True Crime, False Witness

I n the more than two weeks since a Massachusetts judge was forced to declare a mistrial in the case against Lindsay Clancy, the defendant’s supporters have not let up in their campaign to ruin the life of the lone holdout juror whose confidence cost Clancy an acquittal verdict.

We now know that juror’s name, but only because his fellow jurors and their cheering section in the press did their utmost to out him. When his critics weren’t seeking to expose the juror’s identity, they were besmirching his character and judgment — sometimes in especially delusional ways. “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children,” as one juror memorably put it, betraying both her personal affection for the defendant and an unsettling inhumanity.

“I didn’t have any doubts,” Michael Péguy Desronvil, a father from a Haitian migrant family and the holdout juror, said in his own defense. “As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence presented.” It’s not hard to imagine the abuse Desronvil likely endured for refusing to affirm what he did not believe.

For his troubles, Desronvil may face a judicial investigation if Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer gets his way. Her counsel wants to examine the juror’s mobile phone to see whether outside influences swayed him during the trial, as if that’s the only way the prosecution’s case could have persuaded anyone.

It’s not exactly hard to believe that Clancy killed her three young children. No one at the trial claimed she hadn’t. Rather, the defense contended that mitigating circumstances around the triple homicide excused, if not exculpated, the children’s killer. A plurality of Americans — including a plurality of women — reject the temporary postpartum insanity defense, but at least it’s an argument. What’s not even remotely plausible is that Clancy’s husband, Patrick, played some nefarious role in his children’s slaying. And yet, a significant constituency seems deeply invested in that unreality.

Patrick Clancy sat down with 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat over the weekend for an emotionally taxing interview in which he describes the experience of finding his family dead, save one child who passed away in his arms. He also describes the ordeal he’s experienced since the trial started, in which what must feel like an army of his wife’s supporters has done its utmost to make his and his new wife’s lives miserable. Maybe they’re convinced that, with a sufficient level of harassment, Clancy will have a theatrical meltdown in which he confesses to having framed his former wife. Maybe they’ve watched too many movies.

Indeed, a whole industry seems committed to retailing dubious but less-than-defamatory claims about Clancy designed to implicate him without leveling any concrete charges: the business of amateur “true crime” sleuthing.

The Crime Junkie Podcast contributor Briana Whitney savaged Douthat and 60 Minutes for failing to confront Clancy with the semi-cogent and wholly implausible theories that help “true crime” podcasters fill time. “If you’re frustrated by what you just watched, you’re not alone — we truly don’t know anything from Patrick,” she insisted. “I still think it’s far more likely that he did it than Lindsay,” said the TikTok star JA Kramer, who created a PowerPoint presentation titled “Patrick Did It.” Some even seemed to take pleasure in Patrick Clancy’s torment. As the content creator Alexis Rose said immediately following the CBS broadcast, “The bliss I feel in knowing that Patrick knows that I know.” Each complained that Douthat failed to press Clancy on the various vivid theories that populate the internet, which include the claim that he “hired a body double to go to the CVS for him” while he framed his wife for his kids’ killing.

From the casual slandering of the holdout juror to the possibly actionable denigration of a grieving father, the perversions we’ve had to witness have little to do with the facts in evidence. Rather, they seem to be motivated by their theorists’ desire to prove their membership in an exclusive club. They want to believe that they have seen a hidden truth. They want to think that they are so perceptive as to understand that every story has a far more complex, and more satisfyingly dramatic, subplot. “In the case of Patrick Clancy, there is a deep-rooted willfulness to not see things as they are,” our own Eva Terry wrote in an insightful analysis of Clancy’s interview. She’s right. That’s a problem that plagues “true crime” fandom.

Not every, or even most, of the defamatory allegations bandied about on your favorite podcast can be remedied in civil courts, but some have been. Earlier this year, an Idaho jury awarded Rebecca Scofield $10 million in damages — more than her lawyers sought — after she proved that “psychic detective” Ashley Guillard’s wildly popular TikToks alleging that Scofield was responsible for a quadruple homicide in 2022 were baseless. The YouTuber Ryan Upchurch was ordered to fork over almost $18 million after he spent weeks harassing the family of missing teen Kiely Rodni, alleging that her relatives were behind it all. It’s gotten to the point where being sued has become a point of pride within the true crime community — perhaps because the industry’s presenters typically couch their claims in language that indemnifies the speaker.

Given how common the dramatization of criminal cases has become on this medium, it makes no sense to allege that there’s something special about Lindsay Clancy’s case. Her horrific acts did not inspire so much fan fiction because her actions shine a spotlight on the “harsh realities of motherhood” or because her backers refuse to confront the “horrifying reality” of her alleged crimes. Clancy herself was only a catalyst for the phenomenon that truly jazzes true crime enthusiasts: how these outlets let listeners imagine themselves as a real-life Columbo.

According to some psychologists, the true crime genre — which “utilizes techniques from fiction, like dramatic narrative arcs and characterization techniques” to “deliver compelling stories” — is an elaborate coping mechanism. “The true crime stories they listened to validated both past experiences and future fears of gender-based violence,” Psyche contributor Amelia Anthony postulated. It is the refuge to which women who come up in “violent and patriarchal societies” like our own retreat.

Anthony cited Yale University professor Jeffrey Alexander’s work on the phenomenon of “cultural trauma” to illustrate her point. Alexander’s contributions are helpful, although perhaps not as Anthony intended. “For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises,” Alexander wrote. What he calls “collective actors,” and what Max Weber called “carrier groups” — each with their own “ideal and material interests” — use their talents to “represent social pain” as a means of establishing their place in the social pecking order.

There is value in the exploration of that “social pain.” Some call it a “psychological rehearsal” for the eventual experience of trauma. But the overexposure to these “carrier groups” has a proven capacity to convince lay observers to overestimate their own personal risk, experience anxiety, and, most observably, succumb to an irrational level of mistrust in individuals and institutions.

The Clancy trial and its aftermath have given us a full-spectrum look at what a pathological level of mistrust paired with unearned self-confidence looks like. The business of “true crime” has led its consumers to conclude that there’s always a third act — a twist at the end of the teleplay that provides the audience with a tidy payoff. “But crime cases don’t follow a clean narrative, even though viewers and listeners really want them to,” said one media studies professor.

In the end, “true crime” isn’t about the perpetrators, the victims, or even the state’s discrete allegations in this case or the other. It’s about us — the viewer, the listener, the host and guests — all displaying their infinite capacity for cleverness. And if that exhibition produces entirely new victims or revictimizes the already traumatized, well, that’s a small price to pay.