Don’t Celebrate Lindsay Clancy

On Friday, the Lindsay Clancy trial ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict, ending—at least for now—one of the most miserable and upsetting cycles of discourse and speculation in recent memory. In 2023, Clancy killed her three children and then attempted to kill herself, which left her paralyzed and confined to a mental hospital. Clancy was charged with first-degree murder, and the jury had to decide whether or not she was responsible for her children’s deaths. There was no dispute over whether Clancy had carried out the act. The question was whether it was deliberate, as the prosecution claimed, or if, as the defense contended, she was in the grip of psychosis. In the end, 11 jurors voted for acquittal, but a single holdout juror resulted in a mistrial. As a central question, though, the contention at the heart of the case seemed not so much legal as philosophical. How far back into the darkness of your mind do you have to go for the world to disappear and be replaced by delusions? How far had Clancy gone down that mysterious road? It’s not a mystery why Clancy’s case has attracted so much attention. A mother killing her children is an act that inspires a primal disgust; societies have been fascinated and repelled by maternal filicide stretching back at least as far as the myth of Medea. But as the trial went viral, it became the object of a sprawl of online arguments, inspiring assorted conspiracy theories and half-baked debates about gender and mental health. The brutality of Clancy’s actions, and the portal of grief that they opened up, was flattened and shrunk until it could be comfortably debated. And those arid, and unhinged, debates miss something essential here. Leaving matters of law and psychiatry aside, what Clancy did was truly evil—whatever her legal culpability, she was clearly in the grip of something whose horror is beyond the bounds of language. So much of the discourse has been an attempt to avoid looking squarely at that evil. This avoidance is maybe most obvious when commentators (everyone is a commentator these days) used the Clancy case to discuss more typical cases of postpartum depression. In a Substack post sub-titled “It could’ve happened to you too,” the feminist activist Reshma Saujani noted that in the lead-up to the killings, Clancy wrote things like, “I am completely overwhelmed” and “I’m really worried about going back to work.” Wrote Saujani, “If you are a mother, you could have written any of these confessions.” She then went on to call for more support for mothers and increased screening for postpartum depression. “We discard the mother by the time she’s given birth to the child,” she wrote, quoting a documentary film. Zawn Villines, who writes a popular Substack called Liberating Motherhood, placed Clancy’s story in “a political context in which women and their children are treated like entities that don’t matter.” She described postpartum depression as being caused in part by “a lack of support, an absence of sleep, a dearth of community.” For many women, these are deeply felt personal issues—and Clancy, in this telling, becomes a victim of a system that downplays the mental and physical suffering of women. That sentiment inspired hundreds of women to gather in support of Clancy outside the courthouse. “Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up,” one of these supporters told the Associated Press. “We’re scared because nobody takes us seriously.” But public sympathy for Clancy went well beyond concern for mothers writ large. As the New York Times reported, over 25 pro-Clancy t-shirts are available on Etsy, including one reading “Team Lindsay.” A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $1 million to support the living expenses of Clancy’s parents. And there has been a pronounced tendency to cast blame on anyone but Clancy—her doctors, society as a whole, her ex-husband, whom some particularly unhinged posters accused of masterminding the murders somehow. Villines, in the midst of her discussion of postpartum mental health, carved out some time to denounce Clancy’s husband and men in general, who are, she wrote, “a leading cause of postpartum depression.” According to Villines, Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband, “prioritized his pleasure over her life”—per trial testimony, Patrick had frequently gone on ski trips and to brunches with friends—and “was an active participant in every moment of suffering that came before.” (Patrick has testified in support of his ex-wife, and has asked the public to forgive her.) Reactions like Saujani and Villines’ prompted a backlash from people (primarily conservatives) who were appalled that anyone could sympathize with Lindsay Clancy. That’s perhaps understandable, but it wasn’t long before some of the backlashers came up with vile, beyond-the-pale takes of their own, including theorizing that postpartum depression itself is fake. “Children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake,” the right-wing pundit Matt Walsh wrote on X. “The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.” Clancy’s “depression,” he went on, using scare quotes, was actually “a selfish hatred of her children.“ So much of the discourse has relied on either misrepresenting or simplifying the facts of the Lindsay Clancy case. Certainly, postpartum depression deserves more consideration generally, but what was afflicting Clancy, according to her defense, was postpartum psychosis, a rarer and more severe condition that is estimated to occur in one out of every thousand births, and with the rate of harm to a child vanishingly small even within that. Other mothers may hear echoes of their own struggles in Clancy’s story, but her story is altogether stranger and more frightening than what the vast majority of women experience. And while it’s distressingly common for people to lack access to mental health resources, Clancy did have plenty of doctors, arguably too many—Patrick and Lindsay have filed separate lawsuits against her providers, accusing them of not coordinating care and failing to diagnose her correctly. The attempts to blame somebody, anybody, for what happened is to evade the event itself. The point of a trial is to draw clean lines around messy events. It almost seems fitting, somehow, that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. There’s something truly unknowable about what happened to Lindsay Clancy. Raising awareness around postpartum mental health is all well and good, and genderslop discourse keeps some people busy, but none of that has much to do with the actual lives that were broken on one horrible day three years ago. There is something howling and bleak out there, beyond the edge of our comprehension. Lindsay Clancy didn’t so much fall through the cracks of a broken system as she was swallowed up by an abyss. The prayer that any one of us might have is that that abyss never opens up for us. Harry Cheadle is a freelance writer and editor living in Seattle. Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network. And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: My concern with your post is that you posit a construct of "evil" without much explanation or defense. From where I sit, this is a tragic event. It is pretty clear that all of us, including the perpetrator wish it did not happen. What is your evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with the perpetrator that suggests that she is driven to repeat this act because she is "evil." A niece of mine had something at least close to postpartum psychosis and it was bloody awful. It seems that a special vitamin therapy got her over it and she's now a perfect mother, but for a while there it was horrifying.