The Gypsy Rose Obsession, Part 9

Speaker: One thing before we begin, as many of you have heard, Ken Urker, Gypsy's former partner and the father of her daughter, was found dead at his home on October 2nd. He's in this episode, and nothing you're about to hear has changed In fact, I produced this episode before his passing, But stick around to the end because I wanna update you on that situation. All right, let's play the episode

Content Creator: Gypsy Rose is pregnant, y'all. Gypsy Rose just confirmed that she is pregnant. Gypsy Rose, you've not even been out of jail for a year, honey. You ain't e- sh- is she even divorced from Ryan yet? I

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: am 11 weeks pregnant. Ken and I are expecting our very first child come January of 2025.

Reporter: So to be clear, you haven't been with your ex for a... This is- Month, yeah ... clearly Ken's baby. March.

Content Creator: Um, early, it wa- it was

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: mid-March, um, when I left Ryan. So, um, this is absolutely 100% Ken's baby. Still waiting for the result of the paternity test. I did get the NIP test. The results are in, baby. 99.9%. No. Ken is the father. Ken is the father. Look at that beauty. Look at that beauty, guys

Javier: Gypsy Rose Blanchard getting pregnant wasn't just another celebrity baby announcement. It was closer to an internet panic, and it had nothing to do with who the father was, because we all found out about that pretty quickly. The panic was about the fact that the woman who ordered her own mother's murder was now responsible for keeping a child alive. This is the one thing that the pro-Gypsy and the anti-Gypsy side actually agree on.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Ken is going to be an incredible dad, and we are so excited to welcome our baby girl into the world.

Content Creator: It is official. Gypsy Rose Blanchard just announced the gender of her baby. Sweetie, I'm

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: your mom. I'm your dad. And you are a girl.

Nancy Simpson: She's a mom, and I think all of us collectively who give a crap about anything are worried about this little girl

Javier: Today's episode is about Gypsy becoming a mother and about everybody who decided that that was their business. I'm Javier Leva, and this is Pretend, stories about real people pretending to be someone else Let's be honest about the thing that we're all quietly thinking about, because I was thinking it, too. Gypsy grew up in an abusive house, and now she has a daughter of her own. The fear is that what happened to her is going to happen again, with her on the other side of it. So I read the research, and a person who has built her whole career around this very topic is Kathy Spath Widom. She's the one who popularized the phrase, "The cycle of violence," in the Journal of Science back in 1989. In 2015, she published a follow-up in the same journal that complicated the very phrase that she coined, the cycle of violence. She and her colleagues spent 30 years following two groups of people. One abused as children, and one not, and they interviewed their kids. Part of the cycle of abuse is real. The kids of parents who were abused were at higher risk for neglect and sexual abuse. But here's the interesting part, because parents with abuse histories were twice as likely to be reported to Child Protective Services. When researchers asked those same parents directly, they were not reporting more physical abuse or sexual abuse than anybody else. Kathy Widom concluded that some of that gap might not be more abuse happening at all. It might be more people watching. She calls it detection bias. So hold on to that, because there are not many mothers in this country being watched the way Gypsy Rose Blanchard is, and it started before her daughter, Aurora, was ever born. When the pregnancy was announced, some on the anti-Gypsy side refused to believe that there was a baby at all.

Content Creator: There is no baby. Aurora is not a real baby. There is no kid named Aurora over there. All right? She's pregnant, y'all. Now, am I wrong? I thought she couldn't get pregnant. I got some more no baby proof that you might need. This is how we take her down with no baby. This is how we have to do it.

Javier: To be fair, most people on the anti-Gypsy side believe that the baby is real. This content creator is definitely in the fringe. But when a community spends years picking through every frame of a woman's life, a few of them will eventually stop posting on the internet and start calling CPS.

Content Creator: Gypsy Rose has been receiving a bunch of backlash regarding her daughter, 'cause some people started noticing some weird interactions that she has with her baby, where it looks like she's going in for a kiss, but a lot of people are starting to believe that she's actually blowing on the baby's face. The reason people believe that Gypsy is blowing on the baby's face is because whenever she leans in to give the baby a kiss, the baby, like, jerks back. Like when you blow on a baby's face and they're, like, trying to catch their breath. People have posted multiple screen recordings of Gypsy doing this.

