PRETEND

There are people online right now who don't believe Dee Dee Blanchard had Munchausen by proxy. Some of them don't believe Munchausen by proxy is a real thing at all. So if the abuse wasn't real, how do you explain the feeding tube, the shaved head, the free trips to Disney?

We also discuss the violence in the house leading up to the murder. If Gypsy is the monster, what does that make Dee Dee? For Gypsy critics, the pendulum swings the other way. Justice for Dee Dee, the movement that says the real victim here is the woman who died.

Was Dee Dee a sick woman, or was she a con artist with a kid?

In this episode:

Alaura Flowers and Amber Dietz of Into the Weeds

Content creator Audacious Audrey

Fancy Macelli of the Good Wives Network

Nancy Simpson, host of The Toll podcast

Gypsy Rose Blanchard

Want more?

Ad-free episodes, early releases, and the latest on the stalker case are on Patreon and PRETEND+ on Apple Podcasts. More at thisispretend.com.

Written and hosted by Javier LeivaEdited by Puneeth Shenoy with The Podcast PunditsTheme music by Joe Basile, thechicken.net

© Creative Babble 2026

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to the anti-Gypsy camp, they've found it. The smoking gun. Gypsy Rose Blanchard has a rare genetic disorder, a microdeletion on chromosome 1, and depending on who you ask online, that one word explains the feeding tube, the leukemia, the paralysis. All of it. Which means, according to them, Dee Dee Blanchard wasn't abusing her daughter at all. She was just a mom trying to help a sick kid.

So I brought in a genetic counselor and made her explain this thing to me like I'm five, because I am not a geneticist and neither is anyone else arguing about this on TikTok.

Kira Dineen, a genetic counselor, walks through what a microdeletion on chromosome 1q21.1 actually is and what it can and can't explain.

Featuring

Kira Dineen, genetic counselor and host of DNA TodayAndrea Dunlop, host of Nobody Should Believe MeGypsy Rose BlanchardBree, Fancy Macelli, Audacious Audrey, and Amber & Alaura of Into the Weeds

Credits

Written and hosted by Javier LeivaEdited by Puneeth Shenoy with The Podcast PunditsTheme music by Joe Basile, thechicken.net

Listen and support

New episodes drop weekly. Early and ad-free episodes are available now on Patreon and Pretend Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/channel/pretend/id6443456985Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/pretendradio
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I sat down with Alaura and Amber from Into the Weeds, the podcast that first dug through the Gypsy Rose Blanchard FOIA files. I wanted their honest reaction to my microdeletion episode, including the part where they felt like I'd pitted them against a genetic expert.

We discuss:

Is there actual evidence Gypsy was medically abused? I put a page from Dee Dee's medical file in front of them, a handwritten list of Gypsy's supposed diagnoses, and we argue about whether it points to Munchausen by proxy, malingering, or something the DSM-5 doesn't cleanly cover at all. We also get into the prison calls and how Gypsy seems to become a different person depending on who's on the other end of the line.

This is part one of a longer conversation.

The full, lightly edited cut is up on the PRETEND YouTube channel. Into the Weeds is part of Military Broadcast Radio, a nonprofit supporting veterans and military families, so go give them a follow.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to the anti-Gypsy camp, they've got the receipts. Gypsy really had leukemia. She really needed that bone marrow treatment, and the feeding tube and the surgeries were all real and documented, not fabricated. Case closed, they say. Munchausen by proxy, debunked.

That's the claim, anyway.

Three hundred pages of Gypsy's private medical records ended up online, and I got my hands on them. So do the documents validate the claims? We're going to dig in.

Want more? Ad-free episodes, early releases, and the latest on the stalker case are on Patreon and PRETEND+ on Apple Podcasts.

More at thisispretend.com.

Written and hosted by Javier Leiva
Edited by Puneeth Shenoy with The Podcast Pundits
Theme music by Joe Basile, thechicken.net

2026 © Creative Babble
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's like getting to the end of a movie and discovering the twist, then going back to the beginning because every scene means something else. That's what I've been doing all week with the Rick and Tanya Fernandez interviews. This time we're looking at Shelbey Fernandez's surgeries, what the doctor told police in 2019, and new audio from Shelbey Fernandez herself, recorded before her arrest.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices