Episode 5: Gypsy Rose Part I - Daughter of the Devil

It was a crime that rocked the world—a daughter who captured the minds and hearts of the media.

That's right. This week, I'm inviting you to join me on the most immersive journey I've ever taken - right into the heart of the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case. 

We'll start by looking into the biggest unasked question: Who was Dee Dee Blanchard? How did she become the monster under her own daughter's bed? 

Family patterns run deep, and that's certainly the case with Gypsy Rose Blanchard. 

Chapters

• 1:21 What this episode is about
• 3:38 Who was Dee Dee Blanchard?
• 9:10 Narcissism under the surface
• 12:39 The underage problem
• 17:30 Gypsy is born
• 19:50 The parental trigger
• 22:10 The pageant circle
• 27:16 The feeding tube
• 32:56 Dee Dee's car wreck
• 35:54 Isolation
• 37:32 Hurrican Katrina
• 39:13 Doctor's raise suspicions
• 41:28 Dee Dee's scams escalate
• 43:40 Malingering By Proxy
• 46:34 What's next?

Transcript

0:00

[Music] Hello, hello, hello, my lovely people. And welcome back to another episode of Scandal Queens. Last week we gave you the Royal Family. The week before that we gave you JoJo Siwa, but this week I'm getting into possibly the deepest and darkest territory. I've ever gone with you and boy does it apply. As you've probably guessed from the title, yes we are talking about Gypsy Rose Blanchard. We are talking about her life, her crime, her, you know, how she's been after prison. We're going to be talking about all of it and we're going to be examining some really interesting patterns. We're going to look at some red flags and we're going to ask ourselves some really, really, really big questions. Now this episode is going to be a little bit different than my other episodes because this is my first two-part episode. There was just too much to put all in one episode. It's just two-packed, it's too lengthy. There's too many details and too many important things that you need to pay attention to. So this episode is going to be split into two parts. The first part, I want to do something that's not really been done in any of these documentaries and any of these like crime exposés and that is I want to deep dive, not into Gypsy Rose's life, I want to take you on a deep dive into D.D. Blanchard's life, her mother's life because there is so much here that is slipped through the cracks and that really paints a picture of what happened to Gypsy and what Gypsy's potential future could be. So that's what we're going to cover here in the first episode. Now next week we will get into Gypsy. We're going to look at her, her point of view, her angle from the story, her involvement in the crime. We'll go into details about the murder and we'll talk about what Gypsy Rose's life has been like after prison. But today it is all about D.D. Blanchard. That is what we are going to be talking about today. So buckle up because I've watched all six of the documentaries and series that are out about this crime and this family and it is a doozy. It's probably got to change your whole perspective because I know it certainly changed my life. So D.D. Blanchard, this is Gypsy Rose's mother, this is the woman who was murdered in 2015 and despite all of that we've gotten some really shoddy information about her. There's been a couple of the documentaries like the prison confessions of Gypsy Rose and the revenge of Gypsy Rose that have painted a little bit of a picture but we have a problem and it's the problem that we run into with so many toxic and abusive moms and it's this like villain or angel like hero type of mentality where people either paint her as a like perfect victim, this poor, poor woman who just loved her child so much and just happened to be mentally ill or she gets the other painting which is a complete monster which in my personal opinion is the more accurate one but I want you to be able to make your own decision on that so we're gonna jump in. We're gonna figure out who D.D. Blanchard was and how she ended up where she did with her daughter. D.D. story starts in Chakbe, Chakbe, Chakbe, Chakbe, Chakbe, Chakbe, Louisiana. It's a small town outside of Tibado, it's a suburb of Tibado. D.D. was born Claudine Petra, Claudine Petra which in French is Pitra if anybody's interested in that. It's a French Canadian family so they're like this French Creole family which those of you who watch the documentaries you've heard her family speak you know what I'm talking about. So this is the family that D.D. is born into. She's born in 1967 in this small town Chakbe. It's one of three cities in the parish. Now it has around 5,000 citizens the populations around like 5,000 people so still a very small town but it was even smaller in the 1960s. It was even smaller. She was born the youngest of three children according to the documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose. Now if you go on Wikipedia it says that D.D. was born the eldest of three children but I believe she was the youngest and here's why I believe she was the youngest. There are multiple interviews from her brother and sister Claudine Emma and they describe D.D. as being the favorite child. Okay she was the last one born she looked the most like her mother and her mother favored that child above and beyond anyone else. When you listen to Claudine Emma recount these memories of growing up with D.D. it's really sad because kind of in a way the way they describe it it kind of feels like their mother didn't necessarily love them or they were uncertain of that love but they D.D. was not. D.D. was the star of her mother's life. She was the absolute star of her mother's life and she got everything she wanted from her mother. While the other kids