A sea of supporters dressed in bright pink surrounded Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts on Thursday morning, held back by yellow police tape.
There were around three hundred people there, mostly sporting fuchsia, baby pink and magenta outfits. Some held up signs to TV camera crews with hand-written messages including “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace for Lindsay.”
The vast majority of them were women. They were there for one person – Lindsay Clancy, the mother in the now famous Duxbury murders case.
Given that Clancy has admitted to killing her three young children, the support seems astonishing. Online and on social media, the obsession with the case seems to have spiralled somewhat out of control in recent days.
A generation of TikTok-surfing women obsessed with true crime are hooked. And they are resolute about one thing: Clancy is not to blame. Most of those who defend her say the medical system is responsible – citing the overprescription of an “everyshifting” cocktail of psychiatric medications to Clancy.
A growing number of others have taken over social media comment sections, claiming – without evidence – that her husband is the one responsible.
This is in spite of the fact that Lindsay herself admits she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defence has had three years to build a case, and yet it has never once disputed that she did it.
The facts, as stated in court, are that all three children were brought into the basement of the family home by Clancy, who strangled them one by one with her bare hands using exercise bands on the evening of January 24, 2023.
Clancy was found lying on the frozen ground outside her home, with her back broken and bleeding from wounds she sustained after cutting her wrists and neck before jumping from a second-story window in a suicide attempt. It is a dreadful, devastating case on all fronts.
An established part of the evidence is that her husband, Patrick Clancy, was not in the house when the children were killed. Patrick, who has become somewhat a symbol of vitriol on TikTok, testified at the trial that Lindsay had asked him to leave the house to pick up a takeaway order from a nearby restaurant and a prescription from CVS.
Jurors were shown surveillance footage placing him in the CVS store which showed him on the phone with his wife, asking a question about the medicine.
Clancy’s defence says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. They argue that she should not be held criminally responsible because this involved hallucinations and she lost her ability to understand that her actions were wrong. Clancy says she heard a voice commanding her to act.
The defence has also argued that Clancy had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and her condition worsened due to severe sleep deprivation, stress, and psychiatric medication.
Yet, it is not an uncontested fact that Clancy was psychotic at the time of the killings. Postnatal psychosis is hard to diagnose and treat because it is an extremely uncommon condition affecting around one in one thousand new mothers.
The prosecution argued that she was mentally distressed, not psychotic, and that she deliberately and methodically killed the children in a carefully hatched plan.
“She takes responsibility,” Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington said after a hearing in June. “She, as the kids say, she owns it. She’s not running away from anything here. This whole case is an extreme tragedy.”
The question before the jury is actually not whether Lindsay Clancy did it, but whether she was sane enough at the time to be held criminally responsible. Yet, in the open court of social media, everything is up for debate.
Her attorney Kevin Reddington has become a mega celebrity in the online world of TikTok in recent weeks, with his fandom now spilling over into the real world. Many of Clancy’s supporters gathered around him on Thursday outside court. In their eyes, the 75-year-old has become an unlikely champion of women’s rights.
“Is she aware of this support and what does she think of the support?” a reporter asked Reddington, whose past controversial clients include football star turned convicted killer Aaron Hernandez and Michael McDermott, who was found guilty of killing seven co-workers back in 2010.
Reddington is now 75, and after a career spanning 51 years, he is back in the spotlight.
“I’m gonna go in and see her right now. I’m sure that she is and if she isn’t, she will be. She’s so beat up, and just so sad, but this will really help her out, I think,” the attorney told a reporter.
“Tell her we love her,” shouted one of the women in the crowd. As Clancy was driven into the courthouse in a blacked out van, the mass of women lined the road and cheered. They made heart symbols with their hands. Then came the revealing interviews.
“I hope when this is all over, the medical field gets held responsible for some of this. Because she tried desperately to get help, and it wasn’t there,” said one woman holding what looked like a therapy dog in a matching bright pink harness. “Whether she’s guilty or innocent, it doesn’t really matter. Three lives are gone. And so, just get to the truth, that’s all.”
“The system failed her,” said another middle-aged lady, teary-eyed. “She was begging for help and no-one was there.”
“It could be one of my sisters-in-law,” said another younger female supporter wearing a hot pink jumper and oversized sunglasses. “It could be one of my best friends – and it could be me.”
When women are openly telling daytime news channels that they “love” Clancy and “it could be me” (caught up in a triple murder trial), we have reached a new level of collective insanity. It speaks to something troubling about our culture.
I understand that people want to make sense of what happened, but at the end of the day, this is a horrifying murder case.
The culture has become so uncomfortable with the idea of holding mothers responsible for their own actions that some supporters have effectively cast Lindsay Clancy as the main victim to her ultimate act of violence.
Ask yourself this: Would there be cheering crowds of supporters outside a courthouse for a father who strangled his kids because his mental health was poor? We all know what the answer is.
