How Did Gypsy Rose Blanchard Meet Her Now-Estranged Husband Ryan? It Kind of Involves Joe Exotic

The story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard captivated the world. At age 23, after years of living with a mother who had Munchausen by proxy syndrome — and who pretended that a perfectly healthy Gypsy was sick enough to need a wheelchair, a feeding tube, and multiple unnecessary surgeries — the young woman conspired with her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn in the brutal 2015 murder of her mom Dee Dee.

During her time in prison, Gypsy continued to make headlines for her relationships, including two engagements and a marriage.

But how did Gypsy meet her husband Ryan? (And how the heck is Joe Exotic involved?) Gypsy and Ryan have since split, and Gypsy ended up going back to her ex-fiancé, but let's rewind and see how this all started...

Back in 2017, while Gypsy was still serving time behind bars, she got to know a man named Ken Urker, who had written to her via a prison pen-pal program. They hit it off and got engaged the following year, though they called it off in 2019. They stayed on and off for a while, but in June 2022, Gypsy ended up marrying a man named Ryan Scott Anderson in a small ceremony at Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center, where Gypsy was still incarcerated. For the public, it seemed like Ryan came out of nowhere. So, when did he come into the picture?

Well, it turns out Gypsy met Ryan similarly to how she had met Ken: through letters. Ryan had reached out to Gypsy in 2020 after he got to talking with a co-worker who was planning to write to Joe Exotic, the imprisoned star of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King. Ryan figured if his co-worker was writing to a famous convict behind bars, maybe he'd give it a whirl too.

"I said, 'I'll tell you what, if you write [Joe Exotic], I'll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard,'" Ryan recalled to People in 2023. "I never thought she'd be my wife."

But she did indeed become his wife, and he was the one who picked her up from prison in late December 2023 when she was released. They went on to live together as a married couple, and they even said they planned to have a second wedding ceremony where they could actually invite guests, unlike their prison wedding.

But then news broke in March 2024 that Gypsy and Ryan had parted ways. She filed for divorce the following month, which is also when she reportedly rekindled things with her ex-fiancé Ken. Fast-forward to July 2024, and Gypsy announced that she and Ken were expecting a baby together.

As for Ryan, he told the Daily Mail in April 2024 that he felt "blindsided" by their split. "I'm not doing well with it," he said. "For me it just came out of the blue. I had no idea she still had such strong feelings for [Ken]."