Raymond Hall/JC Pictures
Back in the halcyon days of early 2020, when we were optimistic about vaccines, a new president, public health, and the stability of superhero franchises, there was a meme called the jassification trend. It mainly entailed taking photographs of prominent historical figures – for example, Alexander Hamilton, or Kramer of Seinfeld — and running it through a filter makes it seem very Botoxed, contoured, and filtered, like your most insecure friend’s stories from her vacation.
Al-Yassin’s trend was funny because it was clearly misrepresenting ridiculously oppressive beauty standards and the structures that support them, like Instagram and FaceTune. But it was also funny because it highlighted how very easy it is, in a post-truth, post-AI panic world, to take something we understand in a very specific way and completely transform its old meaning. The joke wasn’t just that it was funny to see the Founding Fathers with false eyelashes and bronzer. It was also a way for us to highlight the uncomfortable reality that nothing we thought we knew meant the same thing anymore.
Nearly three years later, Elias’s trend has largely fallen by the wayside. But we’re seeing it resurface with the renaming of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the 32-year-old woman who was released on December 28, after serving seven years of a 10-year prison sentence for organizing her mother’s alleged murder. .
The daughter of single mother Claudina “Dee Dee” Blanchard, Gypsy Rose grew up under the care of numerous doctors and hospitals, with Dee Dee claiming that Gypsy suffered from various ailments, including leukemia and muscular dystrophy. As a result, she spent her life in excruciating pain and was subjected to various unnecessary interventions and surgeries, including the removal of multiple teeth. Since then, many experts have speculated that Dee Dee was suffering from Munchausen’s disease by proxy, a rare psychological disorder in which a parent pretends that their child is sick in order to attract sympathy and attention.
According to Gypsy, Dee Dee kept her under lock and key during her childhood and young adulthood, monitoring her communications and keeping her confined to a wheelchair. After meeting her first boyfriend, Nicholas Bodyjohn, online, Bodyjohn and Gypsy plotted to kill Dee Dee, with Bodyjohn stabbing her to death. In 2015, Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Budejohn is currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. She was eventually released three years ago, after marrying her husband, Ryan Anderson, while behind bars.
The story of the gypsies, as documented in the documentary Irene Lee Carr Dear dead mother (2017) And the fictional TV series verb (2019), It received intense national attention, as well as a wave of sympathy for Gypsy herself. This in itself is not surprising: with its erotic elements of psychological mothers, medical fraud, and illicit sex (Gypsy and Budejohn are said to have had intercourse for the first time in a movie theater bathroom during a screening of the Disney film). Cinderella), The narrative was tailor-made for true crime fans. It was also no surprise that the general public sympathized with Gypsy, who by all accounts was the victim of years of unimaginable suffering at the hands of her mother.
But what was somewhat surprising was how much the general public tended to have such sympathy. In the months leading up to her release from Chillicothe State Prison, true crime creators on TikTok embarked on an unofficial countdown of sorts, making fan edits of Blanchard made for Nicki Minaj or memes comparing her to Emma Roberts walking out of prison in Scream Queens. Some of these comments were more pointed than others: “Gypsy Rose was released on the 28th because the court said she 4 + 4 = ate,” reads the caption on one of the funny, if mathematically flimsy, videos. However, others, such as a video filmed outside, were more serious, reflecting the public perception of Blanchard as an unjustly imprisoned folk hero.
Once she was actually released, the media blitz followed suit, obsessively reporting on her post-prison trip to buy new shoes and her (rejected) request to go to a Kansas City Chiefs game so she could meet Taylor Swift. (Blanchard’s path as a Swiftie gave rise to a small press cycle in its own right, with syndicated outlets Hollywood Reporter An interview in which she reveals her favorite Swift songs. For what they’re worth, they’re “Karma” and “Eyes Open.”) As part of a press tour to promote her upcoming Lifetime series, Gypsy has become a fixture in the tabloids, with outlets relentlessly covering everything from a rude comment she made to a book on Her husband’s Instagram account (“They’re jealous because you rock my world every night,” she wrote in response to negative commenters, adding, “D is for fire”) to the revelation, which she shared exclusively with the people, She only learned to use a tampon while in prison.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard served her sentence and expressed remorse for her mother’s murder. “No one will ever hear me say I’m glad she died or I’m proud of what she did,” she said. the people. “I regret it every day.” She is free, and she can do whatever she wants freely. If she wants to join TikTok and do stories about her life promoting Drunk Elephant, or collaborating with Duolingo owl or whatever, she has every right to, as does anyone who suddenly finds themselves with a big platform. If anyone has the right to post weird things about her husband’s penis on social media, it’s a woman who has been literally and figuratively imprisoned for a good portion of her life.
But those who decided to stop it pose a bigger problem. Rather than run away with Godejohn or report her abusive mother to the authorities, Blanchard plotted to kill her – a crime that, while easily understandable given the circumstances, is difficult to defend. Blanchard herself has expressed this repeatedly in interviews, telling Dr. Phil years ago that her mother “didn’t deserve what happened to her” and that she wished Dee Dee had gone to prison instead. But Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s casting also raises a larger issue: We, as a culture, have a wildly inconsistent approach to criminality. Most of the time, we reject it; Sometimes, we try to make sense of bullshit by constructing our own narratives, making heroes out of those who might otherwise be considered villains. Both approaches miss this point.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is not the first criminal, alleged or otherwise, to be revered as an Internet folk hero. Perhaps the most recent example is George Santos, the far-right former congressman who was fired for compulsive lying, alleged campaign fundraising and credit card fraud, and who has since focused on charging $350 on Cameo to stir up furries. Because Santos is unashamed of his desire for attention and is well-versed in vernacular popular culture, he has built a cult following, erasing his history of greed, almost comically compulsive lying, and vile anti-Semitic comments from the public imagination. There’s also Anna Delvey, the convicted fraudster whose attempts to trick the art world into believing she’s a German heiress led to a (bad) Netflix show and an (even worse) art career. When she attended one of Delphi’s shows in 2022, she spoke to countless fans who saw in her a modern art project in her own right, a scrappy self-starter building herself from the ashes of a harsh post-capitalist order. One woman described her to me as an entrepreneur who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Of course, there is no evidence that this is true, nor is there any evidence to suggest that anything Delvey or Santos did, or were alleged to have done, was intended to benefit anyone other than themselves. However, both have achieved babe status online, especially among young people or marginalized individuals who feel angry at the constraints of white capitalist society. The thinking seems to be that because our world is set up in a way that actively oppresses them, anyone who manages to break free deserves to be revered, regardless of their reasons for doing so or regardless of whether they end up doing more harm. Of goodness. They’re right about the first part. They are wrong about the second.
Gypsy differs from Anna Delvey or Jorge Santos in that she is viewed one-sidedly and strictly as a victim. But the thing about victims that we should have realized by now is that they are complex. They don’t have to be attractive, funny, smart, or even respectable people to be victims either. The thing about victims is that sometimes their stories can’t easily be commoditized via a Lifetime series, or redeemed via Zara’s sponsored TikTok content. Sometimes, their stories are just sad. The thing about victims is that their situation does not prevent them from creating more victims.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s murder had at least one clearly identifiable victim: her mother. She will have to figure out how to deal with the resulting trauma for the rest of her life, and she can do that however she wants. But no matter how much we put a filter on this reality, no matter how much we manipulate it with FaceTune or make it look like a Kardashian, this sad, basic truth will not change.