had to go and work had to you know go to school every day had to be good upstanding citizens. D.D. wasn't held to that same standard and according to her siblings it started when she was little and the mom said oh D.D. has got a heart murmur so she can't do anything. So D.D. was treated as this like porcelain sick child she wasn't allowed to do chores and she didn't go outside with the other kids and if any kids mess with her they got in trouble and she didn't have to go to school and she got lots of special toys and special attention and supposedly it was all because of this heart murmur that the mother really seemed to glom onto and really push as the narrative in this family it was a big deal it was like all the time D.D. has got a heart murmur leave her alone D.D. has got a heart murmur now the siblings claim that they don't think D.D. had a heart murmur. Claud and Emma claim this because they said D.D. was just like every other normal kid she could do anything she wanted but she chose not to and she even as a kid was used this like I'm sick leave me alone in school around the house with other people she would get other people in trouble as the three siblings grow up in this Pitro family the cracks become more and more obvious D.D. gets given cars she goes to college for a little bit her parents pay for it they give her money all the time if you go and watch that prison confessions of Gypsy Rose there's old home footage as well and they show D.D. being handed wads of cash and like she's getting gifted cabbage patch dolls which in the eighties were a really big deal very expensive very hard to get her hands on and you can see the siblings watching in the background with just like flat faces like yep there goes D.D. getting all the attention getting all the love you know getting everything that all of us should be getting and I think that's really interesting I think this dynamic is so so so so interesting considering what we know happened later right because we know D.D. adopted this munch house in this by proxy and used it to abuse Gypsy and it's very funny because what did her mother do with her used an illness that she didn't really have to get a lot of attention for herself and for D.D. and to kind of triangulate and punish and alienate the other children which is exactly what happened and that's something that we see in narcissistic homes we see a lot of triangulation and typically triangulation can be like one narcissistic parent going to one of the three siblings and talking bad about the other two it can be that but it's not always that direct right sometimes triangulation in these families happens by showing favoritism by D.D.'s mother showing everyone that D.D. was her favorite child she was actually turning the other two against them she was creating battle lines between the siblings she was fostering distrust between the siblings she was fostering resentment and animosity and it doesn't really seem to have been good because as D.D. got older Claude and Emma described her as a criminal they said she was a spoiled brat in a criminal she wrote bad checks she was doing credit card fraud and all this other kind of stuff when her mom dies which we're about to talk about in a second she like expands that and gets credit cards in her mom's name and all this crazy crazy stuff but they basically said as a teenager turning into a young adult D.D. is just this self-centered I will have what I want when I want and she thinks that she's better and more special than everyone else so let's just stop there for a second and really take a look at this person that we have D.D. is is an adult she's a young adult she's living in a small town very very small and she's being raised by a woman who tells her you're better than everyone else around you you're special you deserve special treatment because you're different and that different makes you better than others for no other reason than I've just told you you're better than others okay so we've got this woman who thinks she's more special than other people and she's living in a small town which her sibling said you know she thought that was kind of beneath her she thought she was better than that life and she was always kind of scrambling for a more grandiose lifestyle for herself and the reason I think that this is really important to pay attention to before we go into what happens next is because this paint such an interesting picture because if we look at that image of D.D. we're already seeing narcissism you cannot see it you cannot see these narcissistic traits the grandiosity the willing to harm others which may even be psychopathy the I will have what I want my needs matter more than everyone else's and I should be handed things without having to do anything for them very very very narcissistic and why I think this is so important is because in the 1970s there was a psychoanalyst whose name was Heinz Kahoot and he was one of the first people to design a theory of how narcissism happens and according to Kahoot the way narcissism developed in children other than like genes and stuff which he didn't know about was two parenting styles one the cold and a loop parenting style where the child basically gets ignored and gets none of their needs met very very neglectful and the second parenting style which is the kind of grand self it's spoiling the child it's telling the child no matter what they do that they're so good and they're better than everybody else and they're the best without having to work for that without needing to be a good person or to even grow in any way for that and that is certainly what was happening with D.D. Pitla as she is at this time with her mother that is how her mother was treating her and in my personal opinion I