Gypsy-Rose Blanchard Reveals ‘Regret’ About Divorce from Ryan Anderson (Exclusive)

Gypsy-Rose Blanchard is reflecting on her decision to leave her marriage to Ryan Anderson.

Less than a year after the former couple’s divorce was finalized, Blanchard, 34, is opening up to PEOPLE about the impact of their split. Now, a mother to 9-month-old daughter Aurora with current partner Ken Urker, the former inmate shares that moving on from her past has been “a relief.”

“My only regret is having had broken a heart,” she says. “I’m not the kind of person that would ever wanna cause anyone heartbreak or pain, but unfortunately, that is a part of life. Everyone has broken a heart a time or two. It doesn’t ever feel good. It’s part of the long road to get to where you actually belong.”

Anderson and Blanchard first connected while she was serving a 10-year prison sentence for her conviction of second-degree murder for plotting the 2015 killing of her 48-year-old mother, Clauddine “DeeDee” Blanchard, who made her undergo years of intense, unneeded medical treatments. In July 2022, the pair tied the knot in a jailhouse ceremony, and they remained together from her December 2023 release until their separation in March 2024.

Blanchard reveals that she and her ex are not in touch anymore, adding: “After a long time of back-and-forth that just was unhealthy and argumentative, it’s best to let each other heal.”

“Healing looks like being able to remember the good times and forgive myself for the bad,” she explains. “I fully take responsibility for my choice to leave Ryan for Ken because had I not done that, I wouldn’t have my beautiful baby girl. I wouldn’t have the insight to recognize patterns of behavior in relationships that needed to be addressed and worked on. It was a growth experience for me.”

Blanchard and Urker also met while she was behind bars, and were briefly engaged in October 2018 before eventually calling it off. They reunited in August 2019 but split again and didn’t reconnect romantically until April 2024.

While Blanchard admits that “it was a difficult decision” to divorce Anderson and rekindle her relationship with Urker, she credits stepmom Kristy Blanchard for encouraging her to “prioritize her own happiness.”

“It was after a long conversation with Kristy that she told me that I would have to make a decision and it was not going to be easy — it was going to hurt,” Gypsy-Rose recalls. “It was gonna be hard. A lot of people would think negatively towards me for it. So she fully prepared me for the storm that was to come as far as backlash from the public was concerned. What I was not prepared for was backlash from family members.”

She says that her sister, Mia Blanchard, “reacted negatively” when she first saw Gypsy-Rose going public with Urker “immediately” after leaving Anderson. However, she notes that “everyone knew and knew for years that my heart belonged to Ken.”

“We all tried to accept the marriage with Ryan, but that hole in my heart was just too great to ignore and so I faced the consequences and the music as they say, and put feelings into action,” she explains. 

“I was doing it on a hope and a prayer that Ken was going to choose me to even get back together in a relationship with me, because it’s not like we had talked about, ‘Well, if you leave Ryan, then we could be together,’” she later adds. “It wasn’t like that. It was more of, ‘I have this pull in my heart for you. I wanna know for sure what could’ve been.’ I didn’t even know if it would last, but I felt that strongly.”

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Looking into the future, Gypsy-Rose says she hopes that Anderson will “be happy” and find the right person for him.

“I want him to be fully healed from the pain that I caused him,” she adds. “I know something like that takes time. And if he does have a relationship, I really hope the best for them both. I care about Ryan and I hope that he still believes in love. Just because I was not the one doesn’t mean that the one is not out there. So I hope he takes a chance on it.”