Thanks to Hulu’s new television series The Act, the world has become obsessed with the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. The show is based on Gypsy Rose and her mother, Dee Dee, who for years convinced Gypsy that she had a number of serious health issues. The Act is a dramatization, of course, but pretty much everything you see in the series actually did happen.
Seeing what Dee Dee subjected Gypsy to will make your stomach turn, and if you’re tuning in to the show, you probably straight-up hate her. How could someone do something so horrible to their own child? Well, there’s a long history and explanation that led up to Dee Dee’s actions and eventual death. Here’s everything we know about Gypsy Blanchard’s mom.
Dee Dee didn’t have a good relationship with her family.
Dee Dee’s family, the Pitres, were never big fans of her. In the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, which explores the Blanchard case, they spoke out about what Dee Dee was like growing up. The family claims Dee Dee would steal from them as a form of payback for when things didn’t go her way, and they also accused her of writing bad checks and committing credit-card fraud. Dee Dee’s alleged petty crimes might explain why she kept changing her name over the years.
She tried to poison her stepmom...according to her stepmom.
Dee Dee’s family believes she had a thing for murder. Her stepmother, Laura, claims that Dee Dee tried to kill her by putting the weed killer Roundup in her food. Laura survived but was bedridden for nine months after the incident.
She might have killed her actual mother...like mother, like daughter?
Dee Dee’s family also thinks that Dee Dee murdered her own mother, Emma Pitre, by starving her to death. There isn’t any hard evidence, but it wouldn’t be all that surprising considering Dee Dee starved Gypsy too.
She most likely suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Dee Dee started diagnosing Gypsy with a variety of illnesses when she was 3 months old, which included sleep apnea, epilepsy, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and ear and eye problems. In reality, Gypsy was perfectly healthy, but Dee Dee was convinced her daughter was sick. Her behavior points to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is a psychological disorder where a person makes up or exaggerates medical symptoms of a child in their care in order to gain attention and sympathy. It most often occurs in mothers, but there have been cases involving fathers as well. Although Dee Dee was never formally diagnosed, Gypsy told Buzzfeed reporter Michelle Dean that her mother matched every symptom.
She had a medical background.
How was Dee Dee able to convince doctors of Gypsy’s nonexistent illnesses? Well, she came prepared. According to Dean’s 2016 Buzzfeed report, Dee Dee had once worked as a nurse’s aide, and she knew all sorts of medical terminology. This allowed her to appear educated on the illnesses she was suggesting Gypsy had. And since doctors rely on what patients tell them, they were inclined to believe her.
But she didn’t fool everyone.
Dee Dee might have convinced other doctors to give medical treatment to Gypsy—including a cocktail of medications, eye surgeries, ear surgery, and a feeding tube—but there was one person who wasn’t buying it. When Dee Dee took Gypsy to see pediatric neurologist Bernardo Flasterstein in 2007, he was immediately suspicious of Dee Dee. The tests he ran on Gypsy all came back negative, and he noticed inconsistencies in Dee Dee’s story. After speaking with one of Gypsy’s previous doctors, he suspected that Dee Dee had Munchausen by proxy. They stopped seeing him after that, and he told Dean that he didn’t report Dee Dee to social services because he didn’t think they would believe him. “Everyone bought their story,” he said.
Gypsy’s illnesses were fake, but Dee Dee’s was real.
In The Act, Dee Dee gets diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Many fans were left wondering whether the real-life Dee Dee actually had diabetes or if it was just another part of her plan. But it looks like it was true.
According to a search warrant obtained by the Springfield News-Leader, authorities received information that Dee Dee was diabetic and had obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
No one was particularly sad about Dee Dee’s death.
On June 14, 2015, Dee Dee was stabbed to death in her home by Gypsy’s boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn. Gypsy and Nicholas had conspired to kill Dee Dee in order for Gypsy to finally escape her mother. Both are now in prison for their crime, but Gypsy doesn’t regret what happened and told Dean she feels freer in prison than she did with her mother.
“This time is good for me,” she said. “I’ve been raised to do what my mother taught me to do. And those things aren’t very good. She taught me to lie, and I don’t wanna lie. I want to be a good, honest person.”
Dee Dee’s family wasn’t too upset about her passing either. In Mommy Dead and Dearest, her father, stepmother, and nephew said no one wanted her ashes or to pay for her funeral, and they agreed that Dee Dee got what she deserved.