Javier: Let me play that clip one more time.

Reporter: We need to make our kids laugh.

Javier: In the video, baby Aurora is clearly laughing. So I went and looked up what happens when you blow on a baby's face. Well, it turns out that there's a name for it. It's called the diving reflex, and every one of us is born with it. When something hits an infant's face, cold water or a puff of air, the body does three things at once. The breathing stops, the heart rate drops, blood pools back out of the arms and legs and heads for the brain and the heart. It's the body getting ready to go underwater, and it works whether or not there's water involved. According to a 2012 study in the Journal of Child Neurology, researchers could set this off in almost every baby they tested just by blowing air across their face, and it worked best when the baby was already crying. As we get older, that reflex weakens, but in a baby, it's on a hair trigger, which is why parents use it. You blow on your baby's face to stop hiccups. You blow on your baby's face because she's screaming in the car seat and it's the only thing that resets her. So the thing that those creators are pointing to is real, it's just not evidence of anything. I've seen the clip. The baby is not gasping for air. You can't even see her face. But it was enough for Gypsy's critics to call CPS. I asked Gypsy about the live stream in question. She sent me a voice memo.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: My daughter, you know, Aurora liked raspberries, like but it was nowhere near her face. You know what I'm saying? Like, I wasn't blowing on her. Hold up. I gotta go get, get her.

Javier: Gypsy had to run, but she later told me that the blowing video was not the only thing somebody reported. There was a video of Aurora screaming in the middle of the night, and somebody called Child Protective Services over that one, too. In the video, Gypsy has Aurora upright against her chest, rubbing her back, trying to calm her down. And if you're a parent, you are no stranger to nights like these. But that was enough to make somebody pick up the phone. I called the woman who made that report.

Chrissy G: I sent CPS to her house a few years, last year.

Javier: Oh, you were the, you were the one that did that? This is Chrissy G, the woman who called CPS on Gypsy the second time. I have the letter CPS sent her confirming they opened the investigation based on her report, and what the letter does not say is what she's actually accusing Gypsy of. Gypsy told me that this was not the first time Chrissy G had harassed her family.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: She's left harassing phone calls multiple times, and she has called CPS multiple times.

Javier: Here's a voicemail Chrissy G left for Gypsy's stepmom.

Chrissy G: Hi, Christine. I'm calling you in hopes that you will understand how concerned the world is for your granddaughter. Keep her off the internet. Why is she setting up her camera to record her screaming baby? Are you not there to help her? You people need to understand where we're coming from. We are not trying to hurt Gypsy. We are concerned for that child, and she's a weirdo, dude. We hate her

Javier: This voicemail goes on for five minutes.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Her claims were that there was bruises, there was red marks all over Aurora's body, that I do drugs, Chrissy does drugs, Ken does drugs, um, and that she suffers from a, a breathing disorder.

Javier: I have Gypsy's letter from CPS, and I have the one that they sent Chrissy G, and neither one of those letters spell out the allegations. What Gypsy told me is that CPS showed up, they looked over Aurora, checked her body, and found no bruises, no scratches, no marks at all.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: And so I went, find a recording of it, gave it to her. They used it as evidence for the investigation, and me and Ken went and take a hair follicle drug test. Came back clean.

Javier: But get this, Chrissy G wasn't the first to call. About two weeks earlier, somebody had already filed a report, and CPS just folded the two together into a single investigation. They looked into it and they closed it as not justified, which is the state's way of saying they didn't find any abuse. They are still going through the footage frame by frame, and when you watch somebody that closely, you will find something.

Content Creator: People stated that they've noticed that when the baby's in Ken's arms, the baby's more calm and doesn't cry as much as when she's with Gypsy. Talk about the CPS investigation against Gypsy Rose Blanchard. During that live stream, Ken did something that many people think was snorting something. I know. I

Javier: get to... I asked Chrissy G why she did it.

