Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s partner, Ken Urker, was found dead at the couple’s Louisiana home, authorities said Thursday.
Deputies responded to a home in Raceland, around 6:15 p.m., on Oct. 1, where Urker was found “dead upon arrival,” the Laforche Sheriff’s Office told Global News in a statement.
“We are continuing the death investigation. To this point in the investigation, we have found no evidence of foul play,” investigators said, without giving a cause of death.
Blanchard told People Magazine that she believed Urker, with whom she shares an almost two-year-old daughter, had overdosed, the outlet reported.
“I don’t know if it was intentional or not,” she said, adding that he had “not been in a good state of mind lately,” and was subjected to intense online criticism.
“Ken endured an unimaginable level of public scrutiny and relentless cyberbullying across social media platforms, including TikTok and Reddit,” she told the U.S. outlet.
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“The cruelty directed toward him was something no human being should have to endure.”
“I believe the tremendous weight of that scrutiny and harassment had a profound impact on him, and I hope his passing serves as a reminder that there is a real person behind every screen, every headline, and every comment.”
“I’m in disbelief. I can’t think,” she added. “I’ve screamed until my throat burns.”
Blanchard told People that Urker was “an amazing father and a man who was deeply loved.”
“He will forever be my soulmate and my red string, a connection that time, distance, and even death can never erase,” she wrote in an Instagram statement on Friday.
Urker and Blanchard struck up a relationship as pen pals while she was serving a 10-year prison sentence for second-degree murder in the death of her mother, and were briefly engaged in 2018 but went their separate ways a year later.
Blanchard then married Ryan Anderson while she was still in prison. The couple separated shortly after her release in 2023. She and Urker reconciled in early 2024 and welcomed their daughter that December.
After Blanchard’s release from prison, she grew a large social media following and starred in a docuseries called The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Blanchard later deleted several of her social media accounts in what she said was an effort to protect her privacy. In a since-deleted TikTok video, Blanchard said she felt “regret” for her post-prison press tour and apologized “to all the people that I offended with a lack of accountability.”
Blanchard, an abuse victim, was handed a 10-year sentence after she encouraged her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, in June 2015.
For years, Blanchard was led to believe by her mother that she had numerous serious diseases, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy and brain damage. Gypsy underwent numerous surgeries, used a wheelchair and an oxygen tank and often believed she was fighting for her life.
After Gypsy’s arrest it was revealed that Dee Dee had fabricated her daughter’s health conditions. It is widely believed Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental health disorder that involves a caregiver projecting diagnoses or inducing symptoms in a dependent.
During her trial, Gypsy admitted that she asked Godejohn, whom she met in 2012 on a Christian dating website, to kill her mother. Godejohn fatally stabbed Dee Dee 17 times while she slept in her home, where she and Gypsy lived together.
During the attack, Gypsy waited in the home’s bathroom with her ears covered.
— with files from Global News Staff
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