Gypsy Rose Blanchard is pregnant, expecting first child with Ken Urker: ‘Not planned’
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is pregnant!
The 32-year-old announced she is expecting her first child with boyfriend Ken Urker, 31, on Tuesday.
Blanchard shared the special news on Instagram and in a YouTube video titled “I’m Pregnant, My Journey So Far.”
In her Instagram post, Blanchard and Urker posed with photos of her sonogram. They also held up a sweater for their baby that says “Hi” on it.
“We are proud to announce we are expecting our first child in January 2025,” the caption read.
Blanchard said in the YouTube video the pregnancy was “not planned.”
Blanchard and Urker met through a pen pal program while Blanchard was serving a 10-year sentence for the second-degree murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.
They got engaged in 2018 but broke up afterward.
Blanchard went on to fall for Ryan Scott Anderson, a Louisiana middle school special education teacher. Their romance blossomed as they began regularly writing to each other while Blanchard was incarcerated.
The pair were married in a jailhouse ceremony at Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center in July 2022.
Blanchard was released from prison in December 2023 and she split from Anderson, 38, three months later. She filed for divorce in April.
“Unfortunately my husband and I are going through a separation and I moved in with my parents home down the bayou,” she wrote on Facebook in March.
Blanchard added: “I have the support of my family and friends to help guide me through this. I am learning to listen to my heart. Right now I need time to let myself find … who I am.”
Shortly after the separation, the convicted murderer rekindled her romance with Urker.
“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,” Blanchard told People magazine in May. “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.”
“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,'” Blanchard went on.
“Ken was that support for me when going through this emotional hardship of crying and then being okay and then crying,” she added. “Then I let myself open up to the feelings that I’ve always had for Ken. Those feelings just don’t die. 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 revealed in May that she wants to be a mom.
“Absolutely I want kids someday. I think that I’m going to be a good mother,” she told Us Weekly. “I think Ken would be a wonderful father, and so we’ll see what the future holds for us.”
Blanchard’s late mother subjected her to years of child abuse — confining her to a wheelchair and forcing her to use a feeding tube despite being healthy.
Dee Dee had Munchausen by proxy syndrome, a psychological disorder in which parents seek sympathy and attention through the exaggerated or made-up illness of their children.
In June 2015, Blanchard’s then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, who she met on a Christian dating website, stabbed Dee Dee to death in her Springfield, Missouri, home.
Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison plus 25 years.
Blanchard pleaded guilty in 2016 to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years.
She was released early on parole after seven years behind bars.
