Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was convicted of serving to to kill her abusive mom in a broadly lined case, filed for divorce Monday from Ryan Anderson after just below two years of marriage, in response to Louisiana court docket data.
Mr. Anderson, a special-education trainer from Louisiana, has mentioned that he despatched Ms. Blanchard a letter on the Chillicothe Correctional Middle in Missouri and that the 2 started corresponding. They married whereas Ms. Blanchard was nonetheless in jail in 2022.
After her launch in late December, Ms. Blanchard grew to become the topic of frenzied social media consideration, a lot of which involved her relationship. The pair mentioned their introduction to married life on Leisure Tonight and documented a visit to New York Metropolis for Ms. Blanchard’s hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
Ms. Blanchard filed for divorce in Lafourche Parish, La., simply earlier than 2 p.m. on Monday, in response to the clerk of court docket, and the authorized grounds for divorce will not be but public. TMZ was first to report the information of the couple’s divorce proceedings.
Ms. Blanchard and Mr. Anderson didn’t instantly reply to requests for touch upon Monday.
The continuing fascination with Ms. Blanchard has raised contemporary questions in regards to the ethics of public obsession with true crime figures and victims of abuse — and of remaking these figures as influencer-style celebrities.
Ms. Blanchard, now 32, pleaded responsible to the second-degree homicide of her mom, Dee Dee Blanchard, in 2016. Ms. Blanchard’s boyfriend on the time, Nicholas Godejohn, was convicted of first-degree homicide and sentenced to life in jail.
A plea settlement acknowledged that Dee Dee Blanchard had been abusive: “Gypsy’s mother was abusing her bodily, medically, giving her medicine she didn’t want, having her undergo procedures that she didn’t want,” Ms. Blanchard’s trial lawyer, Mike Stanfield, mentioned at a information convention in 2016.
An HBO documentary and a Hulu mini-series launched throughout her sentence characterised her as a sufferer of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a type of abuse during which a mum or dad sickens a toddler for consideration — and drew intense public consideration to the case.
That spotlight morphed into a posh pressure of social media movie star after Ms. Blanchard’s launch. She amassed greater than eight million followers on Instagram and near 10 million on TikTok, the place she shared day-by-day updates with Mr. Anderson and promoted her Lifetime sequence, “The Jail Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”
Feedback on such posts had been combined, with some praising her frank dialogue of her regrets — amongst them, she mentioned, her function in murdering her mom — and others expressing discomfort that her story was being repackaged as leisure.
“It looks like a disservice to let her grow to be simply one other social-media curiosity, together with her abuse and her crimes being meme-ified for an uncaring public,” Alice Bolin, the creator of “Useless Women: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession,” wrote in an article for The Minimize.
Ms. Blanchard deactivated her TikTok and Instagram accounts final month, citing considerations in regards to the results of public scrutiny on her psychological well being.
Alain Delaquérière contributed analysis.