Lindsay Clancy, A Great Stage Of Fools, And Three Dead Children

    Two Fridays ago, 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 murdered her three children and then attempted to kill herself. That attempt 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 is 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 they opened up, was flattened and shrunk until it could be comfortably debated. And I believe those sometimes vacuous debates missed, and continue to miss, something essential. 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 (I suppose everyone is a commentator these days…yes, including me) 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 (of course) who are, she wrote, “a leading cause of postpartum depression.” Not to be snarky, but that little tidbit was news to me. 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.) 

    I, for one, have no time for so-called feminists like those I have quoted above, who try to tell me that the world dismisses women as soon as the child is born, or that men in general, and husbands specifically, CAUSE postpartum depression; or that nobody takes them seriously. Whatever is left of the feminist movement, properly understood, is given a black eye by these nitwits. And if that is not bad enough it encourages the following morons... 

    Reactions like Saujani and Villines’ prompted a backlash from people (primarily conservative men) who were appalled that anyone could sympathize with Lindsay Clancy. In their minds, these so-called feminists wanted to blame anyone or anything other than the murderer. That is perhaps understandable, but it wasn’t long before some of the backlashers, including the unhinged, 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.” As I have written before in this space, more than a few conservative commentators are morons. 

    What is worse, now there are groups of co-called conservatives (trust me; they’re not) who want to deny women who espouse the above views, the right to vote! Really?! Most of these morons have no idea what conservatism, properly understood, is...much like their female counterparts on the Left. I would love to gift them all a copy of George Will’s seminal work, The Conservative Sensibility, but I fear they would not be able to understand the words. But I digress... 

    The bottom line is, in all of the political and social back and forth, what some people seem to forget is that three young children were brutally murdered, and the person who is guilty of that crime is not in dispute. And maybe, just maybe, people don’t want to hear that it’s all society’s fault, or the fault of men everywhere. You know what I mean? But again, there is more to the story.  

    So much of the discourse in this tragedy has relied on either misrepresenting or simplifying the facts of the case. Certainly, in the grand scheme of things, postpartum depression deserves more consideration generally; however, what was afflicting Clancy, according to her defense, was postpartum psychosis, a rarer and even 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 subgroup. 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 is 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. However, it seems to me that attempts to blame somebody, anybody, for what happened is to evade the event itself.

    So where does all of this, some of it quite confusing, lead us? Well, 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 is something truly unknowable about what happened to Lindsay Clancy. Raising awareness around postpartum mental health is all well and good, and while genderslop discourse keeps some people busy, 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, at “the palm at the end of the mind” beyond the edge of our comprehension. I could be wrong here, but maybe 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 the abyss never swallows us. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com