Mommy Dead and Dearest movie review (2017)

Dee Dee and her incredibly ill daughter Gypsy Rose moved to Springfield, MO after Hurricane Katrina, and Gypsy became something of a viral celebrity. She was an adorable little girl who had overcome a short life of horrendous pain and constant medication due to leukemia, muscular dystrophy, seizures, and slow brain development that made her act much younger than her age. She shouldn’t even have been alive, but she fought the diseases trying to kill her, and she became an inspiration for many, getting so much attention that organizations would give Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose trips to Disney World, and Habitat For Humanity even built the pair a new home. In 2015, the world would learn so many shocking truths about the Blanchards, but here’s the one on which most of them hinge: Gypsy Rose Blanchard wasn’t sick.

Sure, her mother told her she was sick, and convinced a shocking number of doctors to go along with the home diagnoses. Dee Dee Blanchard essentially kept Gypsy a prisoner, injecting dozens of medications through a feeding tube and telling her she was sick enough that the girl believed it. Of course, she also told her not to move the legs that shouldn’t work in front of strangers and would hold her hands in interviews, squeezing if Gypsy started talking about something she shouldn’t. She would shave her head because her “hair was just going to fall out anyway.” And she would make sure to get copies of all medical records, so they could move to another hospital if a doctor started to figure out the ruse. Oh, and Gypsy Rose wasn’t even a child—she was in her 20s when a lot of this fame came their way. And then Gypsy Rose met a boy online.

In June 2015, Dee Dee Blanchard was found murdered in her home and her daughter was gone. Not long after, Gypsy Rose posted “That Bitch is Dead” on her Facebook page and the whole thing unraveled. Gypsy Rose was a victim of the confounding Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, in which parents essentially keep their children medical victims, brainwashing them and even poisoning them. It totally warped Gypsy Rose, and when she met a boy named Nick online, he was like a match thrown into a barn filled with lighter fluid.