Gypsy Rose Blanchard Announces Pregnancy

Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was convicted of helping to kill her abusive mother in a widely publicized case, announced in a tearful YouTube video on Tuesday that she and her boyfriend, Ken Urker, were expecting their first child.

“I want to be everything my mother wasn’t,” Ms. Blanchard, 32, said in the clip, describing the pregnancy as “a blessing.” She said she was due in January.

In 2016, Ms. Blanchard was sentenced to 10 years in prison — the minimum for second-degree murder — under a plea agreement that acknowledged the abusive relationship with her mother. After serving about seven years, she was released in December and has since gained millions of followers on social media, where she has documented her personal life, including her marriage to Ryan Anderson and her relationship with Mr. Urker. (Ms. Blanchard filed for divorce from Mr. Anderson in April.)

Ms. Blanchard’s childhood, trial and life after prison were the subjects of an HBO documentary in 2017 and a Hulu mini-series in 2019, which thrust her into the national spotlight. (Both programs portrayed her as a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of abuse in which a parent fabricates an illness for a child.) More recently, Ms. Blanchard has starred in her own series on Lifetime, “Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up.”

Ms. Blanchard has disavowed some of the public fascination with her life. This week, she called out a TikTok user who posted a video from the house in Springfield, Mo., where her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, stabbed her mother to death in 2015. While Ms. Blanchard no longer lives in the house, some social media users have filmed themselves in recent months driving past it and stopping by to gawk.

In the video, the user films the house while driving by and pointing out several “no trespassing” signs in the yard. “People came out,” the user wrote in an on-screen caption, referring to the home’s apparent residents. (The TikTok poster did not respond to a request for comment.)