Chrissy G: My CPS report was real, and there was no bullshit around it.

Javier: What, what did you see that was concerning to you?

Chrissy G: This happened last May when she posted a story of baby Aurora screaming. I'm a mom of five children. Three of them were colic. So just that right there, I knew exactly what was going on. I seen a little baby screaming her head off on Gypsy's shoulder, and realized you took the time to set up a fucking camera to record. You're a DD. You were DD. Like, immediately I, you know, the baby has colic. Why aren't you asking for help? Your baby is in pain, like pain, real pain, Gypsy. And you're not doing anything but recording for attention. So I sent CPS, I called them and I said, "Look, I don't know if it's because I can't stand this woman, and I think she should still be in jail, or if this is really- Something that should be worried about

Javier: Did you tell me what it was exactly that you saw that was concerning to you?

Chrissy G: It was the whole video of her. It was her story. I guess it was a TikTok story that was just up for a 24-hour period, and it was in the middle of the night.

Javier: Is it the one where she's rocking her?

Chrissy G: Yeah.

Javier: All right. Let me, let me watch it real quick, if you don't mind.

Chrissy G: Okay.

Javier: So, okay, so I watched, uh, one video. It's very short. So let me see if there's another one that's better.

Chrissy G: Yeah, a lot of people made videos about that.

Javier: I mean, it's just a baby cry- I mean, I, I've had two kids, and I've had colicky babies. Um-

Chrissy G: Right, but you, you weren't into the Gypsy lore when this was going on. She needed help. This baby, it was Gypsy Rose, not your friendly new neighbor who's a mom, or a friendly neighbor that's a new mom. It was the woman that took her mother's life. All I seen was her just shaking that baby, just shaking her, and like, "Aurora, stop. Aurora, stop." Like, I did not want that to happen.

Javier: I, I don't see her shaking it, but still, look, it, it is kind of like-

Chrissy G: No, no, no, no, I didn't mean visually seeing it. I'm saying I was, like, worried that was gonna happen. Like, all I could see is, like, this end up happening. She wasn't shaking the baby. Oh, okay. I was worried about it happening. 'Cause

Javier: I was like- See she's just rocking- No ... the baby and patting its back. I mean, not even patting. She's rubbing its back. No,

Chrissy G: she's, yeah.

Javier: Um-

Chrissy G: That's, that's rubbing it down.

Javier: I mean, I, you know, here's... I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna say my, my thoughts. I think about this two ways, okay? Just to be fair to you, I d- I think it's extremely weird that somebody would videotape a colicky baby. It's just kinda weird, right? It, it seems like- Yeah, that- ... attention-seeking behavior, for sure. D- I, I agree with that. What I don't agree with, uh, not from just seeing this, there's nothing wrong with that baby. I mean, babies cry. Babies are colicky.

Chrissy G: It, it was, like I said, it wasn't just... And I get that. I totally, I respect that, and if you were to only look at that video, you would think I was fucking insane. But I wasn't just looking at that video.

Javier: Yeah, I know, but at the same time, it's like, it, it's kind of a waste of, uh, CPS resources, right? Like, if nothing in that video is alarming. I know what you're saying, because you're reading between the lines, right?

Chrissy G: Right, but that's why I gave them other stuff. That's why I told them to look at her videos. We know Gypsy has an anger problem. We know she has a frustration problem. We know all of this, and then we see her have a baby, and we're like, "What the fuck?" Then we see her not being able to handle the baby, and nobody's helping her. Shaken baby syndrome, those things are real. Postpartum depression is real. Lindsey Clancy. Okay? Postpartum depression's a thing. I called CPS because I knew for a fact that they would help her, not take her baby and run, 'cause that's not what they do.

Javier: Krissi G believed that she was calling for help, that CPS would show up with services and mental health support, and a lot of people believe that, but CPS is not a support service. They come to your house to find out whether you are hurting your child, and if they decide you are, they can take your child with them. Like a lot of people, when they see something, they're supposed to say something, right? They're mandated reporters. Are you a mandated reporter? Is that what your profession is?

