It might have been as early as last week’s People magazine cover featuring Gypsy Rose Blanchard, but definitely by the time she appeared on Friday’s episode of “The View,” as the hosts awkwardly joked, “murder is wrong,” that I started to wonder what the hell I was watching.
A few days before the taping, Gypsy Rose had still been in prison for her role in the death of her mother, a grisly crime that obsessed the nation in 2015. The 24-year-old Missourian had been raised to believe she was desperately sick: leukemia, a degenerative muscular disorder, a surgically inserted feeding tube. Only later did she realize that all of it — including her rotted teeth, her bald head and her wheelchair — had been wholly unnecessary. Dee Dee Blanchard perpetuated a horrifying decades-long hoax, cajoling doctors into performing procedures that made her healthy daughter into a frail dependent. Upon learning the truth, and believing she had no other way to escape, Gypsy Rose conspired with her online boyfriend to kill Dee Dee. He was the one who wielded the knife; she was the one who posted on Facebook, “That b---- is dead.”
Public opinion seemed to determine — correctly, as far as I’m concerned — that Gypsy Rose’s criminal actions had been understandable, if unfortunate. By the time she sat at the “View” table, she had already been the subject of a fictionalized Hulu series, a new Lifetime docudrama, and she now has 6 million followers on social media. Once upon a time, she had been a villain. Then, people realized she was a victim.
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End of carouselUpon her release, she was being presented as something else: an inspiration. A girlboss.
“America’s sweetheart,” a Slate headline declared, as commenters online encouraged her to get it, girl. Joy Behar euphemized her entire life story as “interesting.” Sunny Hostin, slumber-party style, asked for details on her prison romance with her new husband.
“I don’t like the fame, but one thing I can do with it is some good,” Gypsy Rose explained with the right note of Pollyannaish humility, and it became clear that someone had taught her — or, I dunno, maybe she was preternaturally gifted — to know exactly what tone to strike for a morning-coffee audience. These viewers weren’t looking for trauma and loose ends. They were looking for optimism, and for those ends to be tied up in a bow and presented as a gift. Gypsy Rose would become an activist, she promised the applauding studio audience. A “voice for the voiceless.”
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It was inspirational, sure, but the jaded part of me thought, Well, what else is she gonna do? Girl’s gotta eat. Employers aren’t known to fall over themselves to hire ex-cons with prison GEDs and second-degree murder convictions, but America loves a good redemption story. Gypsy Rose’s unique skill set for that was her wretched past.
As it happened, Gypsy Rose Blanchard wasn’t the only young woman embarking on a redemption tour last week. So was Natalia Grace Barnett, the subject of “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,” an operatic saga whose second season premiered on Jan. 2.
Natalia was a Ukrainian-born orphan with a rare form of dwarfism whose American adoptive parents came forward in 2012 with shocking allegations. The Barnetts said their new daughter was a sociopath who had tried repeatedly to harm them, and — this is where it got weird — that she wasn’t actually 8 years old but was rather an adult masquerading as a child. The Barnetts petitioned the court to have Natalia’s age legally changed to 22, and then they dumped her in a seedy apartment and moved to Canada.
In the new season, filmmakers produced evidence, including dental records and testimony from Natalia’s birth mother, that sure seemed to prove that Natalia was telling the truth about her age all along. Far from being a monster, she says she was treated monstrously. On camera, Natalia alleges that she was the victim of physical and emotional abuse, mostly at the hands of adoptive mother, Kristine. (Kristine has denied the abuse allegations; adoptive father Michael has corroborated some of them.)
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The showpiece of the season is a sit-down reunion between Natalia and Michael Barnett. He comes across as preening and histrionic, spending most of their conversation trying to convince Natalia that he, a grown-ass man, is the true victim in this narrative. At one point he flounces off the interview set while Natalia sobs in confusion. I wanted to reach through the television and throttle him, but once he and Natalia are finally maneuvered back in the same room on a different day, Natalia barely raises her voice. She announces that she forgives him. She will pray for him. She has found new parents, ones that offered her the love she was denied as a child, and she’s now healed and ready to thrive.
The series’s directors seem keen to showcase this interaction as the emotional resolution to their 12-part saga, until a late-breaking twist offers them something even more tantalizing: Natalia’s new parents leave the filmmakers a voice mail, implying that Natalia might be devious after all — “Something ain’t right with Natalia” — and the series ends with a promise that the story “will continue.”
An astute viewer won’t fall for the trick. Of course something ain’t right with Natalia. How could anything possibly be right for a girl who was raised in an orphanage, shipped to another country, saw multiple adoptions fall through (the Barnetts weren’t her first American family), and who was then demonized and abandoned by the adults who had pledged to care for her as their own? How could anyone possibly expect that yet another new set of parents — loving, maybe, but not professionally trained in child psychology — could cancel out years of early childhood chaos and pain?
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There is something weird about the public reintroductions of Natalia Grace Barnett and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. The way we rubberneck over their past trauma but then expect it to be neatly resolved by the time they hit our television screens.
It’s a familiar pattern by now. I’m reminded of the Turpin daughters — girls whose parents eventually pleaded guilty to child torture and false imprisonment — scrubbed up on “20/20,” talking hopefully about hopes of becoming famous singers.
Heck, I’m reminded of Britney Spears, whose legions of fans spent years lobbying to free her from her conservatorship, only for her to finally emerge and have people note that her behavior seemed a little, uh, off sometimes. Trapped in adolescence. Cringe dance moves. Leave Britney alone, yes … but maybe also hope she gets some help?
Free Gypsy Rose. Free Natalia Grace. What sordid stories. What re-entries to the world.
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