no, but she doesn't understand that she's 18. She thinks she's 14. Well, meanwhile, Dede has convinced Gypsy. Gypsy's only 14. And she's convinced the doctors and the neighbors that she's only 14. She can't have the father coming in and inadvertently, and inadvertently ruining the con, right? We have to keep the con up. We have to keep this up. When Rod gets off the phone with Dede, at this point, he realizes something is wrong. And so he's planning the six hour drive from the bayou of Louisiana up to Springfield, Missouri, because something isn't right. Basically, he never makes it because Dede manipulates the situation. Again, this woman is a master manipulator. Maybe I'm not doing Rod's story justice. So I do encourage you to go back and watch all the documentaries to really understand Rod's perspective. For me, in my opinion, after watching all the documentaries, I feel really bad for her dad. Her dad seems like a really nice guy. At this point, he's basically juggling two families. He's got his second wife, Christy, their two kids. And he's also sending money, tons of money to Dede to try to sport Gypsy at the same time. He's being kept from Gypsy. He's also got to make sure he's involved with his other two kids. And plus, he travels a lot for his job. So I do have a lot of empathy for this father. And at this point, he's finally kind of fed up. But Dede being Dede, she warms her way out of the situation with Rod driving up to Missouri to really figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, Gypsy has been... She believes now her mother's convinced her that her father wants nothing to do with her, that her father's got his new family. He wants nothing to do with Gypsy. He doesn't love her, all that kind of stuff. That her father, Gypsy even tells a story that her mother convinced Gypsy that her father actually beat them and picked her up as a baby and threw her, which now she knows wasn't true. So she had this kind of disdain. And somebody asked her, and I'm paraphrasing, did you ever miss your dad? And she was like, no, how can you miss somebody that you don't think really loves you or wants you or you never really knew to begin with? That's how good of a job Dede did with manipulating that father-daughter relationship. Now, Dede did open up a Facebook page that was just for Gypsy and Dede, which does come into play a little bit later in the story. But Dede ran that Facebook page. Meanwhile, Gypsy was gifted a laptop from the Leukemia Society. So she was gifted her own laptop. And she states that she thinks her mother believed that she was on like Barbie websites, like looking at toys. When really what Gypsy had done is she had gone onto Facebook and opened up her own Facebook account that was private, like a hidden Facebook. And this was her first interaction with the outside world. So she was developing these pair of social relationships with people on the outside world that she didn't really know. She was friends with a girl down the street and we see in a lot of these documentaries she's messages the girl down the street to get advice to talk to her like a girlfriend. And at this point, she's starting to flirt with boys because she's super interested. Of course she is. She's like a 16 year old kid. She's interested in boys, you know? And so this is her first interaction with the outside world where she should have, all this time, she should have been at school growing and developing with the kids in her class and experiencing these milestones with other kids her own age instead of finally at the age, at the rifle age of 16, 17 years old. She's finally doing that on Facebook. Do you like to take Gypsy to a lot of these different conventions? And one of these conventions was a convention called Vision Con. It was a sci-fi convention. And when she was there, she was in a wheelchair. Her mother went off to speak to somebody at a booth and this man named Dan accidentally bumped into a wheelchair and they started chit-chatting. She thought he was kind of cute. Anyway, they part ways, they finish up the weekend and he ends up finding her on her private Facebook account. Dan is 36 years old and so Gypsy starts to kind of start thinking sexually about fantasizing. And I want us to remember, because this is going to feed into this story going forward, Gypsy has never, her parents, she doesn't remember her parents being together. They were already divorced by the time that she was born. She's never really interacted with her father and Christie together as a married couple. Her mother's never dated. She doesn't go to school to see her friends have boyfriends or to have boyfriends herself. She doesn't watch regular TV. So her perspective perspective, there we go, of relationships is based off of Disney movies. And as a woman, she's starting to get this idea that in order to be saved, a prince charming has to be the one to save you. She never, as she even says, she never sees people fight in Disney movies. She doesn't know that arguing is part of relationship. Listen girl, girl listen, Gypsy. I would, I did not go through nearly what you went through as a child and I have been through that phase where I wanted a man and knight shining our way to rescue me too. It's a romantic idea to have. And unfortunately Gypsy had to learn this the hard way that that's not how this works. But this is where she's coming from. This is the information she's relying on you guys. This is her reference point. I think we need to