Another summer, another high-profile trial for everyone to lose their mind over. There was Boston’s Karen Read in 2024, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s battle over who abused who worse a few years before that, and now, there’s the case of Lindsay Clancy.
Clancy, whose legal team says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, strangled her three children to death in the basement of her Massachusetts home in early 2023, and neither she nor her lawyers deny that. The murder trial that’s taking place now is to ascertain whether Clancy should spend the rest of her life in prison, or in a mental institution. But on some deep and feminine corners of the internet, there is a chorus growing who believe that Clancy is innocent, and allege that her husband, Patrick, is the one who committed the unspeakable crime.
And then there is a wider, concentric circle of women who believe that Clancy did the murders, but want to stand in solidarity with her. “I could have been Lindsay. Any one of us could have been,” wrote one woman in her defense, echoing a recurring theme. I don’t actually think that’s true; most people are not actually capable of, or at risk of, doing what Clancy did.
The whole Clancy phenomenon has me thinking about the trial of the decade, which happened the year I was born. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman after a trial that caught the world’s attention. Back then, there was a racial divide about the trial: In one survey, 70 percent of white people thought O.J. did it, while a proportional share of black respondents, 70 percent, said he didn’t. In 1995, the O.J. case became a lightning rod for arguments about race and the criminal justice system; today, Clancy is becoming a proxy for one about gender—specifically, the burden we put on mothers, and how we deal with it when they break.
Dan Ahdoot and I talked about Lindsay Clancy, plus OpenAI boss Dario Amodei’s mysterious wife, during this week’s episode of Second Thought. You can listen to it here, or watch below:
Editor’s Note:
Whether we think Clancy did or did not kill her children is an answer that no one can positively say. For now, even though the court will soon present the jury’s “opinion” to answer the question, we will still NEVER know for certain. The jury’s decision of guilt or innocence in this case is no different from thousands of other such cases. What is the commonality in the Clancy case and all other murder trials? Somebody who is innocent has been killed, and the killing was heinous and unconscionable, or there would be no trial!
I can’t get past the fact that so many of the so-called “experts” deeply involved in this series of events are the very type of “experts” courts call on to explain the facts of these incidents. However, no matter the explanations they give under oath in a murder trial, the experts — many of whom are paid for their expertise and testimonies — are only giving their “opinions.” They don’t know the facts.
Whether Clancy is adjudicated as guilty on any level, the penalty she will receive will NOT come close to “accountability” for her three heinous murders of her children in one of the most brutal ways possible.
Just imagine the fear in those babies’ minds as their Mom was killing them.
By the way: this event illustrates only the beginning of a chapter of “equal justice under the law” that our founders would shudder at even the thought.
“Please, God, take care of those babies whose mother took their lives in ways that prove the sin-infested atmosphere from Hell is being normalized in our nation. Please forgive those who wrote these laws and punishments and those who accept such atrocities as “accountability.” And please forgive us for allowing deaths like this to happen with such hollow retribution for such horrors.”
