Addicted to Violence Chic

R achel Danis is seen fixing her hair. So she’s stretching to reach and adjust a barrette or scrunchie (they are back, evidently). We see a close-up of her baby bump. Things are moving along in her pregnancy such that even when she is riding a bike through Manhattan, we see she’s pretty obviously pregnant.

After looking at a few of the photos published by the New York Post, I had to ask myself: Why on earth is this anyone’s business? Why are there paparazzi following Rachel Danis around?

Why are we so obsessed with celebrity, so much so that we make celebrities out of everyone, as if celebrity is the source of meaning in life — that it conveys value — and perhaps for our own personal entertainment. And notice the particular fascination with people connected to the horrifically violent?

Danis, in case you don’t recognize the name, is not an up-and-coming actress. She is the wife of Patrick Clancy, who is the former husband of Lindsay Clancy. The Clancys, as you are likely aware, had three children who were killed by their mother. They were not killed by Danis nor by her husband. The child in her womb will be a half-sibling to the children who are dead, but the unborn baby will not replace even the littlest, Callan Patrick, who was eight months old, and even survived the initial attack and died in a hospital in his father’s arms.

Before a mistrial was declared in the case involving the murders of five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and Callan, there were published photos of Danis and her husband daring to casually talk to one another. This was at the same time as people had all kinds of opinions about the trial, including theories that Patrick was secretly the real killer. This seems a particularly cruel way to add onto the mental load of Patrick Clancy, who lives with the reality of his dead children every day.

In a teaser for former New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s debut interview on 60 Minutes, a clip of Danis explained how she met her husband — there are theories about that, too. There appears to be a public invested in a plot twist on this episode of Law & Order, where even the jurors have become national personalities with airtime.

We know that some of the jurors considered themselves, behind closed doors, additional expert witnesses, giving their assessments as nurses and other professionals. We also know what they thought of the one “hold-out” who insisted that Lindsay Clancy was guilty of the murder of her children. And, as if the writers were working overtime, he’s the lone black man who served on the jury. After it was leaked to the media that he had a domestic-violence complaint in his past, he finally made a statement a few days ago. While giving thanks for his Catholic faith and his daughter, he put the attention back where it should be: “I know the whole focus has been on me, but we want to reel everything back and put the focus on the three angels,” said Michael Desronvil. “The ones that can’t speak for themselves, the ones that can’t defend themselves, and the ones that can’t fight the battles — and those are Cora, Dawson and Callan.”

And we haven’t even gotten into the famed Boston criminal defense attorney, Kevin Reddington. Some of the women on the jury loved him for giving them comic relief, they’ve told us. Already a celebrity in Boston, he has among his clients the girlfriend of Irish mob boss “Whitey” Bulger. “The 75-year-old is a black belt in karate and keeps brass knuckles as a paperweight,” one news story read. He became a spectacle during the trial, constantly holding court among the fan-girl women who would assemble to protest that Lindsay Clancy was on trial.

Because of the postpartum aspect of the trial — and it is wholly unclear from where most of us sit if Lindsay Clancy was depressed (a diagnosis which can be severe, and not just melancholy or “blues”) and on the wrong medication that made matters worse or was undergoing psychosis — women around the world were intimately linking themselves with Clancy, sometimes, almost as a cry for help.

I wasn’t on the jury, and gratefully so. I don’t know how I would have weighed the evidence before me. But I know three kids are dead because their mother strangled them, and our cultural responses to that fact are terribly troubling.

I can’t fault Danis for this, but in one of the parts of the interview with Douthat they used as promos, she declares that she is “just a girl that met a guy running in Central Park on a really cold Saturday,” as she was perhaps simply trying to communicate that they are trying to get on with their lives in the wake of something awful. I was far from alone in getting the romantic-drama vibe, as if she will soon be played by a younger generation’s Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.

The murders of Cora, Dawson, and Callan are not an episode of Law & Order, a reality Patrick Clancy has to live with every day. He is a father living with intense grief — who has been helped by trauma therapy to move forward — working with a foundation he established to help prevent such a thing from repeating in the lives of other families. A healthy culture would focus there. There is no Notting Hill in Massachusetts or New York, and even with a new marriage and child, there is no clean restart — no grief-eliminating resolution in a park — even if there’s a baby bump as in the last scene of the movie. So why are we watching it all to distract us from our lives?

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.