Note - This has been copied over from my Substack, so formatting may be wonky.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard has stepped out of Chillicothe Women’s Prison and into the limelight.

"QUEEN DO YOU LIKE LANA DEL REY" someone commented on a TikTok account of someone pretending to be Gypsy Rose, the still-young woman known for aiding and abetting in the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Dee Dee had a mental health condition known as Munchausen by proxy, which causes someone to either feign or cause illness in another person (usually a child) to garner sympathy, attention, or financial gain. Gypsy underwent multiple surgeries, ate through a feeding tube, and was confined to a wheelchair, all to address ailments she did not have.

After twenty-three years of this abuse, having been failed by every adult and institution who had ever come into contact with her, and with nowhere else to turn, Gypsy asked her secret online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her mother so she could be free. He obliged. The two were swiftly caught red-handed; it was an incredibly sloppy job, with Godejohn lacking the mental faculties and Gypsy lacking the lived experience to know their text messages would easily be found by the police. They were incarcerated—ten years for Gypsy (she served 85% of her sentence), and life without parole for Nicholas.

“yeah i do actually” the imposter account replied.

A screenshot of this faux Gypsy Rose interaction circulated on Twitter, with most users assuming it was really her. I suppose I can’t blame them. Of course, Gypsy Rose would like Lana Del Rey! No music could provide a better soundtrack for her than Lana’s—lush with vulnerable longing to be rescued by a man, dreaming of freedom and escape, and poetic representations of all things Americana.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s story came to me in the form of Erin Lee Carr’s “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” a documentary about Gypsy Rose’s life of unbearable abuse and her role in her mother’s murder. “Mommy Dead and Dearest” is one of the most powerful pieces of storytelling I’ve ever encountered. Gypsy’s voice is an anchor throughout, with prison interviews conducted by Carr. It is empathetic and confounding in the way Carr’s work always is. I’m not sure anyone who has not seen it can say they have the full story. The story was also adapted into a Hulu series, with Joey King playing Gypsy and Patricia Arquette as a convincingly terrifying Dee Dee. It’s a good show with strong performances, but Gypsy Rose’s life is stranger than fiction, better understood when heard from the horse’s mouth.

Even if you’ve been otherwise able to resist the seductive trappings of the true crime genre, the Gypsy Rose story is an especially intoxicating one. It pushes the boundaries of human imagination. It’s a bizarre story that unfolds in what are, to many people, bizarre places: Acadian Louisiana and the Missouri Ozarks. The tale is best told through the thick Cajun accents belonging to Dee Dee and Gypsy’s family members. Most Americans need subtitles to understand them.

You get the sense that this couldn’t have occurred in any other place. It’s distinctly Southern Gothic, overflowing with visuals of the macabre: Gypsy in a children’s dress-up princess crown, with a brittle-toothed grin and a shaved head. Family members recount who Dee Dee Blanchard was before she became Gypsy Rose’s mother: she kept a tarantula as a pet, dabbled in witchcraft, and had a nasty little habit of slipping weed killer into her stepmother’s food. It’s difficult to look away from tragedy, harder still to look away from a freakshow.

It’s too easy to draw the comparison to America’s broader reality television obsession. While we’re fascinated by the lives of the rich and famous (“Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” “The Real Housewives” franchise) and those seeking love in increasingly weird circumstances (“Too Hot to Handle,” “Love is Blind”), there is also a tremendous market for the misfortunes of others—circumstances that make us squirm and present the opportunity to ridicule someone who has it worse than us (“My 600 lb. Life,” “90 Day Fiance,” “Botched”). We have a propensity to bring the weirdest, most downtrodden among us into the frame on our screens. Southerners are often the butt of the joke, with thick accents, bad politics, and poverty all working overtime to fascinate viewers and cast the subjects on the outside of a national inside joke.

Take “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” from TLC (where else?), the premise of which is to ogle at a Georgia family who puts their child in toddler pageants and feeds said child “Go-Go Juice,” a concoction of Mountain Dew and Red Bull. In a profile of Alana Thompson, a.k.a. Honey Boo Boo herself, all grown up, Rainesford Stauffer nails it:

“The show existed at the intersection of class, economics, and family dynamics — a working-class family (or one presented as such) in a celebrity economy, with plenty of gleeful attention on the way the family’s location and social norms could be amplified for profit with little context for it.”1

I love that quote from Stauffer’s article because it could be applied to countless reality television shows, not just “Honey Boo Boo,” and would hold up extremely well. The Honey Boo Boo story took a turn for the dark, which should come as absolutely no surprise. The show was canceled amid accusations that Alana’s mother, “Mama June,” was dating a child molester. Multiple family members were arrested on drug charges. TLC wanted a circus sideshow, and they got one, but threw Honey Boo Boo out with the bathwater when shit got real.