remember this. Her reference point is Disney movies. She has not gone to school like we all went to school. She's never even done like afterschool activities with other kids away from her parents where her parents dropped her off and picked her up. This is her reference point for what romantic relationships look like, the damsel in distress being saved by the man. Around this time too, she finds her Medicaid card and her Medicaid card says that she is 19 years old. So she confines in Dan who found her on Facebook after the convention and they're chit-chatting. She confines in him that she's actually 19 and he tells her well you know you're a legally an adult. You can leave if you want. You can absolutely leave. And so she starts hatching this plan to leave. Dan's the first person she tells that she can actually walk. She tells him that. Now meanwhile I think she does think she has like cancer and all that kind of stuff. So they hatch a plan where she's going to hitchhike to his friend's house and he's going to take her off to Arkansas, live on his farm and she's going to be free of her mother. Now this is what gets me. She went to go pack her back and the only clothes that she had were Disney Princess costumes. So she didn't even have a closet of regular teenage clothes. Now of course she had a bunch of wigs, her head's shaved so she puts on a blonde wig and sinks out the back door. She packs up her bag, leaves a note for her mother and tells her mother in the note that she knows she's really 19 and that she's going to go live her life now. She gets to Dan's friend's house around about like 8 o'clock in the morning, somewhere between 4 o'clock and 8 o'clock in the morning where she realized that Dan is actually on probation and she didn't even know what probation was at that point. So there's no farm in Arkansas she's going to. So she's broken free of her mother but she's totally dependent upon this man to save her. Anyway, her mother finds her, brings her home, gets to the house around 8 a.m. She says the first thing she says to her mother is, I know I'm 19. Her mother takes her outside and tells her, if you come home with me, I will let you keep seeing Dan which is a lie. So Gypsy gets in the car, goes back home and this is when the abuse really starts. Her mother, I mean it's not really so it's been going on but this is when it becomes more desperate. Her mother chains her to a bed for two weeks with handcuffs and a dog leash and smashes her laptop, gets a BB gun, gets a knife, all kinds of stuff to really scare Gypsy into believing you are mine. If you do this again, it's going to be much worse for you. In one story, Gypsy gets so fed up with her mother that she actually pulls the BB gun out to shoot at her mother not knowing that it's only a BB thing. I can't say the G word too much for you two but that just shows her desperation of wanting to get out of the situation around 2000. So that's 2011. Over time, she starts to gain trust back with her mother. Her mother finally lets her go to the bathroom by herself. Her mother finally lets her bathe by herself, all that kind of stuff. Around 2012, Gypsy starts going back on the internet on her mother's computer after her mother goes to sleep. Now, her mother and her usually sleep in the same bed. That's just how they do it. So her mother would go to sleep and Gypsy would sneak and get on the internet. She joins this Christian dating site where she meets this guy named Nicholas Godajan. Now, Nicholas has a lot of problems. He's mentally slow. He's got autism. He's got multiple personality disorder. She doesn't know this yet. But she starts to develop this relationship with him online. Their relationship has only been online. And they devised this plan in 2013 that he's from Wisconsin. But he's going to get on a bus and come to Springfield and they're going to go see Cinderella. And he's going to bump into them at the movie theater. And it's a pretty whacked plan. But, you know, Busk is the plan of teenagers. Her mother thinks he's creepy, doesn't like him. She ends up going to the bathroom with him. That's where they have sex the first time. In a bathroom stall, so romantic, right? Anyway, she's dressed up like Cinderella because it's a kid's movie. It's just a very weird, weird situation. After this, things start to develop. Get really strange for her with Nicholas Godajan. But of course, she doesn't have any frame of reference because all she knows is Disney movies. All she knows is the man has to save you. And at this point, typically I don't like to use Wikipedia. But for this, I felt like Wikipedia actually did give a very good summary. So let's just look at this together. And then we're going to have a conversation because I want to make sure I get all the details right about what happened, especially for our friends watching from other countries who have not heard this story. So growing independence of Gypsy, this is under a Wikipedia article called The Murder of Dee Dee Lancerd. Okay, Dee Dee seems to have at least one forge. Dee Dee seems to have at least one forge to copy of Gypsy Rose's birth certificate changing her birth date to 1995 to bolster claims that she was still a teenager. Gypsy Rose said in a later interview that for 14 years, she was not sure her real age. Dee Dee sometimes also claimed that the original happened destroyed during post-Katrina flooding. Dee Dee did keep another copy with Gypsy Rose's real birth date. So she had a, somewhere, a real