Chrissy G: No. Nope. I'm a mother, so I consider myself a mandated reporter, and they asked me that question, and I said that, and apparently in Louisiana, all mothers are mandated reporters. It's not like that in every state, but in Louisiana, if you have a child, you're a mandated reporter.

Javier: She's wrong. Under Louisiana law, Krissi G was a permitted reporter, not a mandatory one. A mandatory reporter is a doctor, a nurse, a therapist, a social worker, clergy, teachers, childcare workers, coaches, police. Somebody's mom is not on that list. But yes, anyone can call CPS. That doesn't mean that everyone should.

Chrissy G: She doesn't care about that baby. She wanted that baby to trap Ken. Gypsy is not a mother. Gypsy's a person with a child. That's all she is to me. She's a piece of shit. CPS

Javier: was just one way that Gypsy's critics weaponized the system. Here's another one. Gypsy says that somebody with access to medical records went through her daughter's files and put what they found on the internet to prove that she was a bad mother.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Oh, they have also doxed my daughter's medical records. They have broke into the system, the, at her pediatrician's office.

Javier: How did they do that?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: I currently have a HIPAA violation investigation going on into it. Um, I gave them all the information, but my friend was scrolling on TikTok and came across a live stream, and it had Aurora's shot records on

Javier: it. Gypsy sent me a screenshot of the video with Aurora's medical records on it. Somebody had logged in to Louisiana's immunization registry. Her name was at the top, Aurora Anderson. Anderson is Gypsy's ex-husband's last name, not Ken's. Off to the right, there is a patient ID number and her date of birth. None of that is meant for the public to see. Further down that same screen is a list of shots that she had gotten and the dates that she got them. There were shots for the day she was born, more in February, and then one round in April that was three days past due. So somebody went into a state medical database, pulled the baby's file, found a three-day lapse on a single shot, stamped the word late across the whole chart in red cartoon letters, and published it as proof that Gypsy was neglecting her daughter.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: And this lady that hosted the TikTok live stream is talking about how, how she breaks into my daughter's medical records frequently, and is just so open about it.

Javier: That is Gypsy's word, not mine. What I can document is one access on one day.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: She has, like, a medical background, or she knows someone with a medi- a medical background and was able to use the fact that she has access to that system in order to breach my daughter's medical records.

Javier: Louisiana keeps a database called LINKS, which stands for Louisiana Immunization Network Kids Statewide. If your kid has ever gotten a shot in this state, they are on this database, along with every shot that they ever had the day they got it. A lot of people have logins. Pediatricians have them, clinics have them, as well as school nurses. On July 30th, 2025, somebody logged in and pulled Aurora's file. Then that screenshot went on a live stream, and people sat in a chat and talked about a baby's medical record. Can you imagine?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: I gave all the information. I was calling hospitals. I was calling everybody, like, trying to figure out, like, okay, this, this crosses a line. If you don't like me, that's one thing. My, my medical records are very public, but my daughter's medical records, no, this is, this is beyond.

