It’s been impossible to avoid hearing Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s name over the past week. The former inmate who was sentenced to a decade in prison in 2016 after pleading guilty to enticing a boyfriend she met online to kill her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, was released on Dec. 28 after serving 85 percent of her original sentence.
Blanchard’s story was turned into an HBO documentary and scripted drama (The Act) and it will the subject of an upcoming six-part Lifetime doc, The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, featuring prison interviews. The sordid tale has garnered attention because of the raft of unnecessary medical interventions Blanchard underwent because of what experts believe was her mother’s mental disorder, Munchausen by proxy, a rare behavioral disorder in which a person’s caretaker seeks medical help for exaggerated or phantom symptoms of a child in order to get attention.
In advance of the Lifetime series’ kick-off on Friday (Jan. 5), Blanchard spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her post-prison life, how therapy has helped her heal and what she’s learned about the lengths her late mother went to in seeking superfluous cures for fake ailments.
Though Blanchard seems open to talking and being in the public eye now that she’s out, she said you shouldn’t expect to see her on Dancing With the Stars due to what she described as her two left feet and total lack of rhythm. The avowed Swiftie did ,however, share her favorite Taylor Swift tracks with THR. “All of her songs are really, really good. I really like the song ‘Eyes Open,’” Blanchard said of track Swift recorded for the 2012 Hunger Games soundtrack.
That song features lyrics that could be taken as a primer on the paranoia and fear of trying to survive behind bars. “Everybody’s waiting/ Everybody’s watching/ Even when you’re sleeping/ Keep your ey-eyes open,” Swift sings. “So here you are, two steps ahead and staying on guard/ Every lesson forms a new scar/ They never thought you’d make it this far.”
Blanchard said another current favorite is the Midnights hit “Karma,” whose lyrics also seem to be somewhat on-the-nose. “I’m really digging ‘Karma’ right now. ‘Karma’ has been what I have been playing on my playlist a lot. So I’m jamming out to that,” Blanchard said of the track that ends with the line “Karma’s a relaxing thought.”