Gypsy, Trump & Skeeves
Big week for true crime and our criminal relationship to the truth.
Hi friends!
How’s everyone doing? I haven’t sent this newsletter on a Monday before but I’m still getting a grip on what day it is in this new year of ours so we’re gonna roll with it and find the rhythm that 2024 wants to bring. I always forget how weird the beginning of January is, when the excitement of the holidays and the best intentions of a fresh, new start give way to the reality of … winter. I’m just trying to stay cozy over here and not get the coronavirus which has once again made itself known despite all the great work we have done to forget its existence.
Last week, after a friend texted me an alarmist tweet, I went to re-up my covid juice. The nurse checked my records and informed me that since she was dishing out Pfizer, and I previously had J&J and Moderna, I would now have all three microchips. We both laughed way too loudly, and having collected the elusive triple crown, I left feeling excited and accomplished (am I OK?), and poured one out for 2021 when vaccine brands were the height of culture. What a time to be alive.
Covid may be making a comeback, but it has nothing on Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the world’s most notorious victim of Munchausen by proxy, who was recently granted parole and has been on a wild press tour ever since. In case you haven’t been online in the past week to eight years, Gypsy plead guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 for conspiring to kill her abusive mother and she is now free, at 32, from both the fabricated illnesses of her childhood and the prison where she spent most of her young adult life.
In true Age of Unhingement™️ fashion, she celebrated her freedom by sharing her intention to grow her social following, and has been engaging in some heavy posting, including a (since deleted) bold declaration of sexual satisfaction in defense of the husband she married while in prison. The husband resembles her mother so strongly that Freud can be heard cackling in his grave, but happy for her that the D is so fire. She’s been through a lot.
The high point of her press tour, for me, was when she stopped by “The View” and Joy Behar needed a reminder from Gypsy herself that murder is wrong. Just feels very on the nose for how we’ve collectively chosen to embrace this story — glossing over the heinous crime of it all to champion her strength and redemptive ascension into the spotlight.
And Gypsy has nowhere to go but the spotlight, it’s really the only consistent home she’s ever known. First she was rolled across stages by her cancer-scamming mother, then her story became national news without her consent. After her confession, she was thrust further into the public eye by a true crime machine that turned her tragedy into tabloid fodder, a prestige documentary, and a limited series starring Patricia Arquette in an award-winning turn as her mom.
I worry for Gypsy and what will become of her when the spotlight begins to fade and she is left to reconcile what the freedom of living a life actually means. She has been so poised on her press tour, which is for a Lifetime docuseries that promises “unprecedented access” to her, but since her release, she has already given us more access than we deserve.
The level of social media infamy (and scrutiny) she is now experiencing after such a difficult childhood and years in prison does not bring the gentleness she likely needs, but at least now she can share her story in her own voice, however post-and-delete that voice may be, and here’s hoping that her story is the rare true crime tale with the happiest of endings.
In honor of this tarot reader in a bad wig that somehow made it on Fox News to forecast Trump’s demise, I am going to make a bold prediction: in 2024, courtrooms will overtake airplanes as a top nexus of Unhingement. Sure, that Alaska flight randomly shed a chunk of wall midair this week, but it’s still early days. Give the courtroom drama time to heat up — one week in and we have had a man violently jump over a judge’s bench with the velocity of a pogo stick, Trump’s eligibility to appear on ballots sent to the Supreme Court, and the unsealing of the Epstein documents.
I know I wasn’t alone in thinking what was being unsealed was a list of names that would read like a who’s who of boomer Hollywood meets the worst of Washington. What we got instead was a bunch of redacted papers mentioning the same old crew of dirty old men, a YouTube video from Alan Dershowitz that I would have to be clockwork oranged to watch, and some solid Stephen Hawking jokes. The juiciest part of the Epstein court docs, that screenshot of a Q&A where Stephen Hawking’s proclivities are said to include watching undressed midgets solve complex equations on a too-high-up chalkboard, is devastatingly not even real.
Anything to do with Epstein is entrenched in the kind of conspiratorial lore that makes fact vs. fiction a muddy discernment, but Steven Hawking holding a math class for sex midgets being taken at face value, while hilarious, is a whole new level of collective media illiteracy. What will become of the discourse this year when the professional liars campaign in full force and Trump’s distorted standup routine really starts cooking with gas? It just makes good sense that courtrooms, a last bastion of truth (at least under oath, in theory) will have their moment as this country’s relationship to reality is put to the ultimate test.
My reality? I’m going into this new week with a good attitude in spite of the fact that I decided to do a dry January this year, and since I live in California, that means I’ve given up weed. I do think trying to live your best life is a relic from less deranged times, but I felt compelled to be virtuous, I guess. Now I’m just too mentally acute and there’s no backing out because that goes against my core principle of having to commit for the plot. Hope you have a wonderful week, please think of me when you indulge in your favorite vices!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz
crying at “velocity of pogo stick,” absolutely perfect writing
Nice recap of our continuing absurdity!