The true story behind the twisted tragedy of Munchausen "The law"

In 2016, journalist Michelle Dean wrote an article for BuzzFeed that became an unexpected viral sensation, entitled "Dee Dee wanted her daughter to be sick, Gypsy wanted her mother to be murdered." For years, Dee Dee Blancharde, who had vicarious Munchausen syndrome, had simulated her daughter's illness, confining her unnecessarily in a wheelchair and feeding her through a feeding tube. At the age of 20, although her mother had always claimed to be a teenager, Gypsy murdered Dee Dee with the help of her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online. (Gypsy is currently serving a ten-year sentence for second degree murder.) The story, with its black Gothic undertones and a fascinating mother-daughter relationship at its center, has sparked interest immediate Hollywood; three years later, it is the subject of a new anthology of Hulu on the real crime titled L & # 39; act, co-created by Dean and veteran television Nick Antosca.

L & # 39; act is the rare prestige drama created by a female predominance; four of his six writers are women, and five of the eight episodes were led by women (The mustang director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed the pilot). Yet a recent Antosca interview with HuffPost has been criticized by many Deans peers, including Slate's books and a cultural columnist. Laura Miller and writer and feminist critic Roxane Gay – for appearing to minimize his contributions. The historical erasure of women is a subject Dean is familiar with; before being a writer on television, she was a leading feminist critic and wrote a book titled Sharp: Women who have made the art of having an opinion, presenting biographical portraits of important female writers and critics who helped shape the cultural conversation of their time. We talked to Dean about the transition from journalism to television, about the importance of women in the writers' room, and about bringing the story of Gypsy and Dee Dee to life.

Where did this story begin?
Someone sent me a news wire containing photos of Gypsy and Nicholas, who seemed really scared. The story below resembled "there are fraudsters in Springfield, Missouri, and she pretends to be disabled." But what really intrigued me in the story is the feeling that these people did not expect to be where they were. They did not look hard. They did not look like criminals. They looked like people who had really experienced something. This is the week when the body was found, and then I spent about a year in the hope of gaining the trust of people in the case. And then the story became super viral and it was really shocking.

Why?
I knew that people were very interested in history when I was trying to give them a summary of the capsule, and I knew that a certain area of ​​the audience was really interested in real crime stories . I did not necessarily know if the public would understand that Gypsy was both an author and a victim.

How did you choose the direction you wanted to take when people started to tell it through film and television?
I had not prepared any interest in Hollywood. But when I started talking to producers interested in buying the rights of the article, this woman named Britton Rizzio is really distinguished. She was thinking along the same lines as me and she wanted to steer the project to involve many women. And then she introduced me to Nick because she thought that he would be a good collaborator for me. I was not trying to write in TV, but I knew that the medium had some possibilities to convey what I have always worried about is that Gypsy was a human. I thought there was a brave creative choice to make to find something more solid, and Nick was also totally on this wavelength. When he began to describe this as a journey of arrival in age, I really felt like we were on the same page.

What did you feel by going from writing this story as a journalist to obtaining creative license to fictionalize certain elements?
The best part of this for me was the collaborative nature. You can really feel like you're in a black pit, especially if you're a freelance journalist working tirelessly in front of your computer and being alone with this really dark subject. I have always lived in the field of immersive or literary journalism, focused on creating an atmosphere and a sense of place, as well as simply reporting facts. In a sense, the shift to fiction is not so far away. But it's also difficult to know people. It's also tricky when it comes to a high-profile case. It really started to weigh me a little. We would do something that already worries so many people.

What are the main gaps you had to fill in the things you wanted to dramatize but for which you did not have to report?
Oh my God. I do not know many things and one of my responsibilities is to remind myself that there are many things I do not know. One thing I really wanted to dramatize and really captivated me was the idea of ​​the girl [in a wheelchair] who gets up at night and walks down the hall, although it is not a specific night. We all go through where we try to find out who we are outside of the frame of references that our parents give us. Gypsy obviously lived like a really horrible version, but there was something that broke my heart in the idea that it was the world she could have and that she was trying to make the most of it.

Did you have specific goals that you wanted to achieve or a specific goal for hiring and hiring women?
The writers' room had four women and two men, including Nick and me. Everyone really wanted to hire women for this particular project. It was important because I think that one of the things that can make the series unique is that it plunges you into a darkened femininity, both in terms of how Gypsy was infantilized as a kind of doll and the idea of ​​the "good mother" and the kind of value we put on it. The idea of ​​a drama and especially a dark drama that has so many female voices is unusual.

Some of your pairs frustration on Twitter recently expressed on a meeting with your co-host Nick, in which they felt your contribution was underestimated. Did you also feel that?
I think we have certain rhetorical habits when we talk about creators and some of them are only related to the fact that entertainment journalists rely on someone they've interviewed before, and that's partly the way things are edited. Nick and I were collaborators on this point. It was very important for both of us that it be something that does not belong to anyone. I have been fortunate to be able to collaborate with many outstanding artists and to have this wonderful showcase of women in the kind of work that women are often not asked to do.

I just wanted to see if it was a lot of noise for nothing.
When I was a culture critic, I wrote about artists like: Oh my God, they are these creative geniuses, they have a hand in everything in the show. When you make a production like the one I did, there are so many people who have a strong creativity in it. I want to focus on those aspects of collaboration that are very real. I think I think that one of the problems is having this idea or this audience coverage that privileges their creative vision above everyone to the point where journalists do not think about the existence of other people in the group. And it's a rhetorical thing that happens in a lot of coverage.

What would you like us to ask you for more?
I would like us to talk more about the women directors of the series. It's a really unusual situation to have a huge cable show where the majority of the episodes are run by women. With regard to a serious prestige cable show, it's unusual. Many members of the cast commented on this, saying they were not used to having so many female directors and that they felt they were bringing something different.

And our writers here. My first love. I love them. I like to have a writers room. We discussed femininity and things like cutting nails. Just talk about the process of painting your toes in a female-dominated room – it's a different type of conversation than a male-dominated play.

As you have said, the series deals so much with that dark side of femininity that, in my opinion, can get into the wrong hands a kind of caricature, but it seemed very human and the characters were real.
This is the best compliment you can do me. One of the reasons I remained attached is simply that it's so important to me after hearing so many people say that "it was a crazy story" – and I know what they want to say and I know that they do not want to say a bad – but I wanted them to understand that it was a crazy story that happened to real people and that these real people felt a real emotion. For them, it was not a crazy story on the Internet, it was not a fun documentary, it was something heartbreaking and sad and sometimes even a little exhilarating in terms of the pleasure that it has. They had together before. Which is so sad because it is part of the trap.

I know you said recently that you did not talk to Gypsy. Do you feel like it?
I do not know. She has my number.

She therefore knows that she is presumably aware of her existence.
She knows absolutely about her existence. I will correct the record: she knows. We get used to it a little bit, when we're a journalist, we sometimes write about people and then they have their own answers, and they're entitled to it.