think this is where we see this female narcissism cycle in this family gearing up kicking up because there's a very good chance D.D.'s mother was a narcissist as well who may have also been dealing with munchowsons by proxy because she certainly treated her child that way and she took her youngest and kept her youngest child in this kind of weird state of arrested development in order for her to keep that attention as a mother to keep getting that supply from her quote unquote baby and this is how these narcissistic cycles these patterns of behavior generate in these families D.D.'s mother used her for supply and narcissism and then D.D. ends up doing the same thing to her child later it is a vicious vicious cycle and I think that the system is where it all began. So we've got a pretty clear picture now of who D.D.' was becoming as a child and into her young adulthood and that's kind of the next time we pick up in D.D.'s story and again Gypsy is not even here yet right? So brace yourselves because this has been very carefully avoided in all of the documentaries that you've been watching it gets mentioned but it doesn't get addressed for what it is. So we get to 1990 90 1991 D.D.'s 24 years old she's a 24 year old woman living in this small town getting all this special attention and starting to visualize who she's gonna be right? She's been handed everything by her parents and now she wants a man and she goes out and finds one she finds Rod Blanchard Rod Blanchard who she's immediately attracted to and immediately goes after and tries to charm and she does. Here's the rub. 24 year old D.D.' was going after a 17 year old child still in high school. That's right when D.D.' started chasing Rod and got involved sexually with Rod he was 17 years old and in high school she was a 24 year old adult. Now according to Rod and I believe again he mentions this they mention it kind of briefly very briefly like one sentence in Gypsy's Revenge but in the prison confessions of Gypsy Rose he goes a lot more in depth and he says yes she lied to me actually I didn't know she was 24 he thought she was like 20 21 you know so younger still not good still no one who should be messing with a 17 year old but this is the early 90s in small town Louisiana so we're just gonna go with that. So D.D.' lies to him about her age and Rod's like wow she's really pretty she's really charming he said she was so bubbly and so positive and smiled and laughed all the time so he was like yeah let's let's have some fun and they did he said they had a lot of fun she's very charming they get along really well too well obviously because D.D. gets pregnant very very soon after they meet. Somewhere in there Rod finds out that she's actually 24 and he's you know again still 17 but he says you know what let's we're just we're just gonna go with this here she's pregnant I'm gonna do the right thing so the two of them get married while he's a 17 year old high schooler and she's a 24 year old adult because she's pregnant and Rod said Rod Blanchard said yeah I was gonna do the right thing I'm gonna be a father you know I've done this I've gotten myself into this let's do it so he marries D.D. makes her D.D. Blanchard and they settle down and get ready to welcome their first baby and start a family together until three months into the marriage about three months into the marriage Rod turned 18 and the story he tells is that he woke up on his 18th birthday and looked around and went what have I done I can't do this so according to him he goes to D.D. and says look it's not your fault I'm not in love with you I just I'm not in love with you I'm gonna do the right thing and I love our child and I'm gonna take care of this child when it comes but you and me are gone and he walks out on her on his 18th birthday now he says that's when he saw a dramatic flip and her in her personality and her behavior he described her up until this point as the quote unquote perfect southern wife just like always doing what he wanted and cooking and cleaning and getting ready for their baby and you know visiting family and stuff like that but he said when he told her he wasn't in love with her she snapped he said she like just got really cold like weirdly cold with them threw down their their wedding certificate which is apparently was framed on the wall and smashed it and through a big fit so I mean some of that you can understand right but let's not forget who we're talking about we are talking about someone who could potentially have narcissistic personality trains so being walked out on is not necessarily like heartbreaking for them it's humiliating for them it is humiliation to the extreme especially when you consider this is a small town they are living in a small town everyone would have known that didi the 24 year old got dumped by her now 18 year old husband and that she was now a single woman about to give birth to her first child in this small town not good it is not good but anyway rod he stays involved he says I'm still gonna do the right thing even though I'm not gonna be living with you didi or in a relationship with you so apparently he still comes around all the time he starts making payments immediately he pays for didi's house so that she can stay there and she doesn't have to work and then gypsy rose is born on July 27th 1991 now rod is already gone he's already out of the house but like I said he is highly involved he's still highly involved at this point and according to rod when gypsy was born completely normal he said the birth was normal the baby was normal all the you know they do all the tests and checks and everything when the baby comes everything was fine there was nothing wrong so they kind of settle into this new reality of this blended