But in September, she was granted parole and served 85% of her sentence before being released. Now back in 2017, a gypsy rose documentary was released and you Asia wrote a piece for Vox about it called HBO's mommy dead and dearest is a perfect storm of true crime, pageantry and southern gothic tropes. And it's a great piece summarizing what goes down in the documentary, but also a great analysis of what exactly we are supposed to take away from it. So I want to start at the beginning. How would you describe the story of gypsy rose Blanchard to someone who has not seen the documentary heard about her gone through the Wikipedia page?

I would describe it as kind of a bizarre, garish, almost larger than life battle of wills between a mother and daughter, where you have this mother that is controlling and narcissistic and has projected all of her need for attention on to her daughter via what we now know of a disorder called moonshows and by proxy. Most of the public actually learned about this disorder through this case and moonshows and syndrome is a syndrome whereby someone pretends to be sick for attention. Moonshows and by proxy is where someone forces someone else in their life to be sick so that they can then have attention for caring for that person. And in this case, the person that the mother, Dee Dee Blanchard was practicing her abuse on was her daughter gypsy rose Blanchard. And Dee Dee Blanchard would force her to use a wheelchair. She shaved her head to make it look like she had been having chemotherapy. She forced her to use feeding tube. She convinced multiple doctors to give gypsy multiple unnecessary surgeries, including really horrible things like at one point she had her, I think saliva glands removed, just really bizarre, awful stuff. And she also created this entire illusion and this narrative around gypsy that was sort of smoke and mirrors. She was perpetually young. She's perpetually ill. She was sick with everything. She had chronic illness. She was on death door. They were low key celebrities in the terminal illness community, I guess you could say. They received lots of attention. They received lots of gifts. They got to go on free trips. They received free housing, for example, from the Ronald McDonald house. This was both a disorder and also a scam. So gypsy wasn't really able to escape. She was never allowed to be on her own. She was never allowed to talk to her doctors on her own. And she was also constantly encouraged and pressured to be performatively much younger than she actually was. So by the time things really kick off here, she was in her early 20s was still essentially performing the role of being a young teenager. But she also was very, very eager to be on the internet where she met a guy named Nicholas Goedijon. Nicholas Goedijon was kind of vulnerable in his own way. He had a long history of mental illness. He was on the autism spectrum. He may have had dissociative identity disorder. The experts sort of argued over this in court. And he was very, very heavily into dark, dark fantasies and dark fantasy role playing, that type of stuff. So she kind of found him and it was sort of this perfect storm of personalities coming together to fuel what happened next, if that makes sense. Yeah.

And can you maybe tell us what happened in 2015 that led to gypsy rose's arrest?

D.D. and gypsy had a joint Facebook account. And in June 2015 out of nowhere, somebody made a post to their joint account that just said that bitch is dead. And the post is actually still up. And if you look at it, it's flooded with people with their friends and neighbors just being so shocked and thinking this has to be a hoax because their reputation in their community was just that they were a deeply united, loving mother and daughter pair. D.D. was seen as a saint. Gypsy was seen as just this pure sweet child. And so nobody really knew what to make of this post. But when the police arrived, they found that Gypsy was nowhere to be found. But her mother, D.D., had been brutally murdered. So they didn't know at first where if Gypsy had been kidnapped or what was happening, but they quickly learned from looking at her internet history that it was likely that she and Nicholas Gaudigin had participated in this together. And they were later located a few states away. And they were captured and they both confessed to having murdered her together. And Gypsy wound up pleading guilty to second degree murder, which is partly why she got such a reduced sentence. But also because of the extraordinary circumstances of this case and the horrific abuse that she had suffered for years, she had felt like this was her only way out. I mean, you can argue that she manipulated Nicholas Gaudigin into this. It was something that they very much romanticized this fantasy of him sort of being her knight in shining armor and coming to her rescue and helping her escape this torture chamber where she had been kept her whole life. As brutal and as dark as it all is, like it's also on a level you can't help but feel sorry for both of them. And he actually received, because he was the one who carried out the murder, he received a life sentence without the possibility of her role, which she can argue about whether that's a fair sentence for him to receive such a harsh sentence when she got off so lightly. Because obviously if not for her, he would probably never have done this. He would have no reason to kill TD Blanchard otherwise if not for her. And so she, like you said, served about 80% of her sentence she got out in December. And her fan base, obviously because of the coverage, the national intention that this case got, people were highly anticipating her release. And so there were a lot of people who were just very celebratory in the day that she was finally released. And she emerged from prison into the waiting arms of the press basically and has been on this wide ranging and widely publicized press tour ever since.

