Why are so many women supporting Lindsay Clancy? John Doyle blames America’s true crime obsession

The chatter surrounding the Lindsay Clancy murder trial continues to grow more convoluted and contentious by the day.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children — ages 5, 3, and 8 months — with exercise bands in January 2023 before attempting suicide by jumping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming postpartum psychosis.

Hundreds of women recently gathered in pink outside her ongoing murder trial courthouse (and online via the “Same, Lindsay” trend) to defend her, arguing the medical system failed her and that many mothers share similar postpartum mental-health struggles. Another viral theory perpetuated largely by female Clancy supporters speculates that it was actually her now ex-husband, Patrick, who killed their children and framed her for the murders.

BlazeTV host John Doyle sees beyond the disturbing Clancy support to what he believes is fueling the apologetics surrounding her: the true crime obsession that has gripped so many American women.

True crime, Doyle explains, has become so popular that it’s the subject of many podcasts, television series, and books. There’s even entire true crime conventions that attract thousands of fans.

But it’s predominately women who make up the true crime audience.

Doyle believes there’s a connection between this data and Clancy’s significant base of female supporters. He argues that many of the women who get sucked into the twisted tales of serial killers will find ways to reject the “settled science” when it’s a woman who’s the perpetrator.

To illustrate this point, he reads a tweet from friend of the show Sean Fitzgerald who attended CrimeCon:

This tendency of these true crime fans to support female defendants regardless of the evidence brought against them is what’s fueling the support for Clancy, Doyle argues.

Women, he says, have been conditioned by modern culture to be “extremely paranoid of men” — even in situations when it’s a woman who’s facing conviction.

“The true crime thing, part of what they like about it is the mystery. … It’s like who did what to whom? What’s going on? Oh my gosh, what if this person was framed and it was actually the man?” says Doyle.

What these “junior psychologists” fail to realize, however, is that “most everybody who is actually at the point of going to criminal trial is guilty,” he adds. “They’re in that room for a reason.”

But in addition to their general distrust of men, Doyle continues, there’s the “drama” that pulls them in. A woman being framed by a man is a far more interesting scenario than a cut-and-dry case.

“These people are only interested in drama, in entertainment, in narrative. There’s no part of them that considers the merits of individual claims. This is not about truth for them,” he says.

“If you put something in front of them that contradicts what they are telling you, they will reflexively deny it basically on credit. They’ll say, ‘No, this isn’t true. I just have to go find why,’ and then they go digging to find some piece of information to rationalize their having reflexively denied it,” he continues.

But if pushback continues, the doubling down only intensifies.

“They will even … amplify the drama to themselves by asserting without any evidence at all that you, by not feeding into their fantasy, are actually a part of it — but on the side that’s trying to hide the truth,” says Doyle. “Ultimately though, they’re going to get mad at you for basically pouring water on their fantasy.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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