copy. Gypsy Rose recalls seeing it during one of her hospital visits and becoming confused. Dee Dee told her it was a misprint. Gypsy Rose attended, had attended Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention since 2001, sometimes in costumes since she could blend into their diverse and inclusive communities in her wheelchair. At a 2011 event, she made what may have been an escape attempt that ended when her mother found her in a hotel room with a man she met online, which we now know that's actually was a house of his friends. Again, Dee Dee produced the paperwork, giving her a fault later, later birth date and threatened to inform the police. Gypsy Rose recalls that afterward, Dee Dee smashed her computer with a hammer and threatened to do the same to her fingers if she ever tried to escape again. She also kept Gypsy Rose leashed and handcuffed to her bed for two weeks. Dee Dee later told her that she'd filed paperwork with the police claiming that she was mentally incompetent, leading her to believe that if she attempted to go to the police for any help, they would not believe her. Shortly after being freed from the bed, Gypsy Rose unsuccessfully attempted to escape from the house again by shooting her mother 10 times with a BB, which she initially believed was a real one. I have to be careful with how I say that. Sometime around 2012, Gypsy Rose, who continued to use the internet after her mother had gone to bed to avoid her tightening supervision, made contact online with Nicholas Gotajan, a man around her age from Big Bend, Wisconsin, home she said she had met on a Christian singles website. Gotajan has a criminal record for indecent exposure in a history of mental illness, sometimes reported as disassociated identity disorder he also has is on the autism spectrum. In 2014, Gypsy Rose confided to 23-year-old neighbor, that's the neighbor I was speaking about that she knew, who unaware that Gypsy Rose was closer to her own age, considered herself a big sister, that she and Gotajan had discussed eloping and had even given chosen names for potential children. Gypsy Rose, who had five separate Facebook accounts, and Gotajan floored it online, their exchange sometimes using BDS and elements, which she had since claimed was more what he was interested in. The neighbor tried to talk her out of it, still thinking she was too young and possibly being taken advantage of by a predator. She considered Gypsy Rose plans, just fantasies and dreams and nothing like this would ever really take place. That makes sense. We always fantasize about that with our friends. Despite DD's efforts to prevent her from using the internet, which went as far as her destroying her daughter's phone and laptop, she maintained contact with Aliyah, the neighbor, who saved printouts from her post until 2014. The next year, she arranged and paid for Gotajan to meet her mother in Springfield. Her plan was for him to casually bump into her while she and DD were at the movie theater, both of them in costume and apparently strike up a relationship that way and then later for her to introduce him to her mother. As soon as they did meet in person for the first time in March 2015, when Gypsy Rose along with her mother went to watch Cinderella, Gotajan says, Gypsy Rose led into the bathroom to the handicapped stall where the two had sex. This is disputed by this Gypsy Rose who states the two did not have sex and that Gotajan had pulled out as penis was but unable to get erect. The two continued their internet exchange interactions and began developing their plan to on a live DD. Now Gypsy Rose, I don't know where they're getting that information because in the documentary, she said they did have intercourse in the bathroom. So the unaliving Gotajan returned to Springfield in June of 2015, arriving while Gypsy Rose and her mother were away at a doctor's appointment after they had returned home and DD had gone to sleep. He went to the Blanchard House. Gypsy Rose let him in and allegedly gave him duct tape, gloves and a knife with the understanding that he could use it to unalive DD. Gypsy Rose had in the bathroom and covered her ears so that she would not have to hear her mother screaming. Gotajan then stabbed DD 70 times in the back while she slept. Afterwards, Gotajan claimed that he had two intimate interactions in Gypsy Rose's room where she also performed intimate actions on him. Y'all can read it. Gypsy Rose alleged that Gotajan had RAPED to her and that the activity was non-consensual. She alleged that Gotajan told her he would RAPE her because she did not allow him to RAPED DD before the unaliving as he had previously fantasized about. Gypsy Rose said that she had called out for help. Gypsy Rose said that she had called out for help from her deceased mother during the RAPE. They took 4,000 in cash that DD had been keeping in the house, mostly from Rod's child support checks. They fled to a motel outside of Springfield where they stayed a few days while planning their next move. During that time, they were seen on security cameras at several stores. Gypsy Rose said at that point she believed that you had gotten away with their crime. They mailed the unaliving item back to Gotajan's house in Wisconsin to avoid being caught with it and they took the bus there. Several witnesses who saw the pair on their way to the Grey House station noted that Gypsy Rose wore a blonde wig and walked unassisted. So this is where it gets interesting, so investigation