family with rod coming at visiting and keep trying to keep the child and paying money yada yada yada but him leaving gypsy alone with this woman didi who thinks she's special who thinks she's better than everyone else and who's just been humiliated in front of the town it kicks off what will become the mess that we know so now is where I like to call this section mommy dearest mommy dearest and this is where we start to see the ramping up of the didi blanchard who will be murdered in 2015 now before we get into this because this is where the munch house is is going to take place this is where I believe you are going to see even more narcissistic traits and perhaps even dark triad traits right so that's narcissism, psychopathy and mocka vellionism I think that's what we're about to see but let's check in right is 1991 didi has just given birth to her first child she's been left by her 18 year old husband she is not loved necessarily by her siblings but she is oh mommy's girl and mommy is still alive and she's still being babyed by mommy and that is who we meet in 1991 when she becomes a mother and gives birth to gypsy rose now rod said that the birth was normal and that everything was fine and that for the first few months gypsy's life everything's fine but then what I believe to be one of the first triggering incidents occurs before gypsy turns one she is revealed to have a condition called stribusness stribusness which is like an extreme lazy eye that can result in blindness so before she's even a year old gypsy has to have surgery on her eye now remember who her mother is at this point this woman who's been humiliated and rejected who thinks she's better than everyone else and who is now just had a child which gets her a lot of attention well guess what happens when the world finds out that gypsy has to have eye surgery didi gets even more attention she gets even more attention this is around 91 or 92 gypsy goes into the surgery and didi lets everybody know about it okay she gets a lot attention she gets a lot of sympathy a few months later again gypsy is not even a year old yet she starts to claim that gypsy's got sleep apnea sleep apnea so by the time she's a year old gypsy is sleeping through the night on a sleep apnea like a heart monitoring machine this is when some members of the family started to go what that's great that seems a bit weird because when they would see the baby the baby would seem normal but she's saying oh she's got to have these eye surgeries and she's got to have this heart monitor according to rod at this point didi wouldn't even leave gypsy alone for an hour she was completely attached to gypsy would not be away for gypsy not even for a moment and gypsy starts to get older she gets into her toddler years and there's there's not really a lot else that gets thrown around right we've got the eye problems we've we've had some talk of sleep apnea but that's about it and that's enough right because people are still starting to feel so much pity for gypsy they're like this poor babies had to have surgery this poor mother has had to deal with giving her baby surgery there's a lot of pity and attention that's being thrown around here's what's really really interesting you might think that this is when we start getting the wheelchair and the shaved head and like the crazy you'll lawn the cabinet of medicine but it's not somewhere in here didi decides that the best way to get attention is not to keep pushing medical accidents it's actually to put gypsy in beauty pageants child beauty pageants I was shocked when I was watching that prison confessions of gypsy rows and they start playing pageant videos of toddler pageants that she was put in with the big expensive fluffy dresses and all of that didi took her toddler and started peddling her toddler in child pageants and for me myself I can't help but to see that as a continuation of the attention seeking the supply seeking using that child as the product to receive supply didi got hit with all that attention like oh my gosh you're having a baby you're a mommy and then she had the sick baby that she got all the attention for now she's gonna get attention for having the most beautiful baby and putting the baby in pageants but unfortunately and this is not mean but like just gypsy was just not you know a Gerber baby she was not a Gerber baby she didn't do well in pageants so she wasn't in pageants for long didi wasn't getting the supply she needed out of the pageants so four years old she pulls her out of the pageants I can't help but wonder and this is just like a little aside I wonder if we would even be here having this conversation if gypsy had been pretty if gypsy had been a traditionally good-looking child and woman we probably wouldn't be here because her mother would have just run her ragged through the pageant circuits and she'd probably be misameric or something and like stuff never would have happened but unfortunately for gypsy that's she wasn't lucky enough to get that so she gets pulled out of the pageants and that is when right around this time she gets pulled out of the pageants that's when didi starts telling stories of seizures she says gypsy's getting seizures gypsy's getting seizures she's got eye problems and seizures and she has to be on anti-seizure medication now I don't know if any of you listening to this have ever been on anti-seizure medication but I was I was on anti-seizure medication for about a year for some seizures that I had that they ended up finding out it was caused by medicine but that anti-seizure medicine zombifies you it turns you into a zombie and if you go and watch the prison confessions of gypsy rose there's a shocking shocking shocking shocking video of gypsy getting ready for