( Note: In discussing real-life events, this piece necessarily includes spoilers for later episodes of The Act.

And so we’ve wended our way through The Act via its depiction of the main players in this tangled family tragedy to see how closely it hews to the established trail of truth - and the moments when it may have strayed. The Act acknowledges in every episode that some of its events have been “dramatized or fictionalized,” which can make it even more difficult than it already is to suss out the concrete facts, such as they are, at the heart of this story. And in March, Hulu premiered The Act, an eight-part dramatic series based on the events leading up to and including Dee Dee’s murder, sourced from BuzzFeed reporter Michelle Dean’s 2016 investigative feature. It has since become the subject of an HBO documentary, Lifetime TV movie, and unending fascination and speculation. To be brief: In June 2015, Gypsy conspired with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to murder her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, who it turned out had made Gypsy a lifelong victim of her Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In fact, once her boyfriend had butchered her mother, she had simply stood up from her wheelchair and run out the house with him.The Act’s trickiest act may just be fighting through the thicket of existing coverage clouding the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Gypsy Rose wasn’t a child at all but a 24-year-old adult.Īnd she had never been sick, disabled or confined to a wheelchair. Officers were at first relieved to find Gypsy Rose in a hotel with her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, who she had met online.īut what they discovered next was so bizarre it was even more shocking and grotesque than the idea that someone had murdered a loving mother and snatched her severely handicapped daughter. The medications she needed to stay alive were found still in the house and a huge manhunt was launched. More alarming, there was no sign of her daughter, leading to a belief Gypsy Rose had been abducted by her mother’s murderer. Neighbours had called police after someone hacked into the mother’s Facebook account, and wrote: “That bitch is dead”. On June 14, 2015, sheriff’s deputies entered Dee Dee’s home and found the mother's body, facedown in a pool of blood from stab wounds inflicted several days earlier. Ted Bundy's girlfriend reveals what he said during confession to gruesome murders

The act hulu true story