The True Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s Grandma, Emma Pitre, Explains a Lot About Dee Dee
You’ve probably seen the crazy story of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard in Hulu’s The Act. For pretty much all of Gypsy’s childhood, Dee Dee said that Gypsy suffered from terminal illnesses. Gypsy was wheelchair-bound, had a feeding tube, and was constantly supervised by Dee Dee. The only problem? She didn’t need any of it. It’s suspected that Dee Dee had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where someone (Dee Dee, in this case) fakes an illness on behalf of someone else.
In case you thought Dee Dee, aka the mom on The Act, couldn’t get any scarier, we have some bad news: She may have starved her own mother, Emma Pitre (and poisoned her stepmother, Laura Pitre). Now that Emma has appeared in The Act episode 6, “A Whole New World,” here’s what we know about Emma.
Dee Dee wasn’t Emma’s only child.
Emma and her husband, Claude Pitre, had six children together: Claude Jr., Claudia, Evans, Tate, Dorla, and Claudine (Dee Dee). When Emma died at 59 years old, she also had 17 grandchildren.
Dee Dee’s mother was also a shoplifter.
“Her mom was a little bit like [Dee Dee],” Laura-who married Claude after Emma’s death-says in the 2017 documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest.
Claude says he lost track of the number of times Emma had to go to court for shoplifting. They also allege that she would steal other people’s clothing from the laundromat and had stolen $3,000 to $4,000 from Claude’s father.
Things were always troubling with Dee Dee.
In the documentary, Claude and other members of the Pitre family recall Dee Dee’s troubling childhood. Dee Dee apparently reacted poorly when things “didn’t go her way.”
This wasn’t very surprising to those who knew Dee Dee. Her nephew, Bobby Pitre, says in that same documentary that she was a “real weird girl.” Gypsy’s father, Rod Blanchard, says that Dee Dee had been into “some dark things” during their relationship, including “witchcraft.”
None of her family members seemed at all upset by her death; in fact, no one from her quite extensive family would claim Dee Dee’s ashes after her cremation.
Emma died in 1997 at age 59.
She was buried underneath a joint tombstone meant for her and Claude, who is still alive today and now married to Laura.
Dee Dee’s family believes she killed Emma.
Dee Dee’s family is pretty certain that Dee Dee killed her mother. Emma had been ill, and the family believes that Dee Dee intentionally withheld food from her.
“To leave your mama dirty and asking for food, and [not] feed her, that’s evil," Laura, Dee Dee’s stepmother, says in the documentary.
Dee Dee allegedly tried to kill Laura too.
After Dee Dee and Rod divorced, she and Gypsy went to live with Claude and Laura in Louisiana. Dee Dee did all of the cooking. Suddenly, her stepmother became very sick.
Laura, in the documentary, says Dee Dee tried to poison her by putting weed killer in her food, which resulted in Laura being bedridden for the next nine months.
Bobby told Thought Catalog in 2015 that Dee Dee was “called out” at a family gathering for her treatment of Gypsy and Laura’s sickness. Dee Dee was kicked out and moved to Slidell.
Once Dee Dee was gone, Laura made a full recovery.
New episodes of The Act will go live on Hulu every Wednesday.
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