her first day of school so she's around five years old at this point and she's stoned out of her mind she's stoned out of her mind like she's not responding the mom's like wave wave gypsy wave and you can literally tell just look at that kids eyes you can tell that kid is stoned out of their mind because she's on an anti-seizure medication because the mother is gone and said she's having seizures having seizures having seizures and that was not the case also interesting about that video is five-year-old gypsy still on a bottle she is still on a bottle which all the parents out there will know how bad that is and how big of a red flag that is so all of this is happening right around four years old to six years old and it's around this time that gypsy according to again her prison confessions documentary says that her mom starts telling her things like your dad left us because you weren't a boy and starts kind of heaping on this emotional abuse and in planting this idea of I'm the only thing that you have no one else in this world wants you which very stereotypical and abusive dysfunctional toxic narcissistic parents right now around six years old gypsy's grandmother dies this is DD's mother so this is in 1997 remember DD's mother is the one that defends her in the family so she does a crime DD's mother says leave her alone she she didn't mean it she bully someone leave her alone she didn't mean it poor DD DD special DD is better than the rest of you DD gets what you can't have this person dies this is the person who is validated all of DD's terrible behaviors and all the awful things that she's done and she dies so obviously this is going to lead DD in a state in a state according to her siblings she took it bad she took the death of her mother bad of course she would that was like her anchor that was what made her special this is I think even worse for gypsy because we're going to see more rampups and escalation when you have a major emotional event like that for a narcissistic person they can get really unhinged they can start lashing out they can also feel like hey I don't care about anything now I'm gonna do whatever I want and that certainly seems to be what happened with DD she further isolates gypsy she starts moving around to different projects in the area project housing the family says they see gypsy less and less and less she's around seven eight years old at this time and DD ramps up her financial crimes as well she gets a bunch of credit cards in her mother's name and runs up thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in debt she starts writing bad checks all over town which is highly illegal and obviously police were were coming after her and this also when she claims that gypsy's got a new problem according to her this is when gypsy develops such severe acid reflex that she has to have a feeding tube put in this is when the feeding tube gets put in around seven eight years old now what I really find interesting about that is if you go and watch that prison confessions of gypsy rose there's lots of experts who come in and give testimony and according to the one that comes in and and speaks about the different munchausans by proxies that might have been going on here she said that the feeding tube is one of the most common forms of abuse in these types of situations so this is something that happens in the majority of munchausans by proxy cases it's one of the biggest tells and red flags especially when that child is left on a feeding tube for an extended period of time and it's how these parents basically get control because once there's a feeding tube in your child they have complete and total control of every aspect of that child's life and care because there's so much that has to be done for those feeding tubes so this is a significant moment we are seeing DD really become unhinged here and lose control and start to ramp up not just the financial crimes but also this munchausans by proxy having medical stuff done to gypsy she also gets tubes put in her air during this time now the next huge huge huge moment is I think she is around seven or eight years old right so this is going to be around 1997 or 1998 gypsy is riding on the back of a motorcycle with her granddad DD's daddy's father clawed his name is also clawed and there's a wreck the granddad has a wreck with gypsy on the back now gypsy is fine it wasn't that bad she just got scraped up leg her mother finds out and loses her mind she rips gypsy home bandages up her whole leg and puts her in this huge franken brace that someone would have for like an ACL tear and the family is like oh my god we didn't think it was that bad gypsy herself didn't even know is that bad but her mom apparently brought her home it was like you you're not going to be able to walk this is terrible sure enough according to gypsy a few days after that wreck her mother showed up with a wheelchair and told her to get in it that she couldn't walk anymore and she needed to be in a wheelchair the family the petra family and the blanchards were obviously confused at this point because they're thinking she just got scraped up and she now she's in a wheelchair DD says yeah she's got muscular dystrophy out of nowhere out of nowhere she just claims that gypsy now like seven eight years old has muscular dystrophy and that it had something to do with the motorcycle wreck and she now can't walk anymore and she's going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life obviously the family was shocked but no one questions mothers do they no one questions mothers when they tell these stories because of course they're telling like she's not going to be able to walk and so people just heaped pity on DD heaped pity on to gypsy here's what I think