Gen Z Embraces Gypsy Rose Blanchard: 'They Relate To Me'

On Jan. 7, Gypsy Rose Blanchard posted a TikTok chronicling her first trip to New York. Soundtracked by Taylor Swifts Welcome to New York (Taylors Version), the post featured a slideshow of photos of Blanchard and her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, as they toured local hotspots like Times Square and Radio City Music Hall.

The TikTok garnered more than a million likes and a deluge of positive comments like legendary queen and such an icon. The TikTok encapsulates a series of monumental shifts in Blanchards life: her release from prison, her subsequent rise to fame and her entrance into adulthood. 

Im coming into this just brand new, Blanchard told HuffPost during a Zoom press conference on Jan. 9 for a Lifetime docuseries about her called The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. 

I feel like Im a new baby bird on the internet. I dont even know how to do all of the emojis, she added.

Now 32, Blanchard experienced almost none of her youth as a normal child. She suffered years of abuse at the hands of her mother, Clauddine Dee Dee Blanchard, who is believed to have had factitious disorder imposed on another, formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy . It is a psychological disorder in which a parent makes up or causes an illness or injury in their child.

Dee Dee convinced doctors, nonprofits and family members that Blanchard had leukemia, asthma and muscular dystrophy. She also made her daughter, as well as others, believe she was younger than she was.

In 2016, Blanchard was found guilty of aiding her ex-boyfriend in the murder of her mom and served eight years in prison. A few days before the end of 2023, Blanchard was released on parole. 

Finally, Blanchard is free and coming into her own. Shes getting all the experiences she lost as a young girl, but at an incredible pace and its primarily thanks to Gen Z.

The demographic has embraced her: her TikTok has skyrocketed to nearly 10 million followers and the hashtag #gypsyrose has almost 5 billion views on the app .

Speaking on her story being etched into the Gen Z zeitgeist, Blanchard told HuffPost, I think its great, before saying that she thinks the generation relates to her because Im coming out and experiencing things for the first time that she didnt as a teenager.

And Im just doing it now for the first time, so I think maybe Im 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 said. So I think thats the appeal about me is that Im learning about my identity while Gen Z is learning about theirs, too.

Her rise to stardom among Gen Z is surprising even to the creators and influencers who have promoted her story.

Haley Price, who has more than a million followers on TikTok and co-hosts the true crime podcast Inhuman Podcast, told HuffPost that the podcasts 2022 episode on Blanchard had more downloads than their other episodes. Price said that she and her podcast listeners are happy to see Blanchard live her life for the first time because abuse victims dont always get that chance. 

I have never seen anything like this, Price said. Its 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 executive producer of The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, echoed that sentiment to HuffPost during the press conference, characterizing Blanchards story as Gen Zs 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 said. 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 theyre hoping that the scale of life does her right.