and the arrest. After seeing concerning Facebook statuses posted from DD's account, the Blanchard's friend suspecting something was amiss. When phone calls went unanswered, several friends and neighbors went to the house. While they knew that the two often left on medical trips unannounced, they saw DD's modified car still in the driveway making this unlikely. The protective film on the windows made it hard to see inside with the low light. No one answered the door, so the gathered friends called 911. When the police arrived, they had to wait for a search warrant to be issued before they could enter. They allowed one of the neighbors present to climb to the window where he saw the inside of the house was largely undisturbed and that Gypsy Rose's wheelchair was still present. Now those Facebook posts said something like, the B-I-T-C-H is dead. Very disturbing Facebook posts that we do know Gypsy Rose actually left because she wanted her mother's body to be found. When the warrant was issued, police entered the house and found DD's body. A GoFundMe account had been set up to pay for her funeral expenses and possibly Gypsy Rose's because at this point they think she's been abducted. All who knew the Blanchard's fear the worst. Even if just Gypsy Rose had not been harmed, they believed she could be helpless without her wheelchair, medication, and support equipment like oxygen tanks and feeding tubes. The neighbor, the female neighbor who was among those gathered on the Blanchard's lawn told the police that she knew about Gypsy Rose and her secret boyfriend. She showed them the print out she had saved which included his name. Based on that information, police asked Facebook to trace the IP address from which the post to DD's account had been made. It turned out to be in Wisconsin and the next day police agencies in Waukesha County raided GoToJohn's big bin home. GoToJohn and Gypsy Rose surrendered and were taken into custody on charges of murder and felony armed criminal action. The news that Gypsy Rose was safe was greeted with relief in Springfield where she and GoToJohn would soon be extradited and held on a $1 million bond. But announcing the news, Green County Sheriff Jim Arnott warned things are not as they appear. The media in Springfield soon reported the truth about the Blanchard's lives that she had never been sick and had always been able to walk. But her mother had made her pretend otherwise using physical ABUSC to control her. Arnott urged people not to donate money to the family until investigators learned the extent of the fraud. So, now when we get to the trial, at first both Gypsy and Nick were facing potential death penalties for murdering her. I'm going to let that one go, but I got to be careful because I don't want YouTube to take this down. Life in prison or capital punishment. But eventually the judge and the prosecutor lessened Gypsy's charges because of the ABUSC that she had been through at the hands of her mother. So, the prosecutor gave her a plea deal. I believe it was something like playing to second degree unaliving. She would have 10 years with a possibility of parole at like eight and a half years. And so she took that. And thus the sensation of Gypsy Rose started. Now, Nicholas Gaudijan, who actually did the unaliving is now serving a life sentence. And this is a part of contention for many people because many people believe he was so mentally handicapped that that should have been taken into consideration too. Others believe that Gypsy should also be serving a life sentence while still more people believe she should not have gone to jail at all because of what she had been through. Now, I have watched a lot of different YouTube channels who have talked about Gypsy possibly being manipulative herself. And I don't doubt that she has definitely picked up traits from her mother. That's all she knew. But I also know what trauma does to people. And it's one thing to, in theory, understand trauma. It's an A-B-U-S-E. And it's another thing to experience. A lot of people are saying that she had access to the Internet. She could have called out for help, blah, blah, blah. Could she have though? You have to remember that Gypsy has no reference point for anything outside of her mother. And if you've been A-B-U-S-E-D by somebody, you know it changes the way that you perceive the world. I believe that she was stuck in a mental prison. I believe she feared the worst. I believe that because of her attempts to run away from her mother before had been met so harshly and because her mother had gotten her legally labeled incompetent, if she had gone to the authorities or to anybody else, they would have just laughed it off as her being mentally incompetent. I also know that there was no way she was going to reach out to her father. She believed her father to be this horrific monster that her mother painted him out to be. She wasn't going to go in her mind from one horrific parent to another horrific parent. Did she manipulate a guy with autism to do this crime? Yeah, probably. But was this her only means to escape? I don't know. Maybe. Her family, it's kind of funny and sad at the same time. Her family, when they got her cremation ashes back, they talked about just flushing it down the toilet. Her family was done with Didi and many of them and said she got what she deserved. One of her cousins who is a famous tattoo artist in New Orleans area even said that he knew Gypsy would snap one day. He knew it. We