‘I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t have friends’: Gypsy Rose opens up about killing her Munchausen by proxy mother in new interview

Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the woman who killed her mother in 2015, opened up with ABC’s Amy Robach in an exclusive upcoming interview about living with a mom with Munchausen by proxy.

ABC reports that Blanchard, now 26, and and her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, stabbed her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, in her Springfield, Missouri, home. Less than two days later, they were arrested and charged with murder. She now lives at the Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center home, but claimed that her current life behind bars feels less like a prison than her childhood home did.

“The prison that I was living in before, with my mom, it’s, like, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t have friends. I couldn’t go outside, you know, and play with friends or anything. Over here, I feel like I’m freer in prison, than with living with my mom. Because now, I’m allowed to … just live like a normal woman.”

Throughout her life, Gypsy Rose was confined to a wheelchair she didn’t need, given a feeding tube she didn’t need, chained to a bed numerous, and made to believe she was a sick child when she really wasn’t. As she grew older, she began to rebel, which one time ended with her mother striking her with a coat hanger, confining her to her room, and putting bells on her bedroom door so she couldn’t sneak out.

“She physically chained me to the bed, and put bells on the doors, and told anybody that I probably would have trusted that I was going through a phase, and to tell her if I was doing anything behind her back.”

“It would go into an argument that would last a couple days, or it could be something where she wouldn’t feed me for two days, or so,” Gypsy continued. “It started to be physical in 2011. She would hit me with a coat hanger sometimes.”

When Dee Dee didn’t have Gypsy Rose in hospitals, the pair frequently flew across the country to attend charity functions, where Gypsy was often the centerpiece of celebrity meet-and-greets an all-expenses-paid galas. Yet, she knew she was living a lie and knew she  could walk and eat on her own, and she wasn’t as sick as her mother insisted.

Behind bars, Gypsy Rose revealed what killing her own mother was like, and opened up about her father, her childhood, and how her mother was able to convince doctors that her daughter was ill.

“She had a very sweet personality,” Gypsy said. “She would use her southern charm to get them to be friendly and get on their good side.”

The full interview and story airs on “20/20” on Fri., January 5, at 11 p.m. EST on ABC.

[Feature Photo: Gypsy and Dee Dee Blanchard/Greene County Sheriff’s Office]