Gypsy-Rose Blanchard wants to use her past experiences to help others.
The Munchausen by proxy victim, 32, opened up about why she has an interest in doing advocacy work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation in a Thursday, June 27 Q&A on her YouTube channel.
“I would like to work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation. I feel like after my experience I honestly felt like I really want to give back. It wasn’t fair to those kids what my mom did, getting me a wish and pretending to make me look like a sick child so my mother could get us a free trip to Disney,” Blanchard expressed.
Munchausen by proxy is a rare form of abuse in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy.
Courtesy Blanchard Family
When Blanchard was a child, her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, made her undergo years of unnecessary medical treatments. Blanchard would later serve eight years in prison for her role in Dee Dee’s stabbing death.
In her video, Blanchard recalled taking a trip to Disney at age 10, not knowing that her mother was “taking advantage” of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
“It breaks my heart to know that,” she said. “So, I personally have made a donation to Make-A-Wish because I feel like there is nothing that I can ever say that will make that right. However, giving a donation to Make-A-Wish made me feel like I was giving that wish back to a child, that I was giving back what was taken.”
Courtesy Blanchard Family
Blanchard said that the foundation and projects related to prison reform are “at the root of my heart.”
“I know what it’s like to be a prisoner. I know that inmates are not always treated fairly,” she said. “I was guilty of my crime, but there are a lot of other people that are innocent of theirs. And they don’t get to have their voices shared enough. So I would really like to shed light on that kind of stuff.”
In order to successfully go into advocacy work, Blanchard is looking into taking psychology courses to get the “background knowledge” to help others.
JC Olivera/WireImage
Creating change is something Blanchard told PEOPLE last December has become her “mission.”
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“The choice that I made to commit murder was never the right choice. So my mission now is to take what I’ve done and what [my mom] did and make it worth something,” she said. “So I think it’s really important for me to get out as much awareness about Munchausen by proxy as I can and really try to focus in on mental health.”
