Gypsy Rose Blanchard is opening up about her abusive childhood since her recent release from prison, after serving a seven-year sentence for the murder of her mother, Clauddine Blanchard.
The recently paroled 32-year-old told CNN in a sit-down interview that she believes that the abuse she experienced by her mother would've continued if she was still alive.
“If my mother were still here, I would still be under this abusive medical abuse that I was going through,” she said. “I don’t think that there would have been an end in sight for me.”
Blanchard was a longtime victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Medline Plus defines the disease as a rare physiological disorder where a caretaker makes up or exaggerates illnesses to make it look like a person is sick so they can garner attention or sympathy from them.
For most of her childhood and a part of her adulthood, Gypsy Rose Blanchard believed she suffered from leukemia, muscular dystrophy and asthma because of her mother. Blanchard was kept in a wheelchair even though she could walk. She suffered through surgeries she didn't need, and it kept her isolated from the world, she said.
Blanchard suffered quietly as doctors and her mother convinced her she had a chronic illness. She said she saw no other way out of the abuse but to get rid of her mother and in an act of desperation, she convinced her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother in her sleep. In 2016, Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Godejohn received life in prison for murder.
She said, “I think it’s very important for people to understand that I was brought to a breaking point. Me as I am, as an individual, I could never kill someone.”
Because Munchausen is difficult to identify in people, Blanchard's case and life story is a rare one. There are no reliable statistics on how many people in the U.S. suffer from the disease. But the Cleveland Clinic reported that a rare 1 percent of people have Munchausen syndrome and two in 100,000 children are thought to be the victims of Munchausen by proxy.
While many cases of the disease and the children affected by it are undetected, it is estimated that about 1,000 of 2.5 million child abuse cases reported to the government are related to Munchausen's, the Cleveland Clinic found.
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When these cases have been reported and investigated, the child should be treated for any real medical problems they have. But most importantly, they need to be protected and removed from any further abuse. So that means removed from the caregiver and given psychological treatment.
After years of abuse, Blanchard said she now knows her mother was mentally ill. Most importantly, she is on a path of healing and forgiveness for her mother.
“It's a journey, but I'm starting to feel more forgiveness in understanding that it is something that maybe was out of her control,” Blanchard told People Magazine. “Maybe it was like an addict with an impulse, and that it was not consciously malicious. And I think that helps me with coping and accepting what happened.”
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