also know that Didi also dabbled in black magic and voodoo. Gypsy even recalls the story of her mother putting her picture, a print out of Gypsy's picture, a print out of Dan's picture, a cow tongue and some of Gypsy's menstrual blood into a mason jar in the backyard and bearing it saying that Gypsy will never find love and be happy. Her cousin even talks about Didi messing with black magic and maybe that was why she was able to manipulate and mind control so many people. Now with that being said, I do not believe that Gypsy's mother was a part of any Satanic cult. I think she was just a psychopath. You can be a psychopath and not be a part of a Satanic cult, right? You can be a psychopath and still practice black magic. And I think that Didi was such a messed up person herself that this was her way of acting out in the world. It's obvious to me, one of the saddest questions they ask Gypsy in one of the docu-series episodes is do you think your mother loved you? And she kind of pauses for a minute and says in her own way, I don't think psychopaths know how to love. I think that Didi saw Gypsy Rose as an extension of herself and was her tool to use Gypsy Rose to manipulate the world at the service of Didi. Most parents want their children to grow up and get married and be healthy and happy and smart and wise and have wonderful lives. They want their children to experience everything the world has to offer. Didi did not care about that with her child. She did not want her child to even feel good. Her child to her was an object for her to use and abuse as much as she wanted. Now Gypsy, in my opinion, is one of the only people who actually thrived in prison. And she recounts a story of when she first goes to prison for the first time in her life, she finally feels free and she laughs at how ironic she knows that must sound to people and she did while in prison finish her education. While in prison, she did learn interpersonal relationships with other females. She went through a couple of heartaches. She got engaged, cut off the engagement. She did get married in prison and now is married and living with her husband. I know people are very concerned about that because she hasn't had time to really live on her own but that's, you know, that's her journey to take. We do know from different interviews that she is in therapy. She is and she's working to be a spokesperson for victims of Munchhausen's Biproxy Syndrome. A lot of people though are taken aback by the fact that she has become a celebrity because of this case. But I don't know if it's her being a celebrity. I think it's just the whole case itself is so intense and so wild and the fact that she fell through the cracks and nobody, it got to the point where she, the only escape she thought she had was to unalive. Her perpetrator is wild and I think that's what we're all fascinated in is how did this happen? How does a mother do this to her child? Now, again, as I've mentioned, there are many forensic psychiatrists out there talking about how we're seeing manipulations in Gypsy and why didn't Gypsy reach out to the world when she was using the laptop but they're just forgetting this factor. Gypsy had no reference point. We see this with cults. People who are born into cults like second generation cult members often, have a harder time reallocating to the outside world because they don't have a reference point. They don't have a time of life where the cult wasn't involved. For Gypsy, that cult was her mother. She doesn't have a memory of normal life. She doesn't have school to fall back on. She didn't have teachers to fall back on, friends to, she had no comprehension of what that reality was like. So for her even to understand that she could have reached out for help wasn't a part of her reality. We have to remember that she's not a child that was abducted from a normal life and then brought into a situation where she developed Stockholm syndrome and then over time could reference back to the way life was before. So is Gypsy manipulative as an adult? She probably does have some manipulative traits because that's what she learned from her mom. But I do know from what she has said is that she's working on that. She is working on that with the therapist. I do know that from the Munchausen by Proxies specialist that children that come from this type of environment typically do have a hard time with reality and fiction. And so what might appear as manipulation, what might appear as lying to us might be her just sincerely being confused and using the only thing she knows to use to navigate life. But again, my friends, as she has stated, she is actively in therapy. She took trauma classes in prison. She is actively in therapy now because she is aware of the fact that these issues are going to come up. The only problem is in her being aware of the fact that she doesn't have a reference point to know what is right and what is wrong. She is actively working with that with her father Rod and her stepmother Christy where she is totally enmeshed with her father now. So now she has an incredible support system from her father, her stepmother and her siblings. She's also got the support of many of her cousins and aunts and uncles from her mom's side that were estranged from her that knew she was in trouble. And so she hopefully over the years is going to get her bearing and is going to be able to the best of her ability heal herself and bring herself back to a place of somewhat of