On December 28, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, a 32-year-old who was sentenced to 10 years in 2015 for orchestrating the murder of her own mother, was released early from an American prison in Ohio and is now on parole.
The motive for the murder was her mother’s strange behavior — throughout Gypsy-Rose’s life, her mother maintained complete control over her, citing the girl’s poor health and numerous congenital diseases.
This controversial story was widely publicised around the world, and Gypsy-Rose, even during the 2015 trial, was given hero status by many young people trying to justify her act. Today, now that Gypsy Rose is free again and can now control her life as she wishes, her persona has once again begun to be seen as a heroic figure.
Gypsy Rose, who has spent the last 7 years behind bars, realizes her popularity and, more importantly, recognizes the power of that popularity on social media. She brilliantly demonstrates an understanding of how to engage on Instagram and TikTok to maintain it. Over the past two weeks, videos of Gypsy-Rose worshipping Zoomers have become increasingly frequent, accompanied by clips from her latest posts and recent interviews, in which the newfound icon talks about her relationship with her husband and shares her impressions of her long-awaited stay on the outside.
This is not the first time recently that a highly controversial figure has become incredibly popular among young people. A similar reaction was received by former U.S. Congressman George Santos, who was fired after a scandal over the manipulation of government money. Well-versed in modern internet culture and meta-irony, Santos has been acting defiantly humorous in recent interviews, calling the interviewer “queen” and discussing Birkin bags while evading questions about politics and his dismissal.
Clips of the interview went viral on the Internet and became memes, with young people excitedly writing “That’s so me!”under the posts. Prior to the high-profile firing and subsequent interviews, the liberal Western youth did not support Santos because of his many homophobic and racist remarks.
However, Gypsy Rose’s situation differs from Santos’s in that the girl’s story is indeed very ambiguous, and even though she was involved in her mother’s murder, Gypsy Rose is a victim of circumstance. Being under the watchful eye of her mother, who regularly dragged her to various doctors and clinics in an attempt to get confirmation of a whole list of deadly diseases that her mother herself had invented, Gypsy Rose had practically no friends and no chance to grow up as an ordinary girl. Gypsy-Rose’s mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, allegedly suffered from a mental illness called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In this disorder, often manifested in the mother, the parent fabricates various illnesses for his child to have complete control over him, in return receiving from the ward only gratitude and love.
By the age of 22, Gypsy Rose was still under the control of her mother, who, upon reaching her 18th birthday, formalised custody of her adult daughter to herself. Due to her lack of interaction with peers, at 22, she was still socializing and behaving childishly. But by this point, Gypsy-Rose had already begun to tire of the constant maternal control and wanted to have a more “normal”life. She saw her mother’s murder as a way out of the situation, as she was not yet capable of thinking as an adult and independent person due to her lack of experience, and did not assume that she could turn to the police or neighbours for help. Around the same time, she met 23-year-old Nicholas Godejohn online, with whom she entered into a long-distance relationship, convincing him that by killing her mother he would set her free and they could be together in real life. It appears that Godejohn executed the murder plan, stabbing Gypsy Rose’s mother several times in her home. Subsequently, the couple fled, leaving Dee Dee to die.
For this crime, Godejohn received a life sentence in prison, and Gypsy Rose received worldwide recognition and victim status. Many justify her act by the fact that the girl spent most of her life under the control of her abusive mother, unable to manage herself independently. This is also the reason for the joy of many young people over her early release – the girl spent two-thirds of her life in terrible unfree conditions created by her birth mother, and as a result of her attempt to escape from the situation, she ended up in a new imprisonment. Numerous fans of Gypsy Rose believe that the girl can finally live the normal life she has always dreamed of, and support her in every possible way on the Internet.
Fan support is what can give Gypsy Rose that life. Her online popularity allows her to land contracts with advertising agencies and participate in paid interviews. Like Sanstos, Gypsy Rose understands how meta-irony works and often communicates in her posts using clichéd phrases, especially when it comes to her relationship with her husband, whom she married while still in prison. At the same time, despite the universal support and numerous statements from fans that Gypsy Rose’s mother deserved her fate, the girl herself admitted that she loved her mother very much and fervently regrets her death, and now she realises that there were many other, “legal” ways to get rid of the suffocating custody.
At this point, it seems that there is finally harmony in Gypsy Rose’s life: she has freedom, a husband, money, and is finally free to order her life as she wishes. However, with all the ambiguity of her story, what’s particularly interesting is the reaction of young people who have created a new idol out of her.
In today’s world, the undeniable image of the victim often overshadows all other qualities of a person, which contributes to the public’s distorted perception of that person as practically a saint. Therefore, even knowing the tragic story of this girl, the absolute justification of her act by her fans looks strange in a society that usually censures crimes of such a brutal nature.