Javier: Wow, that's, that's so crazy. I have two daughters, and I would be pissed if somebody plastered their medical records on a live stream. And for what? Somebody wanted to prove a mother was neglectful or wanted to prove who the father was? I spent weeks trying to find out who posted these records, and I found the name on that screenshot. So I did what I do, and I called the stranger out of the blue and hoped that she picked up, and she picked up. I told her who I was and the name of the show. Then I asked her how she got the vaccination records. She told me that she had no idea what I was talking about. I offered to text her the screenshot, the one with her name on it, and she said, "Please do." And so I sent her the document. She said it was fake, but the document is very real. In April, the Office of Civil Rights at HHS opened an investigation into the Louisiana Department of Health over that record. That investigation is into the state agency and how somebody got access into its system. It's not an investigation into this person. I just want to be clear about that. Here's what I know. Her name is on the screenshot. She is named in the complaint Gypsy filed with the federal government. I asked her for an interview, and she said no. And I'm not gonna use her name because she hasn't been charged with anything, and I'm not interested in pointing a mob at somebody. But here's what I do not know. I do not know who logged into that system. Somebody pulled the record, and then somebody put it on TikTok, and those two things are not necessarily the same person. The only thing that would tell me who pulled that record is the access log, and I have asked the state of Louisiana for that. And if they give it to me, it will tell me how many accounts opened Aurora's records. And that should be a very short list because it should only be her pediatrician and pretty much nobody else. Now, here's a totally separate thing that happened in July of this year. The privacy monitoring system at the hospital in New Orleans where Aurora is a patient flagged that her record had been accessed without authorization. Nobody tipped them off. This was just the software that caught it. They investigated, and 31 days later, they wrote to Gypsy. Somebody had opened the family's demographic page. The page is not really medical. It was basically a nosy employee who looked up the parents' names, the birthday, and the address. But think about it. Aurora is not even two years old, and her records have already been opened twice by people who had no business in them. One of those places caught the breach and notified Gypsy. The other one let her chart end up on TikTok, and then 14 months later, Gypsy is still waiting for somebody at the state of Louisiana to mention it at all. When we come back from the break, I ask Gypsy how her own parenting compares to the way that her mother raised her and where she thinks the line is between protecting a child and isolating one You know, you're a mother now, and so, like, I think this part of it hits differently-

Chrissy G: Yeah ...

Javier: now is that you used to sleep in the same bed as your mother. You used to bathe with your mother. Now being a mother yourself, like, what do you think about all that now?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: I definitely can see all the areas that my mom went wrong, um, and, and just was strange. Um, my upbringing was not normal, and I vowed to myself that I'm not gonna be like my mom. You know, there's, there's certain things that even now that I'm doing in my parenting that's very different from my mom. And-

Javier: Is it like a conscious thing? Like, do you have to- It's... No ... th- every time you do something, do you have to, like, make sure you're checking?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: No, it's not even that. It's, it's more of a comparison after the fact. So it's like I will have an experience with my daughter, and then I'll think back to how maybe a similar experience could have happened with my mother and how that was, you know, laid out for me. So it, it's, I catch myself understanding how different I am from my mom in my parenting.

Javier: I know even as a, a parent myself, and I don't have the childhood trauma that you have at all, but I have a very estranged relationship with my own father. And, um, a- and my parenting style has actually been do the opposite of my dad, right? And I would imagine that that's probably- Sure ... your approach, too. But every now and then, my dad, like, appears in my personality. Like, uh, this past weekend, or like a couple weekends ago, I lost my shit on my kids. Like, out of nowhere, and I, I don't typically do that, but, like, I try to suppress that side. Do you ever have that problem where, like, maybe you're trying to hold back a side of you that you don't want to be, that's not natural?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: I think, you know, the only thing that I've, I've noticed is, like, maybe feeling overprotective. But I think that's a certain level of normal, too. Like, there's protection, and then there's, um, isolation. And so a lot of what my mom was doing was isolation and manipulation, whereas, like, I'm just being safe. You know, I'm just making sure, you know, the normal, you know, let's not let her go and roam around Walmart, you know, without Yeah. I'm just trying to keep her alive, though. You know what

Javier: I'm saying? Gypsy Rose Blanchard is the most surveilled mother in America. Strangers pulled her daughter's shot records out of a state database and put them on a live stream. Somebody called CPS because her baby had colic. If anything ever goes wrong in that house, somebody is going to find it, and somebody is gonna post it You, you can't help the way you're perceived, right? Like, your past will always follow you. But how do you want Aurora to think of you, to remember you?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard: I just want her to remember me as her mom. Like, her mom that, you know, protected her, and you know, yes, did, I understand, did some bad things in the past. But the person I am today is the person I want her to remember me as. The choices that I make of, you know, us blowing bubbles together. You know, the times that I rock her to bed. Like, that's me being her mom, and showing her love, and giving her the childhood that I wish that I would have had. And then watching her grow, and develop, and be happy for her, and, and cheer on her, her achievements. That's what I want her to remember me for.

