Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the woman who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for her involvement in the killing of her abusive mother Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard in 2015, announced on Tuesday that she is expecting her first child with her boyfriend, Ken Urker, 31. Blanchard was released from prison in December 2023 after serving eight years of her sentence, after pleading guilty to second-degree murder for her role in the murder of her mother, who abused her for years via Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
The 32-year-old Blanchard shared the pregnancy news in a video titled “I’m Pregnant, My Journey So Far” posted on her YouTube channel on Tuesday, July 9: “I know the rumors have been flying around for quite some time now, and I’m happy to announce that I am 11 weeks pregnant. Ken and I are expecting our very first child come January of 2025 … This was not planned at all, it was completely unexpected, but we’re both very excited to take on this new journey of parenthood.” Blanchard added: “I know that there are going to be people who feel like I’m not ready to be a mother, and I don’t know if anyone’s really ready to be a mother. I don’t know anybody that said, ‘Okay, I’m ready, I’m doing this … All the things that I wanted in a mother, I want to give to this baby. I am a mother now, I am happy, and I just want to be a good mother for my child. I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”
Blanchard and Urker first connected as pen pals while Blanchard was still in prison. Urker proposed in 2018, however their relationship at the time ended years prior to her 2023 prison release. Blanchard later married her ex-husband, Ryan Anderson, while still in prison. However following her release from jail and subsequent split from Anderson in March, Blanchard and Urker reconnected. Blanchard told PEOPLE in May: “Ken and I reconnected as friends. It wasn’t like, jump out of a marriage and then let me meet up with you, and boom, we’re in a relationship. We had kept a friendship for the longest time. He was in a relationship. I was with Ryan, and so we were living different lives with respect to our partners, a ‘wish you the best’ type of thing.” After her marriage to Anderson fell apart, Blanchard said she reached out to Urker: “It wasn’t until I knew that my marriage was over that I was like, ‘I would like to see you and let’s hang out because we never got to hang out before when I was in prison’. I would say that Ken is my first love because that’s when I honestly felt like a mature love. It wasn’t based off of a fantasy. It was actually based on a connection that two people have for each other.”
Blanchard’s story was explored in the Lifetime docuseries The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, released in January. She is currently appearing in Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up, which airs Mondays at 9/8c on Lifetime.
Editorial credit: Natalia Deriabina / Shutterstock.com