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Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison yesterday, after serving eight years for second-degree murder. Now 32, has barely spent a day on the outside and has already become a trending meme on TikTok. The Hashtag 'Gypsy Rose Blanchard' currently has 1.1 billion views on the platform.

The American woman has frequently been in headlines since her story came to light: Gypsy Rose was the victim of her mother’s munchausen-by-proxy. From a young age, her mother, Clauddinnea “Dee Dee” Blanchard, lied to everyone, including doctors, family members, and even Gypsy Rose herself about the state of her daughter's health.

Clauddinnea managed to convince doctors to perform invasive treatments on Gypsy Rose, telling them that her daughter had leukaemia and that her medical files had been lost in hurricane Katrina. While Gypsy Rose originally believed her mother - even thinking she needed a wheelchair to get around - she began to grow suspicious as Clauddinnea’s behaviour towards her allegedly became more violent.

In 2015, she and then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, who she met on a Christian dating site, killed Claddinnea. Godejohn is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.

The extremity and uniqueness of the case made it prime fodder for the true crime genre. Multiple documentaries have been made about the story, as well as at least two films, countless true crime podcast episodes, and most recently, a Hulu dramatisation called The Act.

Speculation has already begun about what Gypsy Rose’s life might look like following her release, including discussions around her reported hopes to meet Taylor Swift and life with her husband - who she married while in prison.

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On top of that, the first videos and images of her leaving prison and stopping off to buy shoes were immediately shared and dissected across social media, with people making edits, skits, or discussing her release in GRWM style videos.

We know the internet will turn anything into a meme, but it’s hard not to see parallels with how other famous, vulnerable women have had their stories taken from them to be used as content fodder.

This year, with the release of Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me, we’ve finally been forced to reflect on the misogyny and harassment that dominated much of her life: from her father’s conservatorship, to being hounded by the press of the early 2000s. The release of The Crown season 6 also re-sparked conversations about the treatment of Princess Diana, much of whom's life was considered public property.

Then there was Amanda Knox, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of her roommate in Italy in 2007. Knox spent four years in prison, has since spoken about her treatment by the press at the time, as well as the true crime genre - co-hosting a podcast called The Truth About True Crime.

While most of the TikTok videos of Gypsy Rose's release are - on the surface - cheering her on, we know how quickly the internet can turn on people. If she can’t be painted as the perfect victim, if she says something naive or even ignorant, if she decides to use her new-found freedom in ways people don’t like, will society twist an already tragic story into something more dark?

The nature of true crime content tends to flatten real, complicated, stories - many of which, like Gypsy Rose's, highlight the failure of systems supposed to protect us - into easily-digestible soundbites. We like stories with clear heroes and villains, where justice prevails at the end, but real-life stories and people are often far more complicated and morally-grey. Turning them into memes or 2-minute videos takes away that nuance.

Gypsy Rose has spent her whole life as a prisoner. While she has spoken to the press several times and seems to be comfortable telling her story, she has also had people, including her mother, claiming to speak for her since she was a child. Let’s learn a lesson we should have learnt long-ago, so we don’t have to look back on this in a decade’s time and reckon with how we treated Gypsy Rose after her release. She is a real person. A survivor of very real abuse. Let's not turn her into a meme.

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Lois Shearing is Cosmoplitan's Senior Sex and Relationship Writer. They have been writing about sex, sexuality, gender, politics, and relationships for almost ten years. Their writing on these topics has appeared in Mashable, The Independent, Metro, The Advocate, and Byline Times, among others. In 2021, they published their first book, Bi the Way with JKP. They are currently working on two other books, set to be published in 2024. 

In a previous life, they worked as a content marketer and content writer for various tech start-ups. They continue to be interested in the tech sector and its impact on our lives, relationships, and work, with particular regard to the ways AI will shape our relationships in the future. 

Outside of work, they are deeply passionate about queer community organising, and run the only support resource for bisexual survivors of sexual violence in the UK: the Bi Survivors Network.  You can find them on Instagram and X. 

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