In January 2023, suburban US mother Lindsay Clancy sent her husband Patrick to pick up a takeaway. She then killed their three children, aged five, three, and eight months, and tried to take her own life, sustaining serious spinal injuries that left her paralysed from the waist down.
The 36-year-old from Massachusetts, now on trial for murder, does not deny killing her children, but argues she is not guilty of the charges against her because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time. In the months leading up to the tragedy, she had sought help from multiple medical professionals, tried more than a dozen prescription drugs, gone to A&E, checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and twice called a suicide hotline.
Jurors are now into their fourth day of deliberations on the verdict, and the televised trial has “gathered extraordinary – and increasingly uncontrollable – momentum among the public”, said The Times. Observers in the US and beyond have been “transfixed” by the tragedy, with conspiracy theories multiplying online and silent rallies organised in support of Clancy, mainly by women who believe she was failed by America’s maternal healthcare system.
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‘Very worst nightmare’
Clancy has become a “something of a feminist symbol” to her supporters, said The Telegraph’s US correspondent, David Millward. Women wearing pink T-shirts saying “Believe”, “She Needed Help”, and “Peace For Lindsay” gathered outside the courthouse. They – and those at “scores of other rallies” – see her as a tragic “example of failing mental-health support for new mothers”.
Many mothers sympathise with Clancy because “she is our very worst nightmare”, said Victoria Smith on UnHerd. She is “a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear”. Looking at her in the courtroom, we see “the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us”. Her actions are “not excusable” but “that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion”. This is what happens when “mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialised, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected”.
As a mother of four, I’m “perplexed” at the support for Clancy, said Nicole Russell on USA Today. You can be “upset about her unsupportive husband” and “frustrated” that all those drugs “scrambled her body and mind”, but “holding her up as a poster child” for struggling new mums? That’s “a bridge too far”. We have turned into “a society which cherry-picks its response to horrifying events”, viewing them only “through the lens of our own experience”. Compassion for Clancy is one thing but it should not overshadow “the demand for justice” for her three dead children.
If a positive can be drawn from this situation, it’s that a “global spotlight” has been shone on postpartum psychosis, said Olivia Petter in The Independent. The condition, which affects one to two of every 1,000 new mothers, should not be confused with postnatal depression, which is more widely understood and more common, affecting one in every seven new mothers. Postpartum psychosis is “shrouded in stigma”: an “under-researched“ condition that can present with “myriad symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and paranoia”. Clancy’s trial will spark “long-awaited” conversations that should “get more research done” and “ultimately save lives”.
‘True-crime brain’
“There are not enough trigger warnings in the universe to prepare you” to watch this trial, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. It was live-streamed on multiple platforms every day, turning it into “a referendum on motherhood and mental heath”, but also one on conspiracy theories, too. When such a complicated and sensitive case is presented like this, everyone watching suddenly believes they have “cracked the whole thing open, in ways that doctors, investigators, lawyers and Lindsay herself could not”.
And on social media, the conspiratorial and “contrarian consensus has flourished”, said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. “An army of trial-watchers” have pushed the baseless claim that Clancy’s now ex-husband, Patrick – who testified in her defence – was behind the deaths, based on “Zapruder-film analysis of old Instagram posts” and other “wild conjecture”. One account-holder even staged a “speculative re-enactment of the crime scene using Bratz dolls” and then posted it to TikTok.
Given this “epidemic” of “true-crime brain”, the “political and sociocultural moment”, and the “bottomless horror” of the case, it was “inevitable” that this trial would “inspire outlandish counternarratives”. It’s clearer than ever that the “American public distrusts its legal institutions and media outlets” and that creates “a vacuum in which wild conjecture can bloom”.
