Who is Gypsy Rose Blanchard? Why is she getting out of jail early?

The story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard has garnered global attention and drawn a following among true crime enthusiasts. Hollywood retold her story in an HBO documentary and an Emmy winning movie ‘The Act’.

In 2015, she along with her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, conspired to kill her mother Dee Dee Blanchard to help her escape the abuse she had been subjected to for years. In July 2017 she was sentenced to ten years in prison after she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder but will be released on 28 December, nearly three years early.

Who is Gypsy Rose Blanchard?

Dee Dee claimed that her daughter Gypsy Rose had several medical conditions and that she was mentally disabled from a very young age. She confined her daughter to a wheelchair by the time she was seven or eight even though Gypsy Rose was perfectly able to walk. She also had her daughter undergo numerous painful surgeries to treat the fake illnesses that she had imagined for Gypsy Rose. As well, she had her daughter medicated to treat seizures that didn’t exist.

So that no one would realize that the ailments were not real she subjected her daughter to physical and mental abuse. It was widely believed that Gypsy Rose was a victim of Munchausen by proxy, a rare form of abuse in which a guardian fakes or induces illnesses in a child for attention and sympathy.

Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose were displaced from Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and were settled in Missouri. There Dee Dee used her daughter as a disabled poster child to gain sympathy and con people out of money according to investigators.

While she followed along with what her mother told her as a child, when Gypsy Rose became a teenager, she began to rebel. This caused her mother to become physically violent with her.

In 2011, she made an escape attempt, but was soon found and taken back home. Dee Dee told her that she had filed paperwork saying that Gypsy Rose was incompetent and had power of attorney leaving the young girl no way out.

Soon after Gypsy Rose met Godejohn online and they developed a relationship. They hatched a plan to murder Dee Dee. While Gypsy Rose hid in the bathroom, he stabbed her mother several times while she slept. Godejohn received a life sentence without parole.

Why is she getting out of jail early?

Gypsy Rose, now 32, will be released from the Chillicothe Correctional Center in northern Missouri on 28 December. This was the first year that she was up for early parole and the Missouri Department of Corrections Parole Board granted her request.

She told People in an interview ahead of a three-part Lifetime miniseries in which she tells her story in her own words that she regrets it every single day.

“If I had another chance to redo everything, I don’t know if I would go back to when I was a child and tell my aunts and uncles that I’m not sick and mommy makes me sick. Or, if I would travel back to just the point of that conversation with Nick and tell him, ‘You know what, I’m going to go tell the police everything.’ I kind of struggle with that,” Gypsy Rose said.

“Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did. I regret it every single day.”