
By Eleanor Harvey
On 23rd December 2023, a 32-year-old woman from Louisiana was released from prison having served eight years for second-degree murder. Originally sentenced to ten years imprisonment, she pleaded guilty in 2016 for conspiring to kill her own mother with her then-boyfriend. On 10th June 2015, she let him into their house, gave him a knife, and stood aside whilst he carried out the attack. She and her boyfriend then stole thousands of dollars of their victim’s money and absconded. Her name was Gyspy-Rose Blanchard.
But the chances are you already knew that, possibly from the very first sentence. In the twelve months following her release, Blanchard didn’t exactly disappear from the public eye into a normal life; instead, she became a minor celebrity. Just like any regular influencer, her relationship woes and cosmetic surgery journey ended up being followed enthusiastically by scores of people. Her Instagram account gained a peak of 7.8 million followers before she deleted it, citing a desire for privacy. She had her own reality series on post-prison life, did multiple interviews on TV and with celebrity magazines like People, and even cameoed in an episode of The Kardashians. If you want to find her on social media now, she is back on Instagram and TikTok—or you could just follow one of her many fan accounts.
It may seem strange to those less up to date with celebrity trends that a self-confessed killer could inspire this level of online following. But Blanchard is just one of a small, but intense, new category of celebrities who have gained renown off the back of serious crimes. Just a few months after Blanchard’s post-prison lifestyle started hitting the headlines, Dancing With the Stars—the US version of Strictly Come Dancing—caused controversy by announcing their 2024 series would feature con artist Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey. In 2019, she was found guilty of multiple counts of theft, having defrauded the rich and famous of New York City whilst pretending to be an heiress. By the time she appeared on the show in September, she was still wearing an electronic ankle tag decorated as just another fashion accessory.
But Blanchard and Sorokin are both made to look like relative amateurs compared to the most recent example of this phenomenon: Luigi Mangione. On 4th December 2024, 50-year-old Brian Thompson—CEO of American health insurance company UnitedHealthcare—was walking to a meeting in New York when he was shot and killed. Five days later, 26-year-old Mangione was arrested and charged with murder, which he denies. Yet the facts of the case have arguably become secondary to the online response to him. A topless photograph of Mangione went viral, accompanied by endless memes about his attractiveness, and his alleged assassination of Thompson was celebrated in some circles as a symbolic protest against the USA’s brutal private healthcare system. In one of the stranger indications of the level of fandom Mangione has inspired, hundreds of students at the University of Florida participated in a lookalike contest based on him on 12th December—just eight days after Thompson’s death.
So, what lays behind this peculiar new trend of hero-worshipping criminals? Firstly, it appears, the victims have to be considered unsympathetic. For Sorokin and Mangione, this means leaning into an “eat the rich”–style narrative: Sorokin stole from people who were considerably richer than most of us will ever be, whilst Mangione is accused of killing a man many would say got rich off of the suffering of the much less fortunate. It’s hard to square this in the end with Sorokin making herself incredibly wealthy off the back of her crimes and reports of Mangione’s own privileged background, but as a superficial image it works. Meanwhile, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s mother Dee Dee had Munchausen’s by proxy syndrome, meaning that she deliberately made her daughter ill and pretended she was severely disabled for attention. Essentially, it appears in all three cases that, if you have a good enough motive for your crime, you can be forgiven.
Secondly, it needs to make a good story, ideally one that can be monetised within an inch of its life. Undeniable a canny operator, Sorokin made herself even more famous from prison by selling the rights to her story to Netflix and Shondaland for $230,000. The resulting 2022 smash-hit miniseries Inventing Anna ran to nine episodes and set a record for most viewing hours for an English-language series in a week after being watched for 196 million hours. Meanwhile, Blanchard’s fame was bolstered by the soap-like twists and turns in her post-prison love life, as she split up from her husband, got back together with an ex-fiancé and had a daughter with him within 12 months of her release. Her social media activity, reality series, and book deal have since allowed her to accumulate an incredible net worth of around $3 million. If you know how to spin it, crime clearly does pay.
But there may also be darker reasons behind why we find certain perpetrators strangely alluring and others simply abhorrent. At its most innocuous level, it points to a phenomenon known as “pretty privilege”: literally, the somewhat controversial idea that conventionally attractive people do better in life by essentially all measures. So much of the buzz around Mangione has focused on his looks that it’s somewhat hard to deny its influence in his case, whilst Sorokin’s Instagram—where she has 1.1 million followers—more closely resembles that of a model than a convicted criminal, with its many shots from fashion photoshoots and brand collaborations.
However, commentators at publications including The Guardian have drawn attention to an even more troubling trend driving the Mangione craze: that white male perpetrators are often judged far less harshly in media coverage than women or people of colour. Relatedly, critics of Sorokin’s appearance on DWTSquestioned why authorities allowed her to take part in the show when legal battles are still ongoing over her planned deportation to Germany. At a time when conversations around immigration and extradition are more toxic than ever, it’s not hard to surmise that someone who wasn’t rich or famous and didn’t look like Sorokin would not have been treated with the same lenience.
Clearly, then, there is not only a right type of crime, but a right type of victim and criminal. Except, when you put it like that, it is so clearly wrong. None of us would like to think that we would be treated differently in a courtroom based on how we looked, or that if one day we were killed it would be treated as anything other than a tragedy. The multimillionaires Sorokin conned may not be perfect; Dee Dee Blanchard and Brain Thompson certainly weren’t. But there is always another side to the story. Thompson had two teenage children. Blanchard was severely mentally ill. Sorokin’s victims… well, they didn’t really do anything except be born lucky. But whatever your stance on any of these people, it shouldn’t actually matter. If we want to think of ourselves as part of compassionate, just society where everyone is treated the same, it’s time this truly disturbing and utterly bizarre trend of hero-worshipping criminals got killed off.
Image: Tingey Injury Law Firm via Unsplash