NY Times: Lindsay Clancy Sure Has a Lot of Female Supporters

It seems obvious and undeniable to me and a lot of other people that Lindsay Clancy is guilty in the colloquial sense of the word. She murdered her three children and the trial is really just about whether she can claim some kind of diminished mental capacity that would spare her life in prison. 

The trial in itself doesn’t seem that interesting but what is really worrisome is the sheer number of women, many with children, who have come out in support of Clancy. Yesterday the NY Times ran a news analysis story about the phenomenon.

Hundreds have shown up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., to rally for Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse whose psychiatric care was so uncoordinated, the defense maintains, that doctors subjected her to “horrific overmedication,” leading to dangerous auditory hallucinations.

Online a kind of consensus certainty quickly emerged around the notion of Clancy’s victimization. Any serious reckoning with the central brutality — that Clancy strangled her daughter Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callen, 8 months, with exercise bands in their basement — has been subordinated to the compassion for her underlying anguish. In some corners of TikTok and Instagram, where charitable feeling for Clancy is at a high pitch, unhinged conspiracy theories — born perhaps of the challenge in believing that a mother could do such a thing — suggest that maybe it was someone else behind the killings, even if Clancy has admitted to them.

On Etsy, there are at least 25 different kinds of pro-Clancy T-shirts available for sale. (“Team Lindsay!” reads one.)

The sympathy extended to Clancy recalls the allegiance offered to Luigi Mangione, who has admitted to killing Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, on his way to a meeting in Midtown Manhattan.

The Mangione comparison seems like a good one because he also claimed he was a victim of sorts who’d suffered severe back pain for years after an accident and a surgery that didn’t help him. Similarly, people have argued that the medical community failed to help Clancy.

Of course Mangione ultimately admitted his guilt once it was clear he was going to be convicted anyway. Clancy hasn’t exactly denied killing her children, she has just denied responsibility for it. Her defense is essentially that she wasn’t in her right mind when she killed her kids. But it does seem odd that few people with mental issues who kill get the kind of fan club Clancy now has.

Nick Reiner was accused of stabbing his parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, to death in December. Despite his own history of mental illness, Nick Reiner has not received a similar outpouring of understanding in his defense.

Simply put, there are no men standing outside the courthouse for Reiner claiming his innocence. He may have been out of his mind, or maybe not, but either way no one is rooting for him to escape responsibility. Either way he’s just a killer who did something horrible. 

When it comes to Clancy, a surprising number of women don’t seem to see it that way. And what’s more worrisome is that social media seems to be playing a role in this reaction. There’s a kind of competition happening online among some women to show how much they sympathize with Clancy or how much they are like Clancy. Obviously that’s a competition that can’t be good for children.

Amateur sleuths, armchair lawyers and influencers have turned the soon-to-conclude trial into snackable, whodunit content, dissecting every detail and advancing their own theories across TikTok and other social platforms.

Rather than focusing on the established facts — particularly Lindsay Clancy’s own admission that she killed her children — a growing number of internet investigators have cast her ex-husband and the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, as the villain. The murderer…

Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University who studies social media and true crime, said the online effort to put Patrick Clancy on trial in the court of public opinion reflects a desire for a more familiar, coherent narrative.

“Some people want this case to fit in really neatly with others and part of what that entails is an expectation that men are more likely to be perpetrators,” said Coduto. True crime, she noted, has a particularly large audience among women, many of whom consume it to understand “how to not be a victim.”

“So, when you look at this case, to have a woman, and not just a woman, but a mother, saying, ‘Yes, I murdered my three kids,’ that’s really hard for people to accept. It doesn’t fit into the neat worldview that they have created around true crime.”

It occurs to me that these are probably the same women who’ve made Candace Owens into a top podcaster for claiming that Charlie Kirk’s organization and maybe his widow were complicit in his assassination. This really does seem to be a problem for the rest of us because some of these people will end up on real juries. Or worse, some of them may end up harming their own kids as a sign of their solidarity with Clancy. 

I’m definitely not suggesting this is all women or even a majority of them, but there is a surprisingly large contingent that seems more interested in their theories and feelings than in looking at the facts. This case is just the latest example of that larger trend that already involves Tyler Robinson and Luigi Mangione.

And right on cue, here’s Candace Owens:

Candace Owens defends Lindsay Clancy mսrdеrіոg her own children, blaming “big pharma” instead

“Lindsay Clancy is obviously not guilty—she was put into an intentional psychosis when she probably just needed to give her kids away for a weekend to get better.” pic.twitter.com/NjYzTWBZZ5

— 𝐆𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐝𝐮𝐬 (@ImperiumFirst) August 20, 2026

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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