You know, going back to 2016, Gypsy, she is sentenced to 10 years in prison. And during her time in prison, the media in Hollywood cannot get enough of her story. They are creating shows, documentaries, just writing about her constantly. And I want to kind of point to the 2017 Vox PC wrote that is about the documentary HBO put out. It's called Mommy, Dead and Dearest.

I first off want to ask, what did you think about the documentary? Was it like fair? Was it bias? Did it change the way you thought about Gypsy in her story? I don't think it changed the way I thought about the story, but I think it, having all the context that it added was really useful. It gave me quite a bit of context about her family. And what we now know too is that there was likely a long history of abuse within her family. There's a lot of generational trauma visited, not just upon her, but also on DD. Her grandfather has been accused of sexually abusing them both. And his response is not, is actually horrifying. So it's not something that would, would lead you to believe that those accusations are empty. At that extent, that seemed to be a little bit layered in this documentary. Like there were hints that the whole family was dysfunctional. And I think you can see that in a number of ways. And having that come through, I think was really helpful in terms of thinking about how, you know, where these problems originated and how they solve visited upon Gypsy herself, right? The documentary was maybe a little more objective in terms of Gypsy herself in terms of not necessarily letting her off for her role in the murder, which I think a lot of people now want to only see her as a victim and only see her as someone who is horrifically manipulated by her mother, which is also obviously very true. And we should never lose sight of that. But she in turn also manipulated Nicholas Gogejan. When we talk about her, we have to be really kind of reflective. And I do think that the documentary in my memory, at least it was a pretty objective look at Gypsy herself. Yeah. And this documentary definitely allows her to kind of enter the public consciousness with at least a little bit more context.

However, in 2019, Hulu, they come out with a show called The Act. It stars Joey King as Gypsy Rose Patricia Arquette plays her mom Patricia wins the Emmy for it. And I think back then, we were kind of still very slightly bringing up this conversation about the ethics of fictionalized or dramatized true crime. Because even though the show was critically acclaimed at one Emmy's, you know, Gypsy Rose herself was not that happy about it. And I kind of want to talk about this moment in time when Gypsy Rose, she is in prison, but her story is kind of everywhere. Do you have any theories as to why the media in Hollywood was obsessed with Gypsy Rose herself? Like, was it warranted? Was it a little off-putting? How did you feel about it at the time?

I think it's still a little off-putting, honestly. You know, and I've covered a lot of these cases. You know, I've written about, for example, the backlash to the Jeffrey Dahmer miniseries. I just read about May, December and the backlash that Vily Falau had towards that story being told sort of without his participation in any way. And I feel like this is a common trope that you hear among true crime in the true crime community, that there's a need to not only be respectful of the victims when you're telling these stories, but to kind of take their viewpoints into consideration and as much as you can, work that into your narrative, which is tricky. We sort of hold true crime to a different standard, perhaps, than we hold other types of fictional retellings of real life events. So there's that on a basic level. Also, in this case, Gypsy was convicted of murder. You know, she did have an active role in not only being the victim, but also perpetrating the crime. So when we talk about how should we incorporate her version of the narrative into the story, at some point we have to fundamentally be aware that that narrative to some degree is always going to be self-serving because she maybe isn't even capable of being objective about her life or her own mothers. And I think that's another aspect to consider. Often victims and their families or survivors, they're incapable of being as objective as the subject deserves. Exactly.

