Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan Scott Anderson are reliving their love story. Ahead of Gypsy’s release from prison on Thursday, she and Ryan spoke to People about how they met, fell in love and tied the knot while she was behind bars for her part in her mother, Dee Dee’s, murder.
“It was when Tiger King was really popular. My co-worker at the time was like ‘I want to write [to] Tiger King.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you write him, I’ll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard,'” Ryan said. “I never thought she’d be my wife.”
In that initial letter, Ryan told Gypsy “what her story meant to me, and on the second page I just let her have it. I told her everything about me.”
Gypsy responded to the correspondence because Ryan, a 37-year-old special education teacher, was from her home state of Louisiana. “I credit that as being the most important thing,” he quipped.
As they got to know each other, Ryan “had butterflies when we’d email, but really what set it over the top was the first time I heard her voice.”
Meanwhile, for Gypsy, Ryan became her “emotional backbone.”
“We met when the pandemic was really, really strong and I had a lot of emotional ups and downs because of COVID,” she said. “Ryan has seen me through some really good times, some really hard times. 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 lot to handle. I could be an emotional handful.”
Though Gypsy’s dad, Rod, and stepmom, Kristy, wanted the couple to wait until her release from prison to tie the knot, they went ahead and exchanged vows in a prison ceremony on July 21, 2022. Since conjugal visits aren’t allowed at the prison where Gypsy was serving her sentence, the couple had to wait until after her release to consummate their marriage and start planning for kids.
“We’re in love. It’s hard because I’m going into a new life and I’m newly married, and I’m going to have kids one day, and I’m going to have to explain to my kids why their grandmother on mommy’s side isn’t around,” Gypsy said. “And that’s going to be a really hard conversation.”
In 2015, Gypsy asked her then-boyfriend, Nicholas “Nick” Godejohn, to kill her mother after she suffered years of abuse due to Munchausen by proxy, a rare disorder in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy.
Nick received life in prison for his part in the crime, while Gypsy was sentenced to 10 years behind bars. Gypsy, who was released after serving eight years of her sentence, previously told the outlet of her crime, “Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did. I regret it every single day.”
Given that, Gypsy said she has no worries about the kind of parent she’ll be.
“Whenever someone says, ‘Do you think that because of what you went through, you’re going to do that to your kids?’ I say, ‘You know what? Absolutely not.'” Gypsy said. “I have learned what not to do. I have no concerns about my parenting when it comes to that.”
As for her marriage, Gypsy said she doesn’t “foresee any major hardships.”
“I think this, being in prison, has been the hard part,” she said. “I think when I’m at home with my family, with my husband’s arms around me and I’m surrounded by my loved ones, that is when I will be happy.”
Watch the video below for more on the couple’s prison nuptials.
RELATED CONTENT: