The Defense Put Gypsy Rose on the Stand First and She Said THIS About the Murder

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is HiddenKillers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

Tony Brueski (0:08)

Everything that we've discussed today is true. What Dee Dee did was real, documented, indisputable. Doesn't matter what Gypsy said on a prison phone call. It's documented what she did. There was other adults in the room, and they were figuring out what the hell was actually happening here. And Gypsy does deserve some compassion, but Gypsy also was convicted of murdering her mother. She convinced a man with an IQ of 82, someone a psychologist described as functioning like a 10-year-old, to stab her mother 17 times. She's not an angel. She's not even a good person. He got life without parole. She got 10 years in a reality show. In this segment, we're going to ask whether a real victim can also be someone who victimizes others without understanding or caring that she's doing it. Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author with us, along with Robin Drake, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program.

Gypsy and Nick Godejohn. Nick was the one who did the murdering, the lover at that moment in time. A video of herself walking into her mother's bedroom, pointing at the pillow, making a stabbing motion. She texted him, for motivation's sake, bring your A game, hon.

This is life, with me on the line.

She shoplifted the knife, she pre-cut duct tape, she put gloves by the door. His defense attorney said at trial that she learned the art of manipulation from her mother. Obviously, she did. Should Gypsy Rose have ever gotten out of prison?

Shavaun Scott (1:48)

That's a tough one, isn't it? That's a tough one. It's horrible. It's horrible. I think it's possible, again, complex thought here, to have compassion for her as a little child who was terribly, medically abused and controlled in so many aberrant ways, and then to say, but as she got older, she became fully accountable for her behavior. You can hold both at the same time. You can have compassion for a child, but hold an adult responsible.

I don't know how to answer that because I can certainly say that looking at the horrendous crime and the way that she orchestrated it with Nick, there could be a case for a stronger sentence for her. I can see it.

Robin Drake (2:39)

Or at least no parole because she got paroled.

As we're going through this and I'm sorry, you all know I'm a nerd with science fiction and sci-fi stuff. The only thing that popped in my mind was when we're talking about her and how she offed her mother was Star Wars and the Sith and the rule of two, one to have the power and the other to possess it and one takes over by killing the other first. It really is very tragically true in this case because she was released early for her conduct in jail. So I think the first question before should she have served more time is should she have been let out early to begin with because maybe she could have benefited from more counseling behind bars that she at least said she was getting.

Tony Brueski (3:23)

Or make it required behind bars. Or do you, I mean obviously rehabilitation behind bars is a pipe dream that doesn't really exist. You know, and though we like to call it that and then mark the box and say, see we're rehabilitating them. Aren't we doing good? Oh, it didn't work out so well. When we're talking here about Gypsy being released from prison, only serving ten years, putting people away, it's twofold. And does our system need to do a better job of examining what it's doing? It's obviously to punish, but it's also to protect those on the outside. Maybe retrospectively looking at this, did the judge at sentencing take consideration of protecting the outside world from Gypsy Rose into enough consideration with that sentence? Or was he just operating with the information that he knew at the time? Was there a way to look ahead and go, you know, this person could be pretty chaotic. He just very much administered or set up the murder of her mother in great detail.

She wasn't just standing off in the side and then Godejohn goes in and does it and she has no part in it. She had a huge part in it.

Again, it's a fine line with this case because there's empathy and sympathy of all this horrible shit but at the same point, okay, this is a monster that was made over here. If you take an animal and you abuse the hell out of it, the cutest animal in the world, and you abuse the hell out of it for many years, and it's going to bite people when it gets out, when it gets free. You have to take that into consideration of other people. Is that something that was really missed when looking at this again? Or is it hindsight 2020?