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Gypsy Rose Blanchard has revealed why her first relationship with Ken Urker ultimately fell apart she was still in prison.
In her new memoir My Time to Stand, which hit shelves on December 10, the 33-year-old opened up about the first time she experienced heartbreak behind bars. Blanchard — who spent eight years in federal prison for the role she played in her mother Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard’s murder — began talking to Urker, 31, shortly after the HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest was released in May 2017.
At the time, she was serving her prison sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri when she received a letter from Urker in the mail. “His voice leaped off the page, as if he were sitting right in front of me,” she wrote in her book. “Holding the paper, I could feel his energy. He was just a cool guy. ‘Hi, my name is Ken.’”
It wasn’t long before the two were speaking almost every day, sending letters and talking on the phone. Urker finally met Blanchard in person, and confirmed his romantic feelings for her with “the most passionate kiss.”
About one year later, Urker visited Blanchard again — to propose.
“We kept our engagement private, only telling our closest family,” she recalled. “Then The Act aired on Hulu, and I went from being known to a being pseudocelebrity.”
Hulu’s 2019 true-crime drama series The Act, starring Joey King as Blanchard and Patricia Arquette as Clauddine, offered a dramatized retelling of the events leading up to her mother’s 2015 murder. Following Blanchard’s arrest, an investigation found that she was abused by Clauddine, who forced Blancard to pretend she was suffering from leukemia, muscular dystrophy, and other serious illnesses.
“My personal life was a carcass to vultures to feast on. The media, including true crime armchair enthusiasts, investigated everything about me, including Ken,” Blanchard wrote. “The invasion was really hard on him.”
She described Urker as a “private person” and explained how the media “attention and scrutiny” bothered him, especially when the news of their engagement was supposedly leaked by someone associated with a family member.
While Blanchard initially blamed the press for her then-fiancé’s doubts, she now acknowledges that Urker ended their engagement for a very different reason.
“I thought at first that it was Ken’s discomfort with the popularity of The Act and the widening of my reputation that led him to end our relationship,” Blanchard said. “I was wrong. At the time of this writing, Ken has reached out to explain and set the record straight.”
“There were many adults in his life, presumably much ‘wiser’ than he, who suggested it wasn’t the right time for me to be married,” she continued. “‘If you love her, you’ll set her free,’ was the common piece of advice he’d hear again and again.
“I see now, he believed he was acting in my best by sacrificing his own needs and wants.”
In her memoir, Blanchard also detailed how she later married Ryan Anderson in July 2022 while she was in prison. They stayed together until after her release in December 2023. The couple parted ways in March this year, finalizing their divorce nine months later.
While she may have been swept up by Anderson’s romance behind bars, she later found out he wasn’t her person — a fact her friends were supposedly aware of before Blanchard.
“They knew we weren’t supposed to be together,” she wrote. “But like every other lesson I’ve learned in life, I’d have to figure that out on my own.”
Now, Blanchard is expecting her first child, a daughter, with Urker. The two rekindled their relationship about one month after she and Anderson called it quits.