is is is wild about this right if you go and watch this story being told in the prison confessions of gypsy rose the granddad tells this story about right around this time gypsy comes over in the wheelchair and DD leaves her there so DD can go and do some work so gypsy's at her granddad's house and her mom's gone they allege that gypsy got out of the wheelchair gone on the trampoline and spent the afternoon jumping on the trampoline with the rest of the kids and this is when she's supposed to have muscular dystrophy and not be able to walk the sad part of that story is that they said that soon as her mother pulled up in the driveway she dropped like a leaf she dropped like a leaf and acted like she couldn't walk in front of all the other kids now the family said that that was like a bad that was like almost an ending they said after that moment DD hit the roof and didn't want any of them to have anything to do with with gypsy that was the end of her just being like casually left at their house casually being a part of the family that was it but of course they started to have some serious questions they started to say DD she can walk why is she in a wheelchair so what do you think DD's move is to this she's now been cornered people are asking her questions they have some doubts she tells him that gypsy has leukemia out of nowhere she says gypsy has leukemia she's been diagnosed with leukemia she has to take all this cancer medication she's gonna lose all her hair that's how DD got herself out of trouble of being questioned about the wheelchair and of course in secret there's no cancer she's at home shaving gypsy's head she's at home shaving gypsy's head and telling gypsy no you have cancer and the medicine is gonna make you lose your hair so we're just gonna go ahead and shave it absolutely nuts absolutely nuts so after that blowup DD moves even further away from her family she takes gypsy and she goes to New Orleans which is a long way away from where they were far enough that it becomes more difficult for these working class individuals to get to gypsy to help her which as we know that was exactly what the intention was so the next big kind of significant moment is one that also doesn't get enough attention and that's what happened in 2000 to DD blanchard so in the year 2000 DD has taken gypsy away from the family she's claiming gypsy has muscular dystrophy and leukemia that she can't walk that she's on all these medications she's also claiming that she is mentally disabled and they are living in New Orleans away from the rest of the family gypsy is nine 10 years old at this time and they get into a severe car accident okay DD and gypsy get into a really bad car accident now gypsy is fine but DD's foot is almost severed from her leg it's a very very very severe injury and she ends up spending a lot of time in hospital so gypsy has to go and live with DD's family don't know why she wasn't sent to live with her dad I'm assuming he wasn't really stable at this time because he had been like living with friends and stuff so she goes to stay with her grandfather and her aunt and uncle the pizza lose I don't know Petra Petra is probably how you pronounce it while she was there the family was obviously concerned right there like oh my god she's got leukemia she can't walk she's on a feeding tube she has to she can only eat pediatric through her feeding tube they were obviously very scared and they wanted to create like a like a the right environment for her they said the whole time she was there she ate like normal she was eating tons of food she ate everything all the other kids ate but she stayed in the wheelchair she stayed in the wheelchair but it was enough for them to start asking questions the longer she was with them the more normal she was acting she didn't seem like she was mentally disabled she didn't seem like she was a sick as she was being painted and she could surely eat without the feeding tube so the family is is getting weirded out they're asking questions and what is DD not gonna like she's not gonna like questions I think it's important to note this is a side note um according to Gypsy during this time she alleged that she was also molested those allegations came out later there's no way to verify that her family vehemently denies that but that's common in families where there's abuse the granddad's response to it was could be pretty icky um but also it just kind of paints questions the grandfather claimed that uh Gypsy from a young age would try to touch him which he thought was really really really an appropriate and tried to stop I don't know what the truth there is I tend to believe victims and I'm just putting this in here so that you can kind of make your decision on that now DD gets out of the hospital after quite a while and she's livid livid when the family starts asking her questions like why is Gypsy eating normally if she has to be on this feeding tube why does she not seem sick even though she's got leukemia so DD just moves DD takes her and just moves away from all of them and they start seeing Gypsy less and less and less um the father during this time he's also getting less and less time to see her he's allowed to talk to Gypsy on the phone but visits become more and more restricted now these are the years 2000 to 2005 and it's the same thing we see um Gypsy getting quote unquote more sick but there's no one like directly around her to verify that this is just kind of what people are seeing and being told it is a distance she's in the wheelchair full time she's having her head shaved this is also when we see DD creating the Yolanda cabinet is what i call it and for those of you who watch the real housewives of Beverly Hills you know about Yolanda's medicine cabinet