Over the years, the severity of Gypsy Rose’s medical issues that Dee Dee Blanchard lied about kept increasing. At one point, she claimed that her daughter had suffered from muscular dystrophy, a type of severe muscle weakness that often causes difficulty with walking. On “Mystery and Murder: Analysis by Dr. Phil,” Gypsy Rose’s father, Rod Blanchard, recalled Dee Dee telling him that it was another chronic condition caused by their daughter’s supposed chromosomal disorder, and that she claimed it was an early death sentence for her. “Dee Dee said she wasn’t going to live to be 20 years old,” Rod revealed.
When Gypsy Rose Blanchard was interviewed in prison for “The Dr. Phil Show” in 2017, she said that Dee Dee initially made her start using a walker as as young child, which would bolster her claim that Gypsy would eventually lose the ability to use her legs. But it wasn’t until she suffered a skinned knee in a motorcycle crash, that her mother insisted that Gypsy needed to be wheel-chair bound. According to Gypsy, Dee Dee punished her if she got caught walking from then on. “She started hitting me with a coat hanger,” she said to Dr. Phil.
Dee Dee’s next fabricated diagnosis was leukemia. To make this lie believable, she shaved Gypsy’s head and shortened her life span again. “She would tell me, ‘With your cancer, you only have about two more years,’ and then when two years would come up, she would tell everybody and me, ‘It’s a miracle you’ve lived this long.'” Gypsy recalled on “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.
