That was the week that the body was found, and then I spent about a year hoping to gain the trust of people in the case. They looked like people who had really been through something. The story below was like “there’s some scammers in Springfield, Missouri, and she’s faking being disabled.” But what really moved me into the story was the sense that these people had not expected to end up where they were. Someone sent me a wire report and it had Gypsy and Nicholas’s mugshots, and they just looked really scared. We spoke to Dean about the transition from journalism to TV writing, the importance of women in the writers room, and what it was like bringing Gypsy and Dee Dee’s story to life. The historical erasure of women is a subject Dean is well-versed in before she was a TV writer, she was a prominent feminist critic and wrote a book called Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, featuring biographical portraits of important female writers and critics who helped shape the the cultural conversation of their time. Yet a recent interview that Antosca did with HuffPost was criticized by many of Deans’ peers - including Slate books and culture columnist Laura Miller and feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay - for appearing to underplay her contributions. The Act is the rare prestige drama created by predominantly women four of its six writers are women and five of eight episodes were directed by women ( The Mustang director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed the pilot).
(Gypsy is currently serving out a ten-year sentence for second-degree murder.) The story, with its gothic noir overtones and a fascinatingly twisted mother-daughter relationship at its center, attracted immediate interest from Hollywood now, three years later, it’s the subject of a new Hulu true-crime anthology called The Act, written, showrun, and co-created by Dean and TV veteran Nick Antosca. When Gypsy was in her early 20s - though her mother still claimed she was a teenager - she murdered Dee Dee with the help of her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, who she had met online.
In 2016, reporter Michelle Dean wrote a story for BuzzFeed that became an unexpected viral sensation, called ‘Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.’ For years Dee Dee Blancharde, who had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, had faked her daughter’s illness, confining her unnecessarily to a wheelchair and feeding her through a feeding tube.
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