and there's a cabinet in Gypsy's childhood home that looked very very very much like that and it seems like this is what life is gonna be right it seems like it's just gonna be um DD running around running her scams telling everybody that her daughter sick and you know just the usual supply and demand of a narcissist but then 2005 happens and her can Katrina heads now her can Katrina ends up being a catalyst a catalyst for DD Gypsy and it is the reason that you know their names right now today if her can Katrina hadn't happened you probably would have no idea who DD blanchored and Gypsy Rose blanchored were because her can Katrina is the turning point that changes their lives forever so obviously horrible New Orleans all but destroyed and the house of DD and Gypsy is destroyed in that the media picks the story up they pick up this story of this poor disabled child with leukemia and her poor hard done by mother who've had everything destroyed so what do you think good people do when they hear this story that's been crafted by DD they have Gypsy and DD air lifted out of New Orleans and flown to a rora mazery where they are housed and taken to mercy hospital and given first rate top tier medical care that's right it blew up it was a huge news story rescuing this child from her can Katrina re-homing them good Samaritans the whole the whole shebang their faces were all over the news all over social media videos interviews DD was just living her best life if you go and look at that stuff she's just beaming and jolly and happy and when you watch these documentaries that's what everyone talks about as well they're like well we just didn't know because DD was just such a happy jolly cheery person and it's like yeah because every time you guys were around her you were giving her the supply she wanted you were like throwing money at her you were like introducing her to celebrities and giving her free trips to Disney world of course she was always jolly and happy around you you were doing what she wanted you to do which is of course is how narcissists work so the two of them become media sensations and they go to this mercy hospital to get care and that's where an interesting thing happens so they go to mercy hospital and DD and gypsy are introduced to dr. Bernardo flaster scene who he is in the prison confessions of gypsy rose if you want to go in here his side of the story on this go and listen to it he basically says he felt good he wanted to help this child whose life had been destroyed by Katrina so he meets gypsy and he meets DD DD says all of gypsy's records have been destroyed in the hurricane I don't have any of her records but she's got cerebral palsy and leukemia so the doctor goes right well I can't just give you treatment for that so we got to run some tests so this doctor flaster scene runs a tons tons tons tons of tests I think they do some muscle biopsies they put gypsy in an MRI machine they run all these tests and he comes back to DD and says there's nothing wrong with this child this child can walk like for sure this child can walk let's get her up and get her to walk DD throws a shit fit throws an absolute temper tantrum and storms out storms out of the hospital and says I will never come back here again and she doesn't but this is what's interesting after she left the doctor wrote in his notes that he believed DD was showing signs of munch housings by proxy and that gypsy was a victim of that he wrote that in the notes but he did not report it to cps now if you really want to get frustrated here's the extra rub he was legally required to report that but he didn't report it because he was afraid of getting in trouble he claims however that's not the law the law is any physician who makes that kind of a report is protected in case it ends up being false so frankly he just didn't do his job and because he didn't do his job we have everything that happens next which is DD and gypsy leave the hospital and go back to their home in aurora and did he just keeps the scams going they're still getting lots of media attention so they take all the interviews that they can they keep building this media circus around themselves it results in a free home from habitat for humanity habitat for humanity comes and on camera gives them a free custom build home it is customized so it could be more accessible for gypsy and are wheelchairs they like lower the light switches and they build this huge ramp and then here's the real kicker they gave her a hot tub the house had a hot tub because dd said she needed it for her muscles gypsy needed it for her muscles this this becomes the game for dd she suddenly realizes we got a machine here and she milks it for all that it's worth they get this house for free they get trips to disney for free gypsy starts meeting a bunch of celebrities and taking photos with them the dad at the same time is getting scammed for a ton of money he's all the way back in Louisiana there in Missouri dd has told him he can no longer see gypsy but he can talk to her on the phone as long as he keeps sending money and she keeps saying that oh she's got this medical thing and this medical thing and this medical thing so he ends up sending about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he's like doing all this through child support and it's it's it's really really sad and at the same time they there's a huge Facebook group that gets started um gypsy is constantly in this Facebook group dd is constantly in the Facebook group there's a red flag over documentation of gypsy's time in the hospital all these things that are going on with her it's really like if you want to talk about narcissism it is it is an audience basically gypsy has an audience at all times her mother now has