Javier: After the prison calls came out, Gypsy sent me this. Quote, "So after debating for a month, I've decided to concede to the online hate and leave public social media. They have been successful at their goal. They will continue to spread hate and negativity, and I will remain a villain to the world, and my daughter will never see her mother become more than a murderer. They won. I'm done." End quote. Next time on Pretend, we are winding this series down Anything Gypsy Rose ran through my show, my channel. I platformed all creators. I promoted them. Do you ever feel like you created a monster? I say I created the Jypverse and, uh, and I'm gonna dismantle it. We're gonna talk to some anti-Gypsy creators who turned on their own side, and we're gonna hear what the Jypverse really thinks of my coverage.

Content Creator: He calls himself a journalist. Javier is the fucking flat fucking Earther, because he refused to change his opinion based on fucking evidence. And I'm just disappointed in Javier. I'm disappointed that Javier has all this fucking evidence. He has all the evidence and the opportunity to sit there and ask Gypsy about all this stuff that she's lied about, and he does. He asks her, then he lets her say whatever she's gonna say, and he never confronts her with the evidence, not once.

Javier: Oh, boy. Everyone's a critic. That's next time on Pretend.

Speaker: Spooky (Patreon Supporter): Hi, I'm Spooky and a Pretend Patreon supporter today's episode was written and produced by Javier Leva it was edited by Puneet Shenoy with the Podcast Pundits and theme music by Joe Basile with The Chicken dot net.

Javier: We are nine episodes into this Gypsy series. And of course I could go on, but I don't want to spread the peanut butter too thin. We're gonna have one last main episode and a few more bonus episodes. But I want to say that I do appreciate all my new listeners who just joined us because of the series. If you're new to Pretend, you should really check out some of my other investigations. A good way to do that is to go to thisispretend.com, my new website, and in the episodes tab, there is a starter pack of some of my bigger investigations. There's my expose on Frank Abagnale, my series on the true crime podcaster author extraordinaire LaDonna Humphrey. And then of course, there's the stalker series, which is currently working itself through the court system. The story is developing as we speak. I also want to thank my Patreon supporters and my Pretend Plus supporters on Apple Podcasts. Without you, I couldn't make this show happen. My Patreon supporters are all hanging out on Discord now. We have our own Discord server. I'm learning all about Discord. We had a live Q&A ask me anything session the other night, and it was awesome. I plan to do those once a month, and it was really cool because I got to sit there and just chat with my listeners and that was so much fun. It was fun for me, and I hope it was fun for everybody else. I appreciate you all listening. That's all I have for today. We'll talk real soon. Take care.

Speaker: end update All right, guys. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Ken Urker was found dead on October 2nd at his home. This episode was produced way before he died. So I wanted to come back on and give you an update on where we stand. When this episode was being produced, Gypsy made the decision to stay off of social media. Since Ken has died, she came back, and she's posted a few times, and one of those posts was a tribute to Ken that showed Aurora's face behind a TikTok filter. And that really set people off because for almost two years, Gypsy has said that she would not put her daughter's face on the internet. She always has a filter or a sticker or something on it. this was the clearest image of Aurora's face, but it still had a filter So this episode that you just listened to was all about Gypsy being a mother. And now Aurora's father is gone, and Gypsy is doing all of this by herself now. The theory going around the internet right now is that Gypsy had something to do with Ken's death, that it was all about a custody battle, that she was afraid of losing Aurora. And there's nothing behind these theories.this is strictly the internet speculating and going wild But none of that matters because we all know how the internet works. I'm getting calls and emails from people who are not even following my own podcast that these kind of conspiracy theories are actually penetrating their algorithm. So the theory is moving really fast yet we don't know a whole lot of information So if you think that the internet was keeping a close eye on Gypsy and her and her daughter you could just assume that they're gonna push the pedal to the metal this time We have one more episode in the Gypsy Rose saga, and that's coming out next week. If you wanna listen to it early, go to thisispretend.com, and you could find the link there to my Patreon or Pretend Plus on Apple Podcasts. But if you want, you could just wait. It'll be available right here next week for free As always, thank you for everyone who supports this show, and thank you for everyone who engages in a, in a productive conversation on social media All right Take care and talk to you soon