Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was convicted of helping to kill her abusive mother in a highly publicized case, announced in a tearful YouTube video Tuesday that she and her boyfriend, Ken Urker, were expecting their first child.
“I want to be what my mother wasn't,” Ms Blanchard, 32, told the paper clip, describing the pregnancy as a “blessing.” He said it was due in January.
In 2016 Ms. Blanchard was he was sentenced to 10 years in prison — the minimum for second-degree murder — under a plea deal that acknowledged the abusive relationship with her mother. After nearly seven years, she was released in December and has since gained millions of followers on social media, where she chronicled her personal life, including her marriage to Ryan Anderson and her relationship with Mr Urker. (Ms. Blanchard filed for divorce from Mr. Anderson in April.)
Ms. Blanchard's childhood, trial and life after prison were the subjects of an HBO documentary in 2017 and a Hulu miniseries in 2019 that thrust her into the national spotlight. (Both programs portrayed her as a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of abuse in which a parent fabricates an illness for a child.) Most recently, Ms. Blanchard starred in her own Lifetime series, “Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockdown.”
Ms. Blanchard has renounced some of the public's fascination with her life. This week, she called out a TikTok user who posted a video of the home in Springfield, Mo., where her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, stabbed her mother to death in 2015. While Ms. Blanchard no longer lives in the home, A number of social media users have been videotaped in recent months driving past it and stopping to take a dip.
In the video, the user films the house while driving and points out several “no trespassing” signs in the yard. “People came out,” the user wrote in a screen caption, referring to the home's apparent occupants. (The TikTok poster did not respond to a request for comment.)
Ms. Blanchard addressed the user in a comment. “You have no respect or decency,” he wrote. “A tragedy happened in this house, but you will all visit it as if it were the Grand Canyon.”
In response to emailed questions, Ms. Blanchard wrote that the house “holds a lot of negative memories” for her and that she felt “uncomfortable” watching visitors “glamorize” the site.
“I recognize that sharing my story so openly creates interest in my case and my life, but the things I experienced in that house were very real and very traumatic,” Ms. Blanchard continued. “It brings up a lot of hard feelings to see people reduce it to a tourist attraction to visit while passing through Springfield.”
He asked that people leave the house and its new inhabitants alone.
Other TikTok users have posted similar clips. “This isn't a tourist attraction, why are you going around our house?” a person standing outside the house shouts in one of the videos. In another, published in December, a pair of women were filmed on a “ghost hunt” across the property.
Helen Brake, a neighbor who lives on a nearby street, said in a telephone interview that she was disgusted by the regular presence of onlookers.
“I think it's horrible,” said Ms. Brake, who has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years. “You must be goblins to keep doing that.”
He added that the house had been repainted since Ms. Blanchard and her mother lived there. Ms. Brake said she once offered to make a dress for Ms. Blanchard when her mother told Ms. Brake that she was having trouble finding one that fit her daughter.
“There are new owners. The house has been painted. They changed address. However, they are coming out of the woodwork,” Ms Brake said. “It's sad. I guess some people have nothing better to do.”
The gruesome scenes have long drawn crowds and curiosity, said David Schmid, an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo who researches crime and popular culture. He cited an example from the 19th century, where so many people clamored to see the excavated basement of serial killer HH Holmes that officials worried the sidewalk might collapse.
Dr Schmidt attributed the cultural obsession with Ms Blanchard, including visitors to her former home, to “natural human curiosity about the extremes of human behaviour”. That curiosity becomes “problematic,” however, when it elevates a perpetrator or victim to celebrity, he said.
“Once they achieve that celebrity status, society tends to ignore their personal lives, their personal rights,” he continued. “Instead, celebrity life becomes public property of a kind. We don't feel there's anything inappropriate about doing that because we feel, in a sense, that celebrity belongs to us.”