Earlier this month, Gypsy Rose Blanchard deleted her Instagram and TikTok accounts in an attempt to live a normal life—relatively speaking, of course. That hasn’t stopped websites from publishing articles based on her private Facebook posts.
After serving eight years in prison for murdering her mother, Gypsy Rose Blanchard did something that would, under different circumstances, be completely unremarkable: she went online. Blanchard, who was sentenced in 2016 to 10 years in prison for the murder of her abusive mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, became an internet celebrity in 2023 as social media users began anticipating her early release. When Blanchard left prison on December 28, she had a cult of followers ready to embrace her. By December 31, her Instagram account had more than 4 million followers.
Blanchard’s online popularity couldn’t be neatly explained by pointing at rubbernecking true crime obsessives. There were some of those, but her supporters were an amorphous legion comprised of ironic shit-posters, meme admins, people who praised Blanchard for literally slaying her abuser, people who genuinely thought she served her time and deserved a second chance, and others who seemed to be drawn to Blanchard as a cathartic symbol of empowerment. She quickly booked appearances on The View and former Bachelor Nick Viall’s podcast, where she promoted her Lifetime docuseries and discussed her marriage to a middle-school special education teacher.
On social media, Blanchard experimented with content, posting Get Ready With Me videos and selfies with her husband, whom she married in 2022. She interacted with commenters, many of whom called her “queen” and wanted to know about her interests. A popular screenshot showed Blanchard confirming her fandom of Lana Del Rey. She was also capable of making followers cringe; in response to negative comments about her husband, Blanchard mounted a defense that included the detail, “the D is fire.” Blanchard may be in her early thirties, but navigating the boundaries of social media as a young adult is one of many privileges withheld from her during her time in prison. It’s even harder to navigate when millions of eyes are following your every move.
When Blanchard decided to delete her public social media accounts earlier this month, she had amassed over 8 million followers on Instagram and 9 million followers on TikTok. “With the public scrutiny as bad as it is, I just don’t want to live my life under a microscope,” Blanchard explained in a since-deleted video posted to her TikTok account. “So I created a private Instagram, and I got it verified. And I had absolutely no doubts or trouble with deleting that public one. I had people who were like, ‘Oh my god, you’re insane for deleting that kind of a following.’ and I’m like, ‘I could give a F about a following.’ That’s not real life.”
“I thought that once I got out of prison, I’d come out and I’d enjoy social media like the next person,” Blanchard said. “Taking selfies of myself in the mirror and just acting goofy and everything. It’s the simple stuff in life, right?” After spending a few months on social media, Blanchard said she had come to see it as a “doorway to hell.” In another video that has also been deleted, Blanchard apologized for what was perceived as “a lack of accountability” in her interviews. “I did a bad thing,” Blanchard said. “But I’ve also been given a second chance at life. So please give me a little grace. Let my actions match my words.”
Just two weeks after deleting her public social media accounts, Blanchard is making headlines again, this time for announcing her separation from husband Ryan Anderson. Numerous sites have reported on the separation just as they would any other celebrity split, pulling details from a post Blanchard made to her private Facebook account. And I can’t begrudge the writers, especially at the more respected publications, which are all increasingly beholden to chasing search traffic; Google has become the great equalizer of digital media, and that’s the most I can say while keeping my job. Still, I wonder how much we’ve truly learned from the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, who became a figurehead for the misogynistic, invasive coverage that escaped the confines of tabloid culture to dominate the news cycle.
In the pursuit to #FreeBritney from her father’s control, her legal conservatorship came to symbolize multiple forms of subjugation and suppression—by the media, her ex-partners, her family members, and anyone else who participated distorting Spears’ image by controlling her behavior. Once she was free, however, Spears’ life remained subject to intense scrutiny. Every Instagram post was exhaustively dissected by social media users and professional writers alike. There is no such thing as privacy in the social media age, and no one is entitled to a life free of scrutiny—celebrities least of all.
And that includes Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who lost the right to live privately when she conspired with her ex-boyfriend to murder her mother. Unlike conventional celebrities, Blanchard became famous not for her talents or her artistic contributions to culture, but for the trauma she experienced and the crime she committed in response, in an effort to escape. Watching Mommy Dead and Dearest, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary about the Blanchard case, it’s apparent—and understandable—that Gypsy Rose has been emotionally stunted from years of being abused by a mother who convinced her that she was younger than her true age, subjected her to unnecessary surgical procedures, and controlled her every move. As she revealed in her Lifetime series, Blanchard didn’t receive therapy in prison because ours is not a rehabilitative system. Coming of age is hard. Coming of age on social media is hell. Coming of age on social media after spending eight years in prison, without therapy, for murdering an abusive parent is, I can only assume, a uniquely painful nightmare.
That our culture refuses to respect the boundaries of even the most unconventional celebrity—a label that increasingly makes less sense as the qualifications for achieving fame become more nebulous—isn’t necessarily surprising. But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
(featured image: Raymond Hall, GC Images)