The perverse fascination with poverty, and particularly impoverished Southerners predates reality television. I’m reminded of Mary Ellen Mark’s photography, particularly one of her most famous, Amanda and her cousin Amy. It’s a photo of a nine-year-old girl standing in a kiddie pool smoking a cigarette, locking eyes with the camera with a jarring sophistication for her age. Her chubby younger cousin looks plainly at the camera, maybe a bit awestruck. The photo was taken seven years before I was born, just forty-five minutes North of Shelby, North Carolina, where I grew up (temporarily grew up, my mother would be quick to clarify). It is an incredible photograph. It is a very, very sad photograph. I wonder how many times that photograph has been printed out and taped up in a dorm room at a private college, or framed on a gallery wall in a Brooklyn co-op apartment with little concern for its context or what it represents.

There is more than enough reason to hold skepticism toward the practice of making vulnerable people into fodder for our amusement. I extend that skepticism to the case of Gypsy Rose’s newfound online adoration. We have to remember that Gypsy’s entire life has taken place under a false reality. She spent years knowing she could walk but being told that she couldn’t, and could not understand why. She had no way of reconciling what in the world was real or true. She was imprisoned by her mother on the pretense of severe medical ailments she did not have and was routinely heavily drugged. Her first relationship occurs online with a man (who would later reveal himself to be profoundly unwell) who asks her to engage in fantastical BDSM sexual roleplay, complete with multiple characters and costumes. After Nicholas kills her mother, Gypsy spends eight years in prison, barred yet again from living a normal life. Now, we enter the next chapter: she is out of prison and very much online. Which is still not an entirely real place.

She posts on TikTok and Instagram, where she has a staggering >6 million followers on each platform. Her nails and lashes are done. She is promoting the release of her tell-all book and her Lifetime documentary series. The comment section on one of her earliest Instagram posts was scattered with “Slay, Mama!” and “Slay, Mother!”— tongue-in-cheek snark about the slaying of her mother while also embracing her as a campy icon. Sort of a Tonya Harding type. She has hordes of fans; she’s been the subject of “fan cam” edits on TikTok. She recently came to the defense of her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson (the two married while she was in prison after Anderson, a letter correspondence turned romance), on Instagram after seeing negative comments about him, writing, “they jealous because you are rocking my world every night…yeah, I said it, the D is fire,” much to the amusement of the internet.

I have reservations about Gypsy Rose’s catapult into internet virality because I question the sincerity of her well-wishers in the comments, and what this could do to her psyche. I’m sure it’s a mixed bag of people who are genuinely rooting for her but are perhaps misguided in the language they use, people who are openly mocking her, and clout-chasers hoping for profile clicks by commenting something witty or shocking. And of course, the response has been far from wholly positive. For every “nice” comment she receives, there is one expressing how appalled they are that anyone would be supportive of her, quick to remind her what an awful person she is, accusing her of being just as manipulative as her mother.

She lived through hell, did a horrible, ill-informed thing to try and free herself from that hell, and came out the other side in one piece after serving her time. Developing a healthy relationship with the internet can be a Sisyphean task for anyone (seriously, if you’ve figured it out, let me know), even for those without large followings and who have lived through far less than what Gypsy has.

I wanted to get input from my go-to source when I have questions about child and adolescent mental health (happens more often than you’d think), with my soon-to-be sister-in-law, Grace Geracioti, LMSW. Grace is a Post Master’s Social Work Fellow at the NYU Child Study Center. Just before her fellowship, she worked at the Children’s Psychiatric Emergency Room at Bellevue Hospital—a job so mind-bogglingly intense it probably sounds like I’m making it up. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about trauma and expresses it better than I ever could

“I worry about the ramifications of her rise to internet fame not because I fear her imminent ability to harm others, but because she has so many intertwined vulnerability factors stacked against her that leave her susceptible to even more control and abuse (both on and off the internet), and thus possible erratic behavior. She has been either abused or institutionalized since birth and will need so much psychological support to live a healthy life as a free woman. As we’ve seen before, viral internet fame probably isn’t the best way to provide that support. Of course, I hope being the internet’s favorite new queen brings her some joy, money, and a way to express herself, but I fear for what the trial-and-error of finding that sweet spot could look like for her.”

Grace’s concerns closely mirror my own. People often forget themselves on the internet—they can be cruel and indelicate, prioritizing their feelings and desires without considering the potential harm to others. This isn't always a deliberate act of malice but is often born out of carelessness. I don’t want to sound overly Kumbaya, preachy, or reminiscent of the anti-bullying messaging we all received as children. I have been just as engaged with Gypsy Rose’s content as anyone else and recognize the inherent campiness of it all. I’ve liked TikToks that make light of the situation and shared them with friends.

What does it say about us that we’re all drawn like moths to a flame to horrible, disturbing circumstances? What trouble could come from our newfound ability to engage directly with the people who lived through them?