an audience at all time it's very worrying and it more worrying that there was like millions of people in these groups uh not seeing any of these red flags and just all believing they were like lifting up and building a new life for a disabled girl and her mother now all of those last points talking about the celebrities and the free trips and the free house and the gifts and all the money that was being donated to them that's important because as it turns out these are complementary symptoms of malingering much housings by proxy malingering much housings by proxy this is when a parent commits much housings by proxy gets into this for financial gain they make their child sick they tell everyone their child is sick they keep their child in this perpetual state of juvenile hood we saw this with the turpens the turpin family for financial gain for that supply for that sympathy and that is certainly what we are seeing here as the escalations get to where we will later uh pick up we see a person a mother who has so little empathy for her child that she is sedating her constantly she's telling everyone and the child that she's mentally delay she's having the i mean gypsy's teeth were rotting out of her head by this point because of all the unneeded medication she was on did he had her salivary glands removed so that she wouldn't be able to drool she subjected her to muscle biopsies to surgery so she wouldn't be able to vomit anymore she's doctor shopping around and the whole purpose of this this hell that she is raising her daughter in is strictly for supply it is strictly for supply and it's not even just financial because she was getting enough money to live from her ex-husband it is to gain money off of who she thinks are essentially fools idiots morons who are lesser than her less intelligent than her less deserving than her you're seeing so much of this like narcissism psychopathy and maca valianism that dark triad that i talked about where she will say and do literally anything no matter who it hurts to get what she wants this is the culmination of who dd blanchard is this is that child who got raised in the beginning and told you are special you are more special than everyone around you and you deserve whatever you want even if you have to hurt other people to take it that is who dd blanchard is in this moment and that is the mother that we are going to pick up with in part two when we take a deep dive into gypsy rose the second part of this chapter who she became her part in the murder and who she is today what do you think does this paint a little bit of a different picture than what you were led to believe what you perhaps have been led to believe throughout the course of this story through the trial through the prison through everything it doesn't end here the story gets much much crazier and we're going to get into that in the next time we are going to cover the murder how it happened when it happened i'm going to be talking about nicole's go to john i'll be talking about gypsy we're going to be breaking down some of the footage from the interrogations and more importantly we're going to be talking about gypsy and who she has become since she's gotten out of prison because i think we are already starting to see some patterns repeating some patterns repeating and it all ties in it all ties in it's not just narcissism because in this next part part two which will be out next week we're also going to talk about how celebrity has now gotten tied into this and the effects that it could be having so hopefully you're going to be here for next week you're going to join me for the conclusion to this deep dark dive into the gypsy rose and dd blanchard saga it is absolutely crazy and i think there are so many lessons i certainly am seeing shades of my own mother in this story who didn't go to this extreme but who certainly got a lot of attention for keeping me constantly in different doctors doing everything but getting my mental health ADHD and everything else dealt with there's a lot in here there's a lot in here and more than anything else there's examples of cycles patterns how these patterns repeat and families and how they continue to harm us generation after generation thank you so much for listening i hope you liked it i hope you be back for next week if you've got questions go ahead and tap that link at the top of the description you can send me a text message let me know what you thought of the episode let me know what you want to hear more about if you've got questions shoot them off to me you can do all that via text if you love the episode please head over to apple podcast leave a quick five star review it helps people find me just it helps with this work because it does take a lot of work i've been probably spent like 15 hours or more just in like a research mode and this you know so um please go ahead and leave that five star review if you feel like it and be so forever grateful and don't forget that you can follow scandal queens on instagram and tiktok at scandal queens podcast we'll be releasing more videos there some recordings and i'm also going to be releasing some of the stuff from this court case which will be both on instagram and tiktok so make sure you go and follow the podcast there and you can follow me at the real evee johnson everywhere that it matters instagram tiktok you know whatever if you'd like to follow me and hear more about the work that i do with victims of narcissistic abuse and breaking through the cult of toxic celebrity then you can absolutely come and join me there for everyone else i hope you will join me again next week because it's gonna be good um but until then keep your heads up keep your eyes on the stars and keep moving forward bye bye[music]