USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
The bizarre fandom around Lindsay Clancy is the latest example of a moral rot infecting a small cohort of conspiracy-minded, self-engrossed women.
In a clear case of female empathy gone awry, they have transformed a Massachusetts nurse who strangled her three babies into the sole victim in this tragedy, while demonizing their poor father, Patrick.
The murdered children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, barely get a mention in the outpouring of support for Lindsay, who has become a vehicle for the “TikTok Moms’ ” own fake victimhood.
Lindsay has pleaded not guilty to the 2023 murder of her children who she methodically strangled, one by one, with exercise bands after sending Patrick out to pick up dinner and medications. She does not dispute that she killed the children but claims she was “suffering from psychosis at the time.”
The prosecution contends she “acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal — to kill . . . She knew exactly what she was doing.”
The five-week trial has been televised to an increasingly obsessive audience of true crime nuts, assorted snoops and a disturbing number of women who have taken to filming themselves holding babies and whining about how hard it is to be a mom.
Some women even caption their TikTok videos “Same, Lindsay.”
It’s a twisted form of attention-seeking in the guise of empathy. These women are normalizing the horror of a mother killing her children, making it seem like a natural response to the everyday challenges of child-rearing, which far-less privileged women have managed to navigate since the dawn of time, like every other challenge in life.
‘We are all Lindsay’
Lindsay fans have raised almost $1 million in the name of her parents, and hundreds dressed in pink and rallied for her outside the court last week.
“We are all Lindsay” is their sick message.
One woman sobbed on camera that Lindsay can’t hug her children’s stuffed toys because her cruel husband supposedly threw them away. But what about the children who can’t hug their toys? The father who can’t hug his children?
It’s the same inversion behind the Luigi Mangione fangirls, the London mob who valorized Cambridge hoaxer Jason Arday and the demonization of Erika Kirk.
The Lindsay frenzy goes hand in hand with the left’s upending of the moral order, in which sympathy is reserved for murderers, rapists and illegal migrant child molesters while police must be defunded, ICE abolished and prisons closed.
The Clancy trial is simply a promotional vehicle for this new amorality.
There is a soap opera pathos to this real-life drama of a perfect family brutalized by unspeakable tragedy.
Each day, the people who loved the children best have been called to the witness box: the husband, the parents, the in-laws, the sister, the friends, the nanny — all with the same haunted look. You wonder at the public interest of televising their private grief.
Patrick’s father, Chris Clancy, described them as “the all-American family” and praised Lindsay as a “very, very good mother.”
True anguish
But unlike a soap opera, there are no easy villains in this case, apart from the one person who committed the crime, whose suffering is impossible to discount.
Lindsay, 36, presents as a sympathetic figure in court. She is in a wheelchair because a suicide attempt left her paralyzed from the waist down. She sits wan and mostly silent, quietly sobbing when the children are mentioned, her face half-hidden by her long, lustrous brown hair.
In a moment that encapsulates the heartbreak of this family cataclysm, she broke down one day during graphic autopsy testimony, whimpering “I can’t do this” as a medical examiner described the ligature marks around Cora’s neck and the broken blood vessels in her eyes and said it would have been a painful death for the little girl.
Only a heart of stone could fail to be moved by Lindsay’s anguish.
But she showed her children no mercy that day and this trial is for them. Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham makes that point to the jury by wearing bows in her hair every day in memory of Cora who loved big bows in her soft blonde hair.
All three children died the same painful way; Dawson first, then Cora and finally baby Callan, who was still alive when paramedics found him but died in the hospital.
After strangling her children, Lindsay left them in the basement while she went upstairs to her bedroom, slit her wrists and throat and threw herself out the second-story window onto the snow-covered lawn below where her husband found her when he returned from the errands she had sent him on.
You wonder how a woman could inflict such unimaginable cruelty on her husband, let alone her children.
First responders on the scene described primal howls of pain coming from the basement when Patrick found his babies after paramedics arrived to treat his wife.