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Gypsy Rose Blanchard Says Her Late Mother Would Be "Proud" of Her in Controversial Tribute Video
The woman convicted of killing her parent said, “Was she a good mom? No. Was she the best mom in the world? No. But she was still my mom."
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is standing by her decision to create a Mother’s Day TikTok post years after pleading guilty to her mother’s murder.
In an eight-minute-plus video posted to Blanchard’s TikTok account on Monday, May 13, 2024, the once-incarcerated woman published a Mother’s Day tribute in honor of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. In it, the 32-year-old — who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for Dee Dee’s 2015 death — said she wanted to remember her mother for “the good that was in her heart.”
“So, today is Mother’s Day, and I wanted to make a video basically celebrating the really strong and wonderful women that I have in my life that have been mother figures to me over the last eight-and-a-half years,” Blanchard began.
Blanchard explained she turned social media comments off so as not to see “negative bullsh-t” about the post, which has been viewed nearly 7 million times.
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“It does not go without notice that my own biological mother is not here to celebrate Mother’s Day, and what I choose to feel on Mother’s Day regarding my own mother is that I think the best of her,” Blanchard continued. “I think about the good times. I think about her as not what she did to me, but I think about her as a person.”
Why is the tribute stirring up controversy?
In the late 2010s, Blanchard and her online love interest, Nicholas Godejohn, conspired to have Dee Dee Blanchard murdered.
Dee Dee Blanchard — who lived with Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (formerly [and still commonly] referred to as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy) — subjected her only child to unnecessary medical treatments for ailments she did not actually have. For years, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was made to undergo multiple surgeries, live with feeding tubes, and was confined to a wheelchair despite being able to walk.
The ongoing abuse, purportedly so the mother could gain financial donations and free trips, ended on June 10, 2015, when then-23-year-old Blanchard enlisted Godejohn to kill Dee Dee in the Blanchards’ Springfield, Missouri, home. Blanchard claimed she hid in the bathroom while Godejohn attacked Dee Dee as she slept and stabbed her over a dozen times.
Ultimately, in 2016, Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She was released on early parole on December 28, 2023 after serving seven years.
Godejohn is currently serving a life sentence behind bars.
Blanchard’s case gained substantial media attention at the time and was later adapted into several documentaries and T.V. series, including an Oxygen true crime special, Gypsy Rose & Nick: A Love to Kill For, as featured in Snapped: Killer Couples. Public interest only grew after her prison release.
Still, in Blanchard’s recent TikTok video, she said whatever emotions she felt for her late mother were hers and hers only to have.
“Was she a good mom? No. Was she the best mom in the world? No. But she was still my mom, so what I choose to feel about her — whether that be guilt, anger, grief, resentment, whatever — that’s mine to feel,” Blanchard continued. “No one can take away from my own feelings about my own mother. And I feel like nobody should be able to have an opinion about my mother except for her family and me because we were the people closest to her.”
Blanchard said she'd spent years working on forgiveness and hoped that “to some degree, I make her proud” of her achievements. She said she’d “pray” for her mother before moving on to other female figures in her life, including her stepmother and the mother of her ex-fiancé Ken Urker.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard defends her Mother’s Day post
On Monday, May 13, 2024, Blanchard told TMZ that, despite turning off the comments, she was inundated with hate messages, some of which even included death threats.
“When I said that I hope my mom is proud of me, people are thinking I mean she would be proud of the murder. That is obviously not what I meant,” Blanchard told TMZ. “I meant she would be proud of me [from] Heaven, like getting my G.E.D., moving towards independence, and learning how to cook, clean, having my own bank account, etc.”
Blanchard maintained that the unfortunate 2015 events “shouldn’t make me exempt” from wishing Dee Dee a happy Mother’s Day and denied making the post “because of my balls and audacity.”
Last month, Blanchard announced plans to publish her memoir, My Time to Stand, which is expected to hit shelves in early 2025.
