Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Change in True Crime

There's a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” in which Gypsy Rose Blanchard films her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies naked in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed the gypsy's mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, to death. The murder was part of a plot the couple devised to free Gypsy, who was 23 at the time, from her mother's grasp so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious signature giggles.

Dee Dee Blanchard had mentally and physically abused and controlled her daughter for decades. Many believed it to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy – a form of child abuse in which a caregiver can induce illness to arouse public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts – and the saga conquered the collective interest.

The segment marks the first time we see it unfold through Gypsy's eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimpse into what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.

Stories like these were once conveyed through reenactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were any primary sources, they were usually scans of photographs of happy families or of grisly crime scenes, supported by narration, as illustrated in programs such as '20/20', 'Dateline', 'Snapped', 'Forensic Files ' and 'Forensic Files'. “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplementary. On rare occasions, viewers hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years later.

Now we have reams of first-person digital footage, meaning viewers are more privy than ever to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes occurred, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential . . The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard summarizes the trajectory of this phenomenon. For example, her saga got the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral look at the events now have options and direct channels, making that series almost an afterthought.

The rise of social media has of course accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn's relationship before the murder was almost exclusively online, and Facebook messages and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy got 10 years, of which she served about seven.

She was released on December 28, 2023, and posted the following day selfie to Instagram with the caption “Freedom's first selfie,” which has received more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she is promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to uncover the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.

She has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she's shared light-hearted videos, like the one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), to Broadway's “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” and more serious ones, like a video in which she lays Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

The influence of technology on modern criminal investigations has become fundamental in many documentaries in recent years.

In the two-part HBO documentary 'I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter' (2019), the story is told largely through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led to the exact moment of Roy's suicide. Selfie videos that Roy has posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) had me “going around in circles, spinning thoughts about responsibility, coercion and the blurred boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.

One of the most prominent murder cases in the United States in recent years – that of disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who fatally shot his wife Maggie and son Paul in 2021 – ultimately relied on a staggering recording made just before the murders. That video, on Paul's phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime and sealed his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

The use of that footage, along with the copious smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix's two seasons “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unthinkable not so long ago.

But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift better than HBO's docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won streamed their days and nights live; they filmed and posted countless hours of sermons and online manifestos to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series consists of this footage, and viewers in turn see Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over months from the perspective of the people who adored her.

It's a vantage point so unnerving and terrifying that the line between storytelling and voyeurism disappears. When the group films her corpse, driving it across numerous state lines and camping with it along the way, we see it all through the eyes of the devotees as well. Several followers continue to promote her teachings online.

This month, it became clear in the comments on Blanchard's Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media host. Some found it strange that she would participate so intensively and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn was serving a life sentence.

The biggest criticism of the true crime genre is that it repackages horrors as guilty pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close – but not too close – to terrible things. And perhaps true crime's best defense is allowing viewers to safely digest the scary underbelly of our world. It's a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.

Either way, the fourth wall is starting to crack, and perhaps the discomfort this could cause is long overdue.