Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was arrested for conspiracy to murder her mother after years of being forced to pretend she was gravely ill, announced Tuesday that she is pregnant.
She revealed that the pregnancy was not planned, but she hoped to give her child everything she lacked growing up.
Blanchard said in a YouTube video that the baby is due in January, which will be just a little over a year after she was freed from serving a 7-year sentence in a women’s prison northeast of Kansas City, Missouri.
“I just want to be a good mother for my child,” she said. “I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”
Gypsy case crept into mainstream media after reports emerged that her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was slain in 2015, had essentially kept her daughter a prisoner, pushing things down her throat for her to be sick.
Rose’s attorney said the mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder in which parents or caregivers seek sympathy through the exaggerated or made-up illnesses of their children.
The mother-daughter duo received charitable donations, and even a home near Springfield, Missouri, from Habitat for Humanity.
When Gypsy Rose Blanchard turned 23, she gave a knife to her then-boyfriend and hid in a bathroom while he repeatedly stabbed her mother, according to the probable cause statement.
Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors cut Blanchard a deal because of the abuse she had endured.
She claims she has forgiven her mother and promoted the Lifetime docuseries, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” and her own e-book, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom.”
Earlier coverage includes the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the 2019 Hulu miniseries “The Act.”
Although many people have opined that she is not ready to be a mother, Rose thinks she is ready to figure it out.
“It’s an amazing feeling when your whole world shifts and suddenly it’s not about you,” she said.
“It’s not about anything other than this tiny little life that’s inside you that you are now in charge of protecting. And that little tiny life is a baby, a little tiny human that’s yours and that you have to make sure that you protect, you love, you take care of. And all of the things that I wish I could have had when I was little.”
