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Did Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard Neglect An Actually Sick Relative in Real Life Like in "The Act"?
If the allegations are true, Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard paid too much attention to a healthy daughter — and not enough to her sick mother.
Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard may have faked that her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, was incredibly sick, but chillingly enough, in The Act — a 2019 Hulu limited series based on Dee Dee and Gypsy’s twisted relationship — her daughter isn’t the only relative she abuses.
A quick refresher: In real life and on the show, Dee Dee pretended Gypsy had everything from leukemia to muscular dystrophy to developmental issues. She forced Gypsy to go along with the scam, making her undergo surgeries and take medicine she never needed. It’s suspected Dee Dee had a condition formerly known as Munchausen by proxy, and now called factitious disorder imposed on another. The abuse went on until Gypsy convinced her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to stab her mother to death in 2015.
RELATED: Gypsy Rose Blanchard Blasts Her Husband's Haters, Says He's "Rocking My World Every Night"
It’s difficult to watch the medical torture Dee Dee heaps on Gypsy in The Act, Hulu's fictional series based on true crime, but the story takes an even darker turn when it’s revealed the character abused another relative in a different way.
In the show, Dee Dee’s mom is actually very sick (unlike Gypsy), but the dramatized version of Dee Dee neglects to care for her.
In several scenes, Dee Dee is shown ignoring her sick mom calling for help. In one, Dee Dee cranks up the television to drown out her mother’s desperate pleas and continues watching cartoons with Gypsy.
“I need you, please,” her mom can be heard saying in the background. This neglect soon leads to her death.
This actually has some basis in reality.
Did Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard neglect her mother in real life, as depicted in The Act?
Dee Dee’s family has accused her of neglecting her mom, Emma Pitre, toward the end of her life. Laura Pitre, Dee Dee’s stepmother, alleged in the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest that Dee Dee abused her own mother. She said that for Dee Dee “to leave her mother dirty and not feed her, that’s evil.”
Kristy Blanchard, Gypsy’s stepmom, echoed those allegations in the documentary. “Dee Dee was starving her. Dee Dee wasn't giving her anything to eat,” she claimed.
Kristy also said she asked a relative if they thought Dee Dee “had anything to do with her mom’s death,” and claimed that the relative, in the aftermath of Dee Dee’s death, wondered the same thing. “That’s how evil she was,” Kristy concluded in the HBO documentary.
If the allegations are all true, it would mean that Dee Dee had a pattern of abusing sick people, making others sick, or pretending they're sick when they're not.
Did Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard poison her stepmother, Laura Pitre?
In addition to claims she abused her own mom, the family also accused Dee Dee in the documentary of trying to sicken or even kill her stepmother with the weed killer, Roundup. “She was putting some poison in my food,” Laura claimed in the HBO documentary. “Same thing she was putting in the plant.”
Dee Dee’s father Claude said in the documentary that Laura nearly died after that incident.
Unsurprisingly, when Dee Dee died, nobody in her family seemed to care. Claude said none of Dee Dee’s siblings cared that she was dead either and that nobody wanted her ashes after she was cremated.
“I said, ‘Flush that in the toilet,’” he said in Mommy Dead and Dearest.
Originally published Apr 23, 2019.
