Gypsy Rose Blanchard said her fiancé Ken Urker died from an overdose and has hinted that cyberbullying might have contributed to his death.
Urker died Thursday on his 34th birthday in his bed at his home in Raceland, Louisiana. Blanchard told People on Friday she doesn’t know whether his death was intentional or not but that he “was not in a good state of mind lately.”
The Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but they told People that they were called to Urker’s home at 6:15 p.m. Thursday and he was found “dead upon arrival.”
Blanchard said Urker was the victim of online harassment, telling People she believes it had a “profound impact” on him.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard Instagram
On Sunday, she shared a link to a petition to get a law created that would hold social media platforms accountable for how they handle harassment reports. She called it Kenan’s Law, named after Urker.
“Ken was a public figure and experienced an enormous amount of public scrutiny,” Blanchard wrote on the petition. “Across platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit, there was extensive content about him that we believed crossed the line from criticism into targeted harassment and cyberbullying.”
She said both she and Urker reported the harassment and many times social media platforms said there was no violation.
“Kenan’s Law would ask lawmakers to establish stronger procedures for how major social-media platforms handle serious and repeated reports of online harassment,” Blanchard wrote.
Blanchard made headlines in 2016 when she was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. After the murder, it was revealed that Dee Dee Blanchard suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder that led her to fabricate her daughter’s medical problems when, in reality, she was fine. Gypsy Rose’s boyfriend at the time killed Dee Dee.
Source: www.huffpost.com
