Gypsy Rose Blanchard is addressing the backlash she’s receiving after appearing to flippantly reference the 2015 murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, in a TikTok video.
In an interview with TMZ published Monday, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who went to prison after convincing a boyfriend to kill her abusive mother, said her aim was to “take accountability for the wrongs that [I’ve] done” when she teamed up with influencer Natalie Reynolds for a “We Listen and We Don’t Judge” challenge video.
“I do deeply apologize to anyone who may have been offended by it. That was never my intention,” she said. “I was not laughing about it. I don’t think it’s funny to joke about a heavy topic and my past.”
She went on to note: “I am trying to be my authentic self, and if my authentic self is saying, ‘I did something bad in my past, but look at where I am now,’ that’s where I’m coming from with it. But I would never joke about my past.”
Participants in the viral “We Listen and We Don’t Judge” challenge are asked to put a positive or lighthearted spin on difficult life moments.
In a video Reynolds posted on Saturday, Blanchard recalls how she “went to prison for eight and a half years” before making an “X” hand gesture and adding “…my own mom.”
As of Tuesday morning, the clip has been viewed more than 14 million times on TikTok alone and drawn a plethora of negative comments.
“Imagine her daughter watching this one day,” one person wrote, alluding to 1-year-old Aurora Raina, whom Blanchard shares with her boyfriend, Ken Urker.
Another person added, “there’s absolutely nothing funny in this, this is actually so freaking wrong.”
Blanchard, now 34, was released from prison in 2023 after serving eight years for the second-degree murder of her mother.
The elder Blanchard had made her daughter a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a form of abuse in which a parent or guardian deliberately makes a child ill or misrepresents their health with the aim of garnering attention and sympathy from others.
To reinforce the charade, she forced her daughter to use a wheelchair, shaved her daughter’s head to mimic the side effects of chemotherapy and also gave her unnecessary medicine that caused severe tooth decay.
After her mother was found stabbed to death in her Springfield, Missouri, house in 2015, Gypsy Rose Blanchard admitted to conspiring with her former boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her mom, arranging for him to carry out the act while she hid elsewhere in the house.
Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole, along with an additional 25 years for armed criminal action. In her plea deal with prosecutors, Blanchard agreed to a 10-year prison sentence.
The case has inspired numerous books, films and true crime documentaries. In 2019, actor Patricia Arquette won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Dee Dee Blanchard in the scripted Hulu series “The Act,” co-starring Joey King as Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