The Clancy trial has shown us that there is almost nothing that women cannot do that other women, and the media, will not seek to validate. The discourse in today’s society has become so radically feminized that anyone who doesn’t hop on the Lindsay Clancy bandwagon is regarded as an idiot who hasn’t spent every waking hour watching the case – and is scorned for being ‘anti-woman.’
That must be contrasted with how the public would react if a father had killed his children. Why are we so adamant in disbelieving that women can also be monsters who do evil things? Why are we taught as women that rather than taking responsibility, the fault for our behaviour lies anywhere but with us?
I support women and the immense struggles they can endure postpartum. I understand that sometimes women have disturbing thoughts, and that treatment can be destabilising, especially in a culture of over-medication. I understand the hormonal and physiological struggles. But the identification and sympathy with Clancy should floor us. Postpartum depression is real and biological – but it is not an excuse to harm your child in any way, regardless of how depressed you are.
It is fascinating that since the trial began, one very firm camp of defenders have emerged who sincerely believe that Clancy is entirely innocent and was framed and gaslit into a false confession by her husband, who they say actually killed the children and tried to kill Lindsay. This is soap opera.
“He wasn’t prepared for her to survive,” read one comment which has almost 24,000 likes. “He was having an affair! He had motive!” was another popular one. “THE. HUSBAND. DID. IT,” read another.
“That blink rate is off the chart,” was another representative comment which was liked 10,000 times.
If you don’t believe a good chunk of Clancy’s most ardent defenders who take this view have lost the plot, and that we should confiscate their TikTok accounts from them for their own good, consider how some are now consulting astrology and birth charts to define the killer’s true identity.
One TikToker made a popular video in which she excitedly says: “It’s been a while, but I have to pop on here just to say that I’ve been following this Lindsay Clancy trial, especially as a mother of two who dealt with a lot of postpartum mental illness. And just following all their birth charts and birthdays and zodiac signs, HE DID IT. HE DID IT.”
“He’s a gemini man. His birthday is June 15. I’m a gemini woman – my birthday is June 14. Let me give you another example of who a gemini man is. Also, my birthday is June 14 – men and women are different, keep that in mind, please don’t judge me – DONALD TRUMP. Patrick did it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.”
Videos like this have racked up thousands of likes and sometimes millions of views. There are very many of them out there. The reasoning? We know the husband did it, despite all the evidence pointing to Lindsay, and despite her confessing to it. And how do we know? Because his birthday is the day after Donald Trump’s – duh. The idea that you can solve crimes based on birthdays has become a legitimately popular view on female TikTok. This is conspiracy-brained lunacy. It’s TikTok-induced gibberish.
We must ask ourselves: Is it a sane society in which millions of women spend their free time rallying to the defence of Clancy, someone who murdered her children one by one? Is it a sane society that raises nearly one million dollars for her parents? And is it a good thing – or instead a terrifyingly bad thing – that women are racing to TikTok to declare that they see themselves in Clancy?
Some women are even making reenactment videos of themselves hanging out of their windows in an effort to prove Clancy was pushed in the fall which left her with a broken back and paralysed from the neck down.
It’s futile and it’s delusional. It is irrational. It is not a ‘who-dunnit’ when both sides have already accepted the evidence. This behaviour, now popularised, breeds a type of self-flattering satisfaction that has turned a horrible tragedy into an exciting murder mystery to be solved. It is a form of escapism from normal life. And it is entirely detached from the cold, hard, monstrous, realities of the case.
The most worrying popular sentiment among Clancy’s supporters is that they too could have been just one step away from killing their small children. To join this camp you must accept the horrifying premise that any mother, at any moment, might just become a murderer. For the sake of our shared humanity and all that is good, I cannot believe that is true.
It is not normal, nor should it be normal, to come close to killing your children. These women, while telling us they are sticking it to the patriarchy, are actually doing the opposite. This is particularly the case when they explicitly feed into the idea that women are by nature so unstable that pregnancy and motherhood are liable to make us all insane and highly dangerous to ourselves and those around us.
That is what Clancy’s feminist defenders are arguing. That they cannot be trusted to not murder their children, and any of them can do it. This is not a flattering or an empowering argument. We must reject it.
The Clancy fanfare, while it disturbs me, must also be understood. It cannot be ignored. It is the logical culmination of decades of feminist propaganda and policy, legalised abortion and abortion extremism, social media saturation, and the over-prescription of SSRI medication.
Almost 25 per cent of adult women in the US take antidepressants – more than twice the rate of men. The Clancy trial shows the dangers of these drugs more acutely than it does their benefits.
Listening to the Clancy camp, I can’t help but wonder, are we reaching the ghoulish end-point where arguing to excuse infanticide is socially acceptable? What is true, at least, is that many women have reached a point where they are willing to jump over Olympic-sized hurdles to absolve themselves of terrible things.
That is not good for society.