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Gypsy Rose Blanchard is leaving prison after more than seven years.
The 32-year-old, who was sentenced to 10 years behind bars in 2016 for her role in the death of her mom Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, and whose life story was depicted on Hulu’s The Act, has been granted parole, a Missouri Department of Corrections spokesperson confirmed to E! News Sept. 29.
Gypsy, who was originally set for a 2026 release from prison, will now be freed on Dec. 28 after serving 85 percent of her sentence as required by state law. She will also, per the Missouri Department of Corrections, be given time served for the year she spent in Greene County Jail ahead of pleading guilty to second degree murder.
Gypsy’s story captured national attention in 2015 after she and her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn were arrested in June 2015 for Dee Dee’s murder. Police discovered the 48-year-old’s body in the Springfield, Mo., home she shared with her daughter after being alerted from a Facebook post to the duo’s joint account reading “That Bitch is dead!”
Gypsy would later testify in court that Dee Dee kept her largely isolated from the outside world, made her use a wheelchair, forced her to undergo unnecessary medical treatments and told friends and neighbors that she was disabled and had several illnesses. Her father, Rod Blanchard, told ABC’s 20/20 in 2018 that Dee Dee, his ex-wife, told him that their daughter had “leukemia, paralyzed, muscular dystrophy,” and “was also using a wheelchair and now had a feeding tube.”
Gypsy said on the program that “the only thing I had wrong with me is I have a little bit of a lazy eye.”
Missouri Department of Corrections
After her arrest, police discovered that Gypsy was actually healthy and able to walk.
One of Gypsy’s former neurologists, Dr. Bernardo Flasterstein, said on 20/20 that he had become suspicious of Dee Dee when he was made to examine her daughter for muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy when she was 14 but found no evidence of either condition. He added that Dee Dee was not happy when he told her that Gypsy’s prior diagnoses were wrong. He said that he wrote in a letter to Gypsy’s primary care physician, “I believe that the mother suffers from Munchausen by proxy.”
In addition, a 2009 police report obtained by 20/20 showed that another doctor alerted authorities when he “could not find any symptoms that support what Dee Dee alleges to be wrong with her daughter.”
In July 2016, after Gypsy pleaded guilty in the murder case and accepted a plea deal for the minimum 10-year prison sentence, her lawyer, Mike Stanfield, told the Springfield News Leader, “Essentially Gypsy’s mother was holding her a prisoner. Her mother would not allow her to spend any time alone with any other human being. Her mother, when they went to the doctor, did all the talking.”
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During Nicolas’ trial, Gypsy testified that her mother controlled and abused her, saying she hit her, punched her, starved her and chained her to her bed for two weeks.
“People felt sorry for me,” she said of the illnesses her mother led others to believe she had, according to St. Louis TV station KSDK. “They believed the lie, they believed the fraud.”
Gypsy also admitted in her testimony that it was her idea to kill her mother. “I wanted to be free of her hold on me,” she said, per the outlet. “I talked him into it.”
In 2018, Nicholas, then 29, was found guilty of first-degree murder and the following year, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Nicholas told 20/20 he “did what I did” because he loved Gypsy. “I really wanted a life with her, I really did,” he said from jail at the time. “[Gypsy] comforted me about it. I prayed once I got here. I tried to get her mother’s soul to forgive me.”
During her time in prison, Blanchard met and married another man. In June of 2022, she wed Ryan Scott Anderson from Louisiana and changed her legal last name to his. In 2019, she was briefly engaged to a man named Ken, who she met through her prison’s pen pal program.
Brownie Harris / Hulu
The alleged abuse of Gypsy and subsequent murder of Dee Dee were subsequently adapted into the acclaimed 2019 Hulu limited series, The Act starring Joey King and Patricia Arquette.
As for what Gypsy thought of the series? Her family friend and rep, Fancy Macelli, told E! News in 2019 that while her client couldn’t watch The Act in prison, she was told about it and was “very happy” about Joey’s casting.
However, Fancy also pushed back at the events depicted in the award-winning series. She added, “We certainly support the actress, but we do not support The Act, as it was grossly inaccurate.”
Hulu has not commented on Fancy’s remarks.
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