And, you know, I want to kind of get into the 2020s at this point because this is kind of where there's a bit of a lull, let's say, in the Gypsy Rose timeline. You know, she gets engaged to a guy they can. She gets married to her current husband, Ryan. And I don't think people were as interested in her story around this point. One, probably because there was this, like, entire new flood of true crime stories, podcasts, movies to obsess over. But also, I don't think she exactly had a voice yet, meaning I don't know if the public was ready to kind of hear from her just yet, except for to hear versions of her, IE through the act. And so I don't think it was clear whether she'd get out early or if she'd complete her 10 years. But let's fast forward to September 2023, when it is announced that Gypsy Rose has been granted parole, which means that she is being released about three years early. And this is when the internet starts to kick up some leaves because, am I right in this, people

were, like, excited for her? I mean,

I found out about this because Popcrave tweeted about it and I was scrolling through some of the replies today. And if I may, I'm going to read some of them to you. Someone wrote quote, Gypsy leaving prison now that she's an icon. I'm so happy for her. Slay as she should. She didn't deserve to be sentenced, in my opinion, fight me. And I will be honest. I read these and I was like, whoa, I just did not realize that there were so many Gypsy Rose supporters, let alone online. And so I want to ask you, how did you feel

about the internet's reaction to her when she was granted parole? I was reading the tweets over the holiday and I almost messaged my editor, even though it was the holiday and we were all off, to be like, these tweets are awesome because they were so funny. They were just really delightful. It was just a really delightful kind of public outpouring and we don't really get that kind of, especially on Twitter, which is this was the rare, the rare occasion that I felt like Twitter actually justified its use as a platform because people were just so happy and everyone, it was just so funny and kind of delightful to watch. I mean, a public celebration like that, that something that unites us is always worth noting. There was just a lot of really positive energy coming out of the whole trend and people just talking about her. Because as things go, it was pretty harmless. It's this abuse victim who's getting out of prison and she seems to be mostly okay, which is a cause for celebration. But at the same time, she's convicted murderous. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. So yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit because,

hey, I agree with you. Did I giggle, giggle, smash the like button on some of these tweets? Sure thing. I did have to kind of take a step back and ask myself if I maybe should feel a little guiltier about the joy that's kind of emanating from Twitter because of this because, like you said, she did serve time for her involvement in the murder of her mother. And so should we be celebrating her so openly online? That's

really tough. Again, like I said, I still feel really sorry for Nicholas Goedajan. He's serving life in prison without parole. Like he's never getting out and his life is over because of this. Where is that level of empathy? Where is that level of public support for him? Is there that level, that same level of public support? Are we just some extent like seeing her as someone who girl bossed her way out of abuse? Like there's this idea of her as a survivor, but also something about her persona and the way we've come to identify her, see her is as this sort of sassy poster child for true crime celebrity almost. Yeah. Like I don't think people are really taking into account the actual like many layers of the psychological trauma she experienced and the trauma she's still working through. She absolutely was horrifically abused and most people can't even fathom the level of abuse that she had to go to. I mean, being forced to use a feeding tube, being forced to have unnecessary surgeries on your body, like it's so awful. But I think in this case, we're kind of overcompensating by taking her immediately from traumatized abuse victim to girl power, like influencer. Like it's not a lot of real stock gaps in between. And of course, we don't know what her progress in prison was like. Prison isn't super well known for its rehabilitative therapy, but in this case, obviously she had so much more freedom in prison than she had being at home. And it's obvious the road to recovery that she's been on. And it's obvious that she has done a lot of work to become healthy and normal. And it's hard not to just be very like simply happy for her. This specific story is so complicated. So it's hard not to feel like we should be approaching the caution. Yeah.