We Love to Hate a Woman on Trial, So Why Are So Many People Defending Lindsay Clancy?
As a crime reporter, I'm often witness to people's greatest tragedies. And for the past decade, I've reported on women at the center of them: El Chapo's wife, Emma Coronel , who served time in a U.S. federal prison for connections to her husband's drug empire; con artist Anna Delvey , who posed as a German heiress while swindling New York's elite; momfluencer Ruby Franke , incarcerated for torturing her kids; and author Kouri Richins , who laced her husband's cocktail with five times the lethal amount of fentanyl and then wrote a children's book about his death. I've also traveled the country reporting in depth on mothers who killed their children .
Once charges are filed, women often become public punching bags. For many true-crime aficionados, accusation alone is license to strip a woman of her humanity. After my jailhouse interviews with Delvey went viral, commenters called her "fat," "ugly," "irritating to watch," "a disgusting soulless carcass," and "a narcissistic sociopathic waste of oxygen." And this was a woman who'd never been charged with a violent crime. This past May, when Richins was sentenced to life without parole for her husband's murder, one commenter said, "She should have got a vat of acid instead."
Which is what makes the reaction to Lindsay Clancy so unusual. Clancy admits to fatally choking her three children, but in the months before the homicides, she repeatedly sought psychiatric help and was prescribed a dizzying rotation of medications. Her lawyers argue that she killed her children (and then jumped from a second-story window and was paralyzed from the waist down) during a postpartum psychotic episode . The jury spent seven days trying to decide whether, given her mental state at the time, Clancy should be legally responsible for her actions and could not come to a decision. This morning, the judge said he intends to declare a mistrial, but gave the defense an hour to request an emergency stay.
While the jury discussed the case, many more were deliberating from home. Despite the grisly details of the crime, the online discussion of Clancy's trial has become an unlikely forum on gender roles and motherhood.
In a rare display of empathy for a woman who has committed devastating violence, women have dubbed themselves "stay-at-home jurors," identifying not only with Clancy but also with the struggles that preceded her crimes. Her case has become a rallying cry for greater awareness of postpartum psychosis and support for mothers in crisis. During the trial, hundreds wore pink and lined the streets to the courthouse for a "Stand in Peace for Lindsay" rally.
Before killing her three children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months—Clancy wrote extensively about her negative postpartum experience: "I feel incredibly sad and guilty about not breastfeeding anymore," she said. "I feel disconnected with myself." The women supporting her during the trial see themselves in a mother who, according to her family, was overworked, underappreciated, and crying out for help.
"I was Lindsay Clancy," Haley Pepper, a birth, postpartum, and loss doula, wrote on Instagram, describing her own experience.
In another post, a working mom of four who was hospitalized with postpartum psychosis responded to Clancy's trial with photos of herself with her baby. "This was me with postpartum psychosis," she said on Instagram. "I had come terrifyingly close to doing what the voices in my head were telling me to do.…When people hear 'psychosis,' they picture someone who looks dangerous. But if you met me today, you'd probably think, She could never hurt her children. The truth is, psychosis doesn't care who you are."
Of course, not everyone is sympathetic. "Who are these soft people?" former FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked of Clancy's supporters on her YouTube show , adding: "I don't look at her and feel sorry for her. I realize she had a mental health crisis going on—three kids are dead!"
But as one commenter on Instagram explained, "No one said this isn't an unimaginable tragedy. This woman was screaming for help and every single person and health care provider failed her and just wrote script after script and no one listened to her."
And as a style and parenting influencer explained in another post , "Why are millennial moms going so hard for Lindsay Clancy?" and named a similar list of anxieties to those Clancy journaled about: "It's the thinking you were the only one who felt this way."
Incredibly, Clancy's pre-crime identity has remained intact. People like her ex-husband and her ex-mother-in-law have insisted that the loving mom was real, is real , and this time, some very vocal members of the public believe them—and her . They're willing to separate the incomprehensible act of killing her children from the totality of the woman accused of doing so.
Psychologist Amanda Vicary, who studies women's consumption of true-crime, believes this shift from a true-crime-obsessed public that vilified Andrea Yates (who was initially convicted of murdering her five children, a decision later overturned) as an unspeakable monster to one that has sympathy for mothers accused of killing their children is due to greater understanding of postpartum mental illness.
And here, "understanding" is the key word. Because understanding what happened that January 2023 day is not—despite what many true-crime followers have long believed—the same as excusing it. Empathy is not exoneration. Covering crime is a brutal business, but my role as a journalist is to help readers better see and comprehend the world around them, perhaps especially when that world is deeply disturbing.
Often, I've been disappointed by how quickly people turn away from someone accused of a crime. I've wondered if they do this because they're afraid to see themselves in the darkest corners of the human experience. As if by staring into the cracks of humanity, we'll somehow lose our own. Now with Clancy, we're finally looking.
A collective feeling on social media suggests that Clancy's case is bigger than just one woman. And it is. That women are fighting not for one mother but for many. Still, are we witnessing a cultural shift or will Clancy be a one-off phenomenon? Imagine what could happen if we brought that same conscience and consideration to other mothers.
Just 27 days before the Clancy killings, in the same county where Clancy's trial took place, Latarsha Sanders was sentenced to two mandatory life terms without the possibility of parole in the killings of her two young sons. Her case—prosecuted by the same district attorney and presided over by the same judge—offers a startling comparison to Clancy's.
Although a neuropsychologist determined that Sanders was "grossly psychotic" when she fatally stabbed her two sons, Marlon, 8, and La'Son, 5, in their apartment in 2018, Judge William F. Sullivan excluded from trial the medical records documenting her schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, paranoid delusions, and auditory hallucinations.
The prosecution's own own expert concluded Sanders had paranoid schizophrenia and was "highly likely" symptomatic when she killed her children. Prosecutors did not call that expert to the stand. (In August, Sanders was granted a retrial after an appeals court found that evidence of her history of mental illness had been improperly excluded from her original trial.)
But while both Clancy's and Sanders's cases share remarkable similarities, only one garnered national support and goodwill.
"As a poor, Black woman, Latarsha Sanders was the 'other,' and what occurred was 'over there' somewhere," her lawyer, Robert F. Shaw Jr., told me. "Not here, not at home, but at a distance, an object to be observed for as long as it flashed on the screen."
Once we label a woman a monster, her cruelty gives us permission to indulge our own. The more horrific the act, the less interested we become in understanding how a human being got there—precisely when that answer may matter most. If we care about the children in these stories, then we have to care about the mothers who harmed them. We have to ask what happened to them, what warning signs were missed, where the systems meant to help them failed.
After all, recognizing what went wrong with Clancy, Sanders, and numerous other mothers suffering from postpartum psychosis or serious mental illness could help prevent the same violence from happening in more families.
"We cannot change the tragedies that happened yesterday," Amna Awan, a life coach for women and mothers, wrote in a post about the potential legacy of Clancy's case. "But maybe, by caring for a mother today, we can change a child's tomorrow."
The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline offers free, confidential support 24/7 in English and Spanish. Call or text 833-852-6262.
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