Gypsy Rose Blanchard Was Convicted of Murder. Now, She’s Being Yassified
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Back in the halcyon days of the early 2020s, when we were optimistic about the vaccines and our new President and the general health and stability of superhero franchises, there was a meme called the yassification trend. It basically entailed taking photos of prominent historical figures — Alexander Hamilton, for instance, or Kramer from Seinfeld — and running them through a filter that made them look heavily Botoxed, contoured, and filtered, like your most insecure friend’s Stories from her vacation.
The yassification trend was funny in that it was clearly skewering ridiculously oppressive beauty norms and the structures that uphold them, like Instagram and FaceTune. But it was also funny because it highlighted how incredibly easy it is, in a post-truth, post-AI-panic world, to take something we understand in a very specific way and completely transform its long-held meaning. The joke wasn’t just that it’s funny to see the Founding Fathers with false eyelashes and bronzer. It was also a way for us to make light of the uncomfortable reality that nothing we thought we knew really meant the same thing anymore.
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Almost three years later, the yassification trend has largely fallen by the wayside. But we’re seeing its resurgence with the rebranding of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the 32-year-old woman who was released on Dec. 28, after serving seven years of a 10-year prison sentence for orchestrating the murder of her allegedly abusive mother.
The daughter of single mom Clauddinea “Dee Dee” Blanchard, Gypsy Rose grew up being shepherded to various doctors and hospitals, with Dee Dee claiming Gypsy suffered from various ailments, including leukemia and muscular dystrophy. As a result, she spent her life in excruciating pain, being subjected to various unnecessary interventions and surgeries, including having multiple teeth removed. Various experts have since speculated Dee Dee suffered from Munchhausen-by-proxy, a rare psychological disorder in which a parent pretends their child is sick in order to garner sympathy and attention.
According to Gypsy, Dee Dee kept her under lock and key during her childhood and young adulthood, monitoring her communications and keeping her confined to a wheelchair. After meeting her first boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, on the internet, Godejohn and Gypsy conspired to murder Dee Dee, with Godejohn stabbing her to death. In 2015, Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Godejohn is currently serving life in prison for first-degree murder. She ultimately was released three years early, after marrying husband Ryan Anderson while behind bars.
Gypsy’s story, as documented in the Erin Lee Carr documentary Mommie Dead and Dearest (2017) and the fictionalized TV series The Act (2019), garnered intense national interest, as well as a wave of sympathy for Gypsy herself. This in itself is not surprising: with its lurid elements of psycho mommies, medical deception, and illicit sex (Gypsy and Godejohn reportedly had intercourse for the first time in a movie-theater bathroom during a screening of Disney’s Cinderella), the narrative was tailor-made for true crime aficionados. It also wasn’t surprising that the general public was sympathetic toward Gypsy, who by all accounts was a victim of years of unimaginable suffering at the hands of her mother.
What was somewhat surprising, however, is how much the general public leaned into that sympathy. In the months leading up to her release from Chillicothe State Prison, true crime creators on TikTok embarked on an informal countdown of sorts, making fan edits of Blanchard set to Nicki Minaj or memes comparing her to Emma Roberts strutting out of prison in Scream Queens. Some of these were more clearly tongue-in-cheek than others: “Gypsy Rose is being released on the 28th because the court said she 4+4 = ate,” said the caption on one funny, albeit perhaps mathematically tenuous, video. Others, however, such as a video shot outside were more earnest, reflecting a general perception of Blanchard as an unjustly incarcerated folk hero.
Once she was actually released, the media blitz followed suit, obsessively reporting on her post-prison trip to buy new shoes and her (rejected) request to go to a Kansas City Chiefs game so she could meet Taylor Swift. (Blanchard’s trajectory as a Swiftie has spawned a mini-press cycle in itself, with outlets aggregating a Hollywood Reporter interview in which she reveals her favorite Swift songs. For what it’s worth, they are “Karma” and “Eyes Open.”) As part of a press tour promoting her upcoming Lifetime series, Gypsy has become something of a tabloid staple, with outlets breathlessly covering everything from a ribald comment she made on her husband’s Instagram (“they jealous because you are rocking my world every night,” she wrote in response to negative commenters, adding that his “D is fire”) to the revelation, which she shared exclusively with People, that she only learned to use a tampon while in prison.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard has served her time and expressed remorse for the murder of her mother. “Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did,” she told People. “I regret it every single day.” She is free, and she is entitled to do whatever she wishes with her freedom. If she wants to go on TikTok and do storytimes about her life while promoting Drunk Elephant, or collaborate with the Duolingo owl or whatever, she has absolutely every right to, as does anyone who suddenly finds themselves with a large platform. If anyone is entitled to post weird shit about their husband’s dick on social media, it’s a woman who has been literally and metaphorically imprisoned for much of her life.
Those who have decided to stan her, however, pose more of a problem. Rather than running away with Godejohn or reporting her abusive mother to the authorities, Blanchard conspired to murder her — a crime that, while easy to understand given the circumstances, is difficult to defend. Blanchard herself has expressed this repeatedly in interviews, telling Dr. Phil years ago that her mother “didn’t deserve what happened to her,” and that she wished Dee Dee had gone to prison instead. But the stanning of Gypsy Rose Blanchard also raises a larger issue: we, as a culture, take an wildly inconsistent approach to criminality. Most of the time, we reject it; sometimes, we try to make sense of the nonsensical by building our own narratives, making heroes out of those who would otherwise be considered villains. Both of these approaches miss the point.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is far from the first criminal, alleged or otherwise, to be valorized as a folk hero on the internet. Perhaps the most recent example is George Santos, the far-right former congressman expelled for his compulsive lying and alleged campaign fundraising and credit card fraud, who has since pivoted to charging $350 on Cameo to gas up furries. Because Santos is unabashed about his desire for attention and well-versed in pop cultural vernacular, he’s built a cult following, erasing his history of greed, almost comically compulsive mendacity, and abhorrent transphobic and anti-Semitic comments from the public imagination. There’s also Anna Delvey, the convicted fraudster whose attempts to swindle the art world into believing she was a German heiress led to a (bad) Netflix show and an (even worse) art career. When I attended one of Delvey’s shows in 2022, I spoke to countless fans who saw her as a modern art project in herself, a scrappy self-starter building herself up from the ashes of a cruel postcapitalist system. One woman described her to me as an entrepreneur who “got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Of course, there is no evidence that this is true, nor is there any evidence to suggest that anything Delvey or Santos did, or is alleged to have done, was intended to benefit anyone but themselves. Yet both have achieved babygirl status online, particularly among young people or marginalized individuals who chafe against the strictures of white capitalist society. The thinking seems to be that because our world is set up in a way that actively works to oppress them, anyone who manages to break free is worthy of veneration, regardless of their reasons for doing so or regardless of whether they end up doing more harm than good. They’re right about the first part. They’re wrong about the second.
Gypsy is distinct from Anna Delvey or George Santos in that she is pretty much unilaterally, and accurately, viewed as a victim. But the thing about victims that we ought to have realized by now is that they are complicated. They don’t have to be charismatic or funny or smart or even decent people to also be victims. The thing about victims is, sometimes their stories aren’t easily commodifiable via Lifetime series, or redeemable via Zara-sponsored TikTok content. Sometimes, their stories are just sad. And the thing about victims is, their status does not prevent them from creating more victims.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s crime had at least one clearly identifiable victim: her mother. She is going to have to figure out how to deal with the resulting trauma for the rest of her life, and she can do that however she chooses. But no matter how much we put a filter on that reality, how much we gussy it up with FaceTune or make it look like a Kardashian, that sad and fundamental truth is not going to change.
Correction Jan. 6, 1:54 p.m. An earlier version of this piece referred to Nicholas Godejohn as Nicholas Bodejohn.
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