Gypsy Rose Blanchard married her now ex-husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, in July 2022 while she was still in prison for the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard.
The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard subject was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016 for killing her mother, who made her undergo years of intense medical treatments that she never needed. Blanchard was a victim of Munchausen by proxy, a form of abuse in which a guardian may seek attention or sympathy by making their child ill or exaggerating their illness.
Blanchard and her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn conspired together to kill Dee Dee in June 2015, and Blanchard later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder. After eight years of serving her sentence, Blanchard was released on Dec. 28, 2023.
Less than four months later, Blanchard filed for divorce from Anderson. The exes legally parted ways in December 2024.
“It was like she was on a leash,” Blanchard’s close friend Nadiya Vizier told PEOPLE in April 2024. “What’s the difference between being locked in a prison cell and feeling locked in her own home and marriage? She didn’t want to put up with it anymore.”
Blanchard has since rekindled her romance with ex-fiancé Ken Urker, with whom she had an off-again-on-again engagement from 2018 to 2022. In July 2024, Blanchard announced she and Urker are expecting their first baby together.
Here’s everything to know about Ryan Scott Anderson and his relationship with Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
He is from Louisiana
Per Blanchard and Anderson’s marriage license, Anderson is from Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he works as a middle school special education teacher. Following her time in prison, Blanchard planned to move to Louisiana, and Anderson joked that was one of the first reasons she decided to speak to him initially.
“She’s like, that was probably the main reason is you were from Louisiana and I wanted to make friends with people from Louisiana,” he told PEOPLE. “So I credit that as being the most important thing is that I was just from Louisiana.”
They began communicating after he sent Blanchard a letter
Anderson and Blanchard first connected in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started. Anderson was working at a hospital at the time, and his clientele dropped from around 300 to 12 patients, he said.
The Netflix show Tiger King was popular then, and his co-worker told him she wanted to write a letter to the Tiger King subject Joseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado-Passage. He told her that if she wrote him, he would write Blanchard.
“I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you write him, I’ll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard.’ And I had watched her documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, like three years before that,” he said. “And then The Act had came out and I’ve never watched The Act, but I remember my friends talking about The Act and I was like, I’ll watch the documentary again. So it was kind of fresh on my mind.”
After he sent it, he didn’t expect to hear back, but within a few weeks, in May 2020, he had begun a back-and-forth email exchange with Blanchard, who he said was drawn to how personal he was and the sacrifices he had made for his family including helping his mother raise his nephew.
He and Blanchard first met a year after they started talking
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Blanchard and Anderson couldn’t meet until July 2021. However, Blanchard has called him her “emotional backboard,” crediting him for helping keep her calm.
“We met in 2020 when the pandemic was really, really strong, and I had a lot of emotional ups and downs because of COVID,” she told PEOPLE. “Unfortunately, it put the prison in a position to where it restricted our freedom even more … So Ryan has seen me through some really good times, some really hard times.”
She added, “I would say that he is probably the most compassionate soul that I’ve ever met, and the most patient, God knows, he’s so patient with me because I could be a little bit of a lot to handle. I could be a handful, an emotional handful.”
She added that though a lot of their relationship was long distance and over the phone, Anderson became so in tune with her emotions, he could tell how she was feeling as soon as she picked up.
“We’ve been able to build this emotional bond that within two seconds of talking on the phone, he knows my emotions,” she said. “And he’ll be like, ‘Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?’ So I’m thankful that I have a man that is open enough with his own emotions so I could let my emotions flow.”
They got married while Blanchard was in prison
While not much is known about how they met, Blanchard did previously have correspondence with men outside the prison’s walls through the a pen pal program. She was previously engaged to a man named Ken in 2019, though they eventually split.
Anderson and Blanchard obtained a marriage license in Chillicothe, Missouri, on June 27, 2022, while she was still serving time, per The Springfield News-Leader.
A month later, on July 21, 2022, the two tied the knot in a small prison ceremony with no guests.
“We do plan on having a reception/redo wedding with all of our family and our friends and the dress and the cake and everything because we deserve that. I deserve that. He deserves that,” she told PEOPLE in 2023. “Our prison wedding was just something to where we can make our vows to each other. It was something that meant something to us. And I think the party is kind of for everybody else and us, but mostly for everybody else.”
Blanchard talked about wanting kids
Ahead of her early prison release, Blanchard told PEOPLE she’s excited to have kids one day. Since Blanchard had a fraught relationship with her own mother — and never lived with her father and stepmother — she said people have questioned what kind of mother she’ll be, which has hurt her feelings.
“Whenever someone says, do you think that because of what you went through, you’re going to do that to your kids? And I said, You know what? Absolutely not. I have learned what not to do,” she said.
Blanchard pointed to Anderson’s mother and her own stepmother as examples of people who are strong maternal figures and whom she plans to model her parenting after.
“I have other mother figures that are around in my life, friends that are mothers,” she said. “So I have a lot of good people around me to pull advice from when that time comes. I don’t think that there’s going to be a manual that says you’ve won mom of the year, but I definitely have no concerns about I think my parenting when it comes to that time.”
He and Blanchard were anxious about being in the spotlight
Ahead of Blanchard’s release, Anderson told PEOPLE that he was worried about the attention that would be thrown upon them since he prefers to be more private.
“It’s going to be a whirlwind and there’ll be a lot of attention,” Anderson said. “I’m still very nervous about that. I’m a very private person.”
However, he added that the two had a plan in store for how to tune out the public and focus on each other.
“Now it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, you’re in the public eye now — go out there and experience it,’ ” he said. “But we’ve decided that every night, we’re going to lay in bed, we’re going to talk to each other and check on each other and see how we’re doing, because it is going to be crazy for a minute.”
He and Blanchard announced their split in March 2024
The pair called it quits roughly three months after Blanchard was released from Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri.
“Unfortunately my husband and I are going through a separation and I moved in with my parents,” she wrote on Facebook in March 2024. “I have the support of my family and friends to help guide me through this. I am learning to listen to my heart. Right now I need time to let myself find… who I am.”
Following the announcement, Blanchard was spotted spending time with her ex-fiancé Ken Urker.
“For me, it just came out of the blue,” Anderson told The Daily Mail in April 2024. “I had no idea she still had such strong feelings for him. I haven’t spoken to her, so I don’t know what’s going on. I’m at a loss. I’m really not doing well at all.”
On April 8, 2024, Blanchard officially filed for divorce. She later filed a temporary restraining order against Anderson.
“It’s heartbreaking because no one gets married to get a divorce. Processing those emotions has been hard,” Blanchard told PEOPLE in May 2024. “I did love Ryan.”
The exes finalized their divorce in December 2024. Anderson, however, did not make an appearance in court.
“[He] was aware that the divorce was taking place today,” Anderson’s attorney Randy J. Fuerst said in a statement to PEOPLE. “He did not seek this divorce but is now glad that this saga in his life is over and he looks forward to a healthy new beginning.”
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
Source: People
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