American TV personality Stassi Schroeder has discovered that she’s related to recently-released prisoner and star Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
Gypsy Rose, 32, was after serving eight years of a 10-year sentence for helping to murder her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, in 2015.
Prior to the murder – committed by Gypsy Rose’s then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn – Dee Dee spent years abusing her daughter and falsely convincing her she was dangerously sick.
And now , 35, has revealed that, after contacting a genealogist to map her family tree, she’s a distant cousin of the former prisoner.
Taking to Instagram, the genealogist Dr. Adina Newman shared the staggering news that Stassi and Gypsy Rose are ‘at minimum 11th cousins’.
‘Still digging because Gypsy Rose and Stassi are related distantly in a bazillion different ways,’ she continued. ‘Stassi is 10th cousins once removed with Dee Dee.’
In response, Stassi could only say, ‘OMG I’m unwell’ before adding numerous crying laughing and skull emoji to her comment on Dr. Adina’s post.
Replying to Stassi, the genealogist saw the funny side and jokingly said: ‘I love this for you’. She then capped off the comment with a red heart emoji.
Stassi, in August last year, appeared in over 150 episodes of Vanderpump Rules, the spin-off series to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
She also appeared in eight episodes of the main series itself between 2012 and 2014 and wrote two best-selling novels: Next Level Basic and Off with My Head.
In 2015, Gypsy Rose asked her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother before fleeing Gypsy Rose’s home state of Louisiana and travelling to Wisconsin.
As a teenager, she was forced to undergo painful surgeries, take regular doses of medication, and use a wheelchair as a result of her mother’s abuse.
Nicholas was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2018 and is currently serving a life sentence (minimum 25 years) without the possibility of parole.
Gypsy Rose’s story was dramatised in the 2019 Hulu network drama The Act, which starred actresses Joey King, 24, as Gypsy Rose and Patricia Arquette, 55, as Dee Dee.
A true crime documentary titled Mommy Dead and Dearest had been released by HBO two years prior, just 18 months after Gypsy Rose was sent to prison.
In an interview with last year, Gypsy Rose admitted that she ‘regretted’ what had happened to her mother and her role in Dee Dee’s death.
‘She was a sick woman, unfortunately, I wasn’t educated enough to see that. She deserved to be where I am, sitting in prison doing time for criminal behaviour.’
Watch The Act on Lionsgate+.
