Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been released from prison and hopes to meet Taylor Swift

In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, “Karma is my boyfriend, karma is a god, karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend.” While the pop star was ostensibly writing about her emancipation from manager Scooter Braun, these lyrics could also easily be about today’s emancipation of tabloid star Gypsy Rose Blanchard from prison, where she’s been held since 2016 for the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard.

Gypsy has become an odd sort of pop culture darling ever since her trial first made headlines in 2015. A victim of her mother’s Munchausen by proxy syndrome, Gypsy was subjected to countless fabricated medical conditions, procedures, and even surgeries for the first 23 years of her life. She was forced to use a wheelchair and a feeding tube, had her head shaved and her contact with the outside world severely limited, and even began to believe in many of the diagnoses herself. “Obviously I knew that I could walk and didn’t need a feeding tube, but everything else was a really big confusion for me,” she said in a recent interview with People. “Whenever I’d question it my mother would say I’d had a seizure the night before and didn’t remember. There was always an excuse.”

In 2015, Gypsy conspired with her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill Dee Dee, which he did while Gypsy hid in the bathroom. As a result of the murder, Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison without parole, while Gypsy was charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to 10 years. After serving 85% of her sentence, Gypsy Rose, now 32, was released today.

Gypsy’s star only grew while she was in prison. In the years following her sentencing, a number of projects sought to tell the convicted murderer’s story, including Hulu’s The Act (2019), starring Joey King, and (loosely) Run (2020), starring Sarah Paulson as a mother with the same affliction as Dee Dee. Gypsy was also the subject of the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead And Dearest and will again appear in Lifetime’s upcoming series The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

With all of this hoopla surrounding her case, it’s no wonder that the internet had a bit of a field day celebrating Gypsy Rose’s newfound freedom. But for her part, Gypsy has a different sort of celebration in mind: finally getting to meet her idol. According to TMZ, Taylor Swift’s music helped Blanchard survive both her abuse and time in prison—she apparently used most of her commissary money to buy Swift’s albums.

Now, Blanchard and her husband (who she married behind bars) have tickets to attend the Kansas City Chiefs’ game on New Year’s Eve, where she is hoping Taylor Swift will be in attendance to support her boyfriend, Travis Kelce. If not, she is also planning to buy tickets to Swift’s upcoming Eras tour stop in New Orleans this October. Now that’s how you ring in a whole new era.