Gypsy Rose Blanchard gives first TV interview, says she had more freedom in prison than with mom Dee Dee

Gypsy Rose Blanchard is speaking out on “Good Morning America,” in her first sit-down interview after serving eight years behind bars for conspiring with her then-boyfriend to murder her abusive mother.

Blanchard, 32, sat down with Deborah Roberts in an interview that aired Friday, just over a week after she was released from Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center, where she was serving a 10-year sentence for the 2015 slaying of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.

“I felt a little bit like I was dropped in a different world,” Blanchard told Roberts of walking free. “You don’t realize how much you’re restricted in prison. I felt like I was in a black-and-white world and I just stepped into technicolor. It was amazing.”

Prior to being limited to a prison cell, Blanchard spent a good chunk of her life being wheelchair-bound as a victim of what experts have labeled DeeDee’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

According to Cleveland Clinic, Munchausen by proxy — also known as factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA) — is a “mental illness in which a person acts as if an individual he or she is caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick.”

Blanchard was subjected to medications, therapies and surgeries she didn’t need as Dee Dee insisted she suffered from a multitude of ailments including leukemia and muscular dystrophy.

“Honestly [it] wasn’t that much of a difference,” Blanchard said of moving from her mother’s home to a state prison. “I also had more freedom in prison than I ever had with my mother.”

Now, however, Blanchard says she empathizes with her mother.

“I don’t believe my mother was a monster,” she told Roberts. “She had a lot of demons herself that she was struggling with.”

“I didn’t want her dead. I just wanted out of my situation,” she added. “And I thought that was the only way out.”

In 2015, Blanchard persuaded then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother. Addicted to pain killers at the time, Blanchard said she was high when she made the decision to carry out the plot.

A year later, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

In 2019, Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder for his role in Dee Dee’s stabbing death. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Though Blanchard has been prohibited from making contact with Godejohn, she does “wish him well on his journey.”

“I’m sure that we both have a lot of regrets,” she said. “All I can really say is that I did my time. He’s doing his time for his part.”

Blanchard is also hoping to represent a “cautionary tale” for those in similar situations — aiming “to bring awareness to mental health issues, to Munchausen by proxy, to abuse victims” — so “they don’t take the route that I did.”

The Blanchard case was immortalized on HBO in the acclaimed documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” as well as the Emmy-winning Hulu miniseries “The Act,” starring Joey King and Patricia Arquette as Gypsy and Dee Dee, respectively.

Blanchard is now sharing more personal details of her past in the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”