normalcy. Do I think that she will ever be free of the trauma or free of the CPTSD or PTSD she suffered for her mother? No. I think she's always going to have flashbacks always going to have to be self checking herself having that self awareness because the most of her life was spent. This is the first time she got out at the end of December 2023. She's only been a free woman for a couple of weeks for her entire life. But because before she was in remember prison for her was freedom compared to the life she was living with her mother. This child, this woman has never known a day of freedom. She never known a day of freedom. Give her some grace. She's 32 years old now and she is trying to do her best. Is she going to make mistakes? Absolutely. But oh, by the grace of God, so are we all. Is she going to say inappropriate things on social media? Absolutely. Is it maybe a little troubling that she's a celebrity coming out of this situation? Maybe so. But not for the fact that she's a bad person but for the fact that she has a lot of shit that she's going to have to work through herself, right? And it's going to be really hard for her to have to do that in front of the world. Is her marriage to her husband Ryan going to last? I don't know. I don't know. But there are two consenting adults and if it doesn't last, it doesn't last but that's the least of our concerns. Now, a lot of people believe that she has the possibility of being a repeat offender and going back to prison. I understand why they're saying that because some trauma victims just repeat what their perpetrators did to them but I don't know, it does seem like Gypsy is genuinely trying to do the right thing. She's genuinely trying to learn how to live an integral life. And again, we have to give her a break. She didn't know. Like I said in one of the interviews, she said she didn't even know that she didn't have cancer until she got to prison. She didn't know that she wasn't sick. Imagine that, my friends, if you will. Have some empathy. You think you're dying. Your whole life, you have been cut off from the world. You've not been able to go to school. Have friends. Have sleepovers. Come on, my girls watching like we used to do slumber parties all the time. She never got to do that. She never got to skid her knee on the playground with her friends. She never got to braid her friend's hair while her friend braided hers. She never got to snicker about the cute boy or hold the boy's hand at lunch. She never learned the economy of bartering at lunch, treating your dessert for somebody else's dessert. There's so much that this girl missed out on. She never got to experience being in sports, running around with the team, going to the pool with friends in the summertime, going to camp. It breaks my heart that her first intimate experience happened in a bathroom at a movie theater while she was dressed up as Cinderella pretending to be younger than she really was to suit her mother's con. It breaks my heart that she grew up in a house that was filthy and was forced to sleep in the same bed as her mother well into her adulthood. It hurts my heart that she never was allowed to take baths by herself until later on. It hurts my heart that her mother never taught her about periods. Never told her what that was. In fact, in one interview her mother, she said her mother told her you get pregnant by kissing a boy. So she didn't even know where babies come from probably until she got to prison as a 20-something-year-old adult. So for all the manipulative tactics you think Gypsy is showing for all these inconsistencies in her story, you think that is a red flag, you must remember that this girl has no reference point. She grew up in manipulation. She grew up in lies. She grew up on the run. She grew up isolated. And in my opinion, in my humble opinion, it is mighty powerful that she is aware of what she doesn't know that even though she doesn't have a reference point of what normal looks like, of what morals look like, of what right and wrong looks like, even though she doesn't have that reference point, she's aware that she doesn't have that reference point. And she's working her damnedest to try to find a reference point so that she can be a good person in society so that she can be helped so she can help others who are victims of much housing by proxy. So I think we all just need to give her a little bit of grace. Is she going to make mistakes? Absolutely. But you know what? I'm 41 years old and I'm still going to make mistakes. So are you. All right, you guys. I know this was a rather long one. I hope that makes sense. Again, for all of my friends watching from other countries that are not familiar with this case, what I gave you was a basic rundown. I really encourage you to watch the Prison Confessions docu-series on Amazon Prime created by Lifetime. There's also the documentary on HBO called Mommy, Dad, and Dearest. And there is also the reenactment called The Act with actors playing out this story. That's pretty good. Also, there's obviously countless YouTube videos out there of people recapping this story too. It's fascinating. It's so fascinating. So anyway, respectfully, let me know your thoughts and your opinion in the comment section. If you're watching this after the premiere, I can't wait to go back and look at the chat on the premiere either to see what you guys are saying. Also, do you think Nicholas Godajan should have a lighter sentence? Let me know. Talk to y'all soon.