Gypsy Rose Blanchard Recounts Relationship Struggles and Couples Therapy Before Fiancé's Death

Gypsy Rose Blanchard has spoken about the difficulties she and her fiancé, Ken Urker, encountered in their relationship, describing them as "challenges that would break many couples." These revelations come approximately a year before Urker's death.

During Season 2 of "Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up," the couple was shown attending couples therapy. Blanchard later discussed this experience in a March 2025 interview with People, explaining the benefits of seeking unbiased professional guidance. "I like it because it gives an unbiased opinion," she stated. "Because you don’t want to go to your family all the time to talk about the bad stuff. You never want to have anybody going, ‘Oh, I think…’ You don’t want their opinions to be changed or affected or a bias or anything."

Blanchard emphasized that having a neutral third party helped them navigate their issues. "It’s nice for [us] to have someone in the middle" to hear both sides, she said, acknowledging areas where they needed to "improve."

"We have been through more than most couples have and have had challenges that would break many couples," Blanchard admitted. "But we still stand strong, and I don’t ever see that changing."

Her primary goal in couples therapy was to foster "open communication." She added, "I hope that we can get even more knowledge and let down our walls, because I’ve built walls over many years, and I think everybody has a set of walls that they put up. So I think it would be wonderful for us to bring those down and be the most vulnerable that we’ve ever been with each other. That would be my goal."

Urker was found unresponsive in his bed at his Raceland, Louisiana, home on his 34th birthday. The Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office is investigating his death. Blanchard suspects he died of an overdose, noting that Urker had been subjected to severe cyberbullying in the period leading up to his passing. "I don’t know if it was intentional or not," she told People. "He was not in a good state of mind lately."

Blanchard also informed TMZ that a substance was discovered at the scene, despite Urker not having a known history of drug use. Urker’s sister, Autumn, also suggested on TikTok Live that her brother's death was not "of natural causes."

The couple shared a 1-year-old daughter, Aurora Raina, born in December 2024. Blanchard and Urker initially connected as prison pen pals in 2017, while Blanchard was incarcerated for her role in the 2015 murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. They became engaged in October 2018, later separated, and Blanchard married Ryan Anderson in 2022. She divorced Anderson in 2024 and subsequently rekindled her relationship with Urker.