Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison on December 28, 2023. Blanchard served eight years of a 10-year sentence for the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, after being a victim of what would become a famous case of Munchausen’s by proxy, a form of abuse in which an individual causes a child or dependent to become sick, in order to gain attention. Dee Dee led Blanchard to believe she had cancer and subjected her to a series of extreme unnecessary medications and treatments—the story was later dramatized in the 2019 series The Act.
Upon her release from prison, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been united with her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson. The pair met while she was still incarcerated, and got married in 2022.
They started corresponding during the pandemic.
Blanchard and Anderson’s relationship began in 2020, at the height of the first Covid lockdown. Anderson had, like thousands of others, become addicted to the true crime series Tiger King on Netflix, and had a colleague who said she wanted to write a letter to Joe Exotic in prison.
“I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you write him, I’ll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard,'” Anderson told People. “And I had watched her documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, like three years before that,” he said. “I I remember my friends talking about The Act and I was like, I’ll watch the documentary again. So it was kind of fresh on my mind.”
A few weeks later, Anderson got a reply from Blanchard, and by May 2020 they were writing each other regularly. Due to Covid restrictions, however, they were not able to meet until a whole year later. They formed an “emotional bond” while exchanging letters and speaking on the phone during this time, and Anderson finally visited Blanchard in prison for the first time in July 2021.
They got married before Blanchard’s release.
Another year after that, in July 2022, they got married in a small private ceremony at the prison—although Blanchard has since stated they will “redo” their vows now she has been released.
“I know the home that I’m going home to is with my husband, and I’m going to have a really supportive family dynamic,” said Blanchard. “And I think that that’s what I’ve been missing this whole time.”
Philip Ellis
Philip Ellis is News Editor at Men’s Health, covering fitness, pop culture, sex and relationships, and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV, and he is the author of Love & Other Scams.
