The trial is Luigi Mangione madness all over again.
The trial is Luigi Mangione madness all over again.
A mid the Lindsay Clancy trial madness this week, I’ve seen a lot of social media posts from predominantly young women saying something to the effect of: “We see ourselves in Lindsay Clancy,” and “We are all Lindsay Clancy.”
Actually, no, all women don’t identify with a woman who allegedly strangled her three little kids to death.
Outside the courthouse this week, young women wearing pink stood in support of Lindsay Clancy, making heart signs with their hands. Some brought their children. Yes, their children.
“One of my sister-in-laws, it could be one of my best friends, and it could be me,” one female attendee said of Clancy’s predicament, presumably referring to her struggle with postpartum depression.
Are they so ghoulish that they are actually cheering on an alleged murderer? The facts of the case are that Clancy consumed a hefty and extended cocktail of prescription drugs to treat her postpartum depression after the birth of her children, which the defense argues induced a state of psychosis that drove her to the unthinkable.
“We feel like the system failed her,” another woman at the courthouse gathering said. “She was begging for help, and no one was there. I don’t know if us being here will make her feel any better but, I mean, she’s living in hell right now.”
Gee, maybe that sympathy ought to be directed toward her three children?
As for the claim that the medical apparatus abandoned Clancy, she saw multiple providers, visited emergency rooms, called crisis/suicide hotlines, entered a partial hospitalization/perinatal program at a hospital in Rhode Island, and self-admitted to a psychiatric facility for about five days in early January 2023 before being discharged. I understand the frustration with the fact that the often first-line therapy for moderate-to-severe postpartum depression is to slap on some SSRIs. There are some studies that suggest that those drugs can trigger mania or psychosis in rare patients. I agree with the assertion that we should diagnose and target root causes before handing people pill bottles.
But, if all of the above interventions represented the doctors and mental health care professionals “failing” Lindsay Clancy, then what does helping her look like? The obvious next logical step is institutionalization, which the left would certainly argue violates Clancy’s personal autonomy.
Just like with the Luigi Mangione fan-girling, what’s fueling the Lindsay-simping are social media algorithms, which have been feeding nonstop videos speculating that, actually, it was Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s allegedly neglectful husband, who strangled their children in cold blood and then framed his wife. Scores of Instagram videos have attempted to poke holes in the prosecution’s story to shift blame to Patrick.
He sounded complacent in the 911 call to police reporting the incident! He didn’t take Lindsay’s many pleas for help seriously as she mentally struggled! He moved on suspiciously quickly to another woman after her psychotic break!
These are baseless conspiracy theories. They have no supporting evidence from investigators, prosecutors, or the defense.
Lindsay Clancy admitted she strangled her children (Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months) with exercise bands on January 24, 2023, in their Duxbury, Mass., home while Patrick was out running errands. Her lawyer said as much in his opening statement. As for the reason Patrick hasn’t been considered as a suspect, his account has been corroborated by CVS surveillance footage, phone records, and other evidence showing he was not home at the time.
But, the online peanut gallery rebuts, his alibi is dubious as it’s simply too convenient! Some claimed he even used a body double at the pharmacy while he was really back at the house doing the diabolical, after which he cut Lindsay’s wrists to mimic a suicide attempt and then tossed her out the second-story window in the hopes she’d die upon impact.
As for Patrick Clancy’s supposed nonchalance about the situation on the phone with police, a veteran journalist from NBC Boston published her own assessment of the recording she heard, which was closed to the public.
“What I heard from Patrick Clancy when he found his children did not sound like a performance to me,” she said. “The screaming, the howling, the crying. . . . Now, you can check me. The published accounts from other reporters described the call the same way. Anguished. Frantic. Harrowing.”
The reporter also helped debunk the claim swirling online that Lindsay was coherent and conversational during the call. Her speech was unintelligible gibberish, according to the reporter, except for one word which she heard clearly: “basement.”
Patrick Clancy found his three children dead in the basement of their home.
The impulse to rally for the alleged criminal instead of the victim and to pin the crime on the man — because the patriarchy — is part and parcel of the worldview of toxic empathy that so many young women espouse today.
For all the fearmongering about young men’s dangerous radicalization to the right, we seem to have plenty of evidence of that on the left among young women. If showing up in public in a costume to wishcast that a credibly accused baby-killer and credibly accused health-insurance CEO assassin get acquitted doesn’t qualify as radical, what does? There’s a not-small chance that the average young woman today will condone either one of these two characters, which I imagine means tricky dating prospects for young men who hope to find someone normal.
Women are just as capable of maliciousness as men. Not every bad choice a woman makes is enabled by a man. Sometimes it’s just outright evil, with no caveats.
Lindsay Clancy is being accused of methodically plotting to choke the life out of her kids one by one, after having researched and calculated the time it would take for her husband to drive to complete various errands and return home. There is no doubt that postpartum is for many women a mentally debilitating experience, as many have testified. And there is no doubt that overmedicalization can absolutely hijack brain function.
But ultimately it wasn’t just a condition or a drug that snuffed out three innocent and precious souls from this world.