On Jan. 7, Gypsy Rose Blanchard posted a TikTookay chronicling her first journey to New York. Soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York (Taylor’s Version),” the publish featured a slideshow of pictures of Blanchard and her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, as they toured native hotspots like Times Square and Radio City Music Hall.
The TikTookay garnered greater than one million likes and a deluge of constructive feedback like “legendary queen” and “such an icon.” The TikTookay encapsulates a collection of monumental shifts in Blanchard’s life: her launch from jail, her subsequent rise to fame and her entrance into maturity.
“I’m coming into this just brand new,” Blanchard advised HuffPost throughout a Zoom press convention on Jan. 9 for a Lifetime docuseries about her known as “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”
“I feel like I’m a new baby bird on the internet. I don’t even know how to do all of the emojis,” she added.
Now 32, Blanchard skilled virtually none of her youth as a standard baby. She suffered years of abuse by the hands of her mom, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who’s believed to have had factitious dysfunction imposed on one other, previously often known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It is a psychological dysfunction during which a father or mother makes up or causes an sickness or harm of their baby.
Dee Dee satisfied docs, nonprofits and members of the family that Blanchard had leukemia, bronchial asthma and muscular dystrophy. She additionally made her daughter, in addition to others, consider she was youthful than she was.
In 2016, Blanchard was discovered responsible of aiding her ex-boyfriend within the homicide of her mother and served eight years in jail. A number of days earlier than the top of 2023, Blanchard was launched on good habits.
Finally, Blanchard is free and coming into her personal. She’s getting all of the experiences she misplaced as a younger woman, however at an unimaginable tempo — and it’s primarily because of Gen Z.
The demographic has embraced her: her TikTookay has skyrocketed to just about 10 million followers and the hashtag #gypsyrose has virtually 5 billion views on the app.
Speaking on her story being etched into the Gen Z zeitgeist, Blanchard advised HuffPost, “I think it’s great,” earlier than saying that she thinks the era pertains to her “because I’m coming out and experiencing things for the first time” that she didn’t as a young person.
“And I’m just doing it now for the first time, so I think maybe I’m a little bit more relatable in that sense, and I think we all kind of feel the need to want to be loved and seen for who we are,” she stated. “So I think that’s the appeal about me— is that I’m learning about my identity while Gen Z is learning about theirs, too.”
Her rise to stardom amongst Gen Z is stunning even to the creators and influencers who’ve promoted her story.
Haley Price, who has greater than a million followers on TikTookay and co-hosts the true crime podcast “Inhuman Podcast,” advised HuffPost that the podcast’s 2022 episode on Blanchard had extra downloads than their different episodes. Price stated that she and her podcast listeners are “happy” to see Blanchard reside her life for the primary time as a result of abuse victims don’t all the time get that probability.
“I have never seen anything like this,” Price stated. “It’s pretty incredible how fast everything happened. There were definitely people that knew her story before the murder, but the story that was known was that she was suffering from all of these illnesses. So after the murder, when everything came out about what her mother had done to her, I think a lot of that brought a lot of sympathy.”
Melissa Moore, the chief producer of “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” echoed that sentiment to HuffPost through the press convention, characterizing Blanchard’s story as “Gen Z’s O.J. Simpson case.”
“I think her case was the equivalent to [O.J.’s for] Gen Z because they were just coming to know the world and they saw for the first time that the world is unfair and that [she] went to prison,” Moore stated. “A lot of Gen Z has come up to me and expressed that. And that their interest in following Gypsy is that the scale of justice did her wrong, but they’re hoping that the scale of life does her right.”
