Lindsay Clancy's Fans Normalizing Horror of Mom Killing Kids

Lindsay Clancy's Fans Normalizing Horror of Mom Killing Kids

The bizarre fandom around Lindsay Clancy is the latest example of a moral rot infecting a small cohort of conspiracy-minded, self-engrossed women.

The unhinged fandom of Lindsay Clancy

A mother who admitted to killing her three children should not be lionised as a feminist icon.

Should feminists pity Lindsay Clancy?

In 2006, a British man called John Hogan leapt from a fourth-floor hotel balcony, holding his two small children in his arms. He had been arguing with his wife during a holiday in Crete intended to save their failing marriage. Hogan and his daughter survived the fall; his six-year-old son Liam died. A Greek court cleared Hogan of murder on the basis that he had been suffering from “an earthquake of insanity”. He was released from a psychiatric unit after only 16 months. Two British inquests later concluded that Liam was unlawfully killed, but Hogan was never prosecuted. I thought of Hogan when I first read about Lindsay Clancy, who leapt from a second-floor window of her Massachusetts home in January 2023. Clancy was not holding her three children; they lay dead or dying in the basement, after their mother had strangled them with exercise bands. Although there are clear similarities between the two cases, my current feelings toward Clancy are very different from those I had toward Hogan. Like many feminists at the time, I struggled to sympathize with him. The “earthquake of insanity” line, in the context of a domestic dispute and a wife who wishes to leave, did not seem to indicate sustained mental illness, but a version of the old provocation defense overwhelmingly relied on by abusive men. By contrast, I find myself feeling enormous pity for Clancy, despite the horror she inflicted on five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old baby Callan. Her defense claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, left undiagnosed in the months leading up to the killings, during which she repeatedly sought help. While this does not lessen the horror of her actions, it suggests a different loss of control — not anger or hatred, but something far more desperate. I am not alone in feeling this way. Clancy has attracted outpourings of sympathy from mothers ever since the killings took place. By early February 2023, following the announcement that state prosecutors would be pursuing murder charges, many were sharing their own postpartum struggles, some even suggesting that “it could be any one of us”. One open letter signed by more than 80 women declared that “as mothers, we know Lindsay was not in a healthy space to carry out the acts she is accused of and we will stand by her in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us if we found ourselves struggling too”. Now that the trial is taking place, supporters have gathered outside the courtroom, wearing pink clothing as a show of solidarity and displaying slogans such as “Believe” and “She Needed Help”. A GoFundMe on behalf of Clancy’s parents, to help with their travel and living costs, has now raised more than one million dollars. It is hard to think of a comparable example in which a father has killed his own children and received so much support. Few men would want to say, “I could have been John Hogan, too”. Suggested readingLet's talk about Ariana Grande's bodyBy Sarah Ditum While the trial is nominally about the distinction between madness and badness, Clancy’s identity as a mother has shaped the public debate around it. In a 2024 interview with the New Yorker, her ex-husband Patrick described her as someone who loved her children but whose mental state deteriorated dramatically toward the end of 2022. Clancy consulted multiple therapists over her anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed an increasing number of medications, and had a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of 2023. She disclosed her thoughts of harming her children to her family because they so terrified her. At no point was any severe mental illness diagnosed. For many, this timeline offers a ready-made feminist narrative. It is what happens when mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialized, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected. It is “fundamentally a story”, writes The New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter, “of who is listened to, who is believed and taken seriously, and who isn’t”. The case of a woman killing her own children has become an argument for greater compassion toward women — rather than serving as a reminder that women can be just as violent as men. One does not have to doubt Clancy’s account to feel a little uneasy about this conclusion. Postnatal mental health is indeed neglected, and postpartum psychosis is yet to gain formal classification as a distinct disorder. Yet the fact remains that Clancy committed a horrendous act. Is her trial really the place for pink t-shirts and #BelieveHer sloganeering? And is Clancy really the representative that this cause needs? Female support for Clancy has been a gift to anyone wishing to define feminism as hypocritical or present feminists as willing to defend the most evil acts just because a woman has committed them. I myself worry about my own fixation on Clancy’s suffering over that of her children. Could it be that we are all reluctant to acknowledge the extremity of female violence because it is so politically inconvenient?  Still, I do not feel my pity is entirely misplaced. Many of the recommendations being made by Clancy’s supporters are uncontroversial: more understanding and better treatment of postnatal mental health crises, less pressure on mothers to hide their struggles, more joined-up prescribing of psychiatric medication. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether any of this would have stopped Clancy from killing her children. Her treatment was flawed but, as Patrick Clancy later pointed out, she seemed to be going through a positive phase immediately before the killings, making it impossible for him and others to know when to intervene. This does not seem to be an instance in which one can simply blame the patriarchy. Indeed, to do so risks sanitizing the maternal experience. I think there are other, darker reasons why many mothers feel sympathy for Clancy. “We pictured ourselves in her shoes before she even committed her terrible act.” When mothers claim they “could have been Lindsay Clancy”, it is more than just an expression of solidarity. Clancy has become a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear. Many of us have tried to imagine what it would be like to end up in her situation. In the midst of all the sleeplessness and isolation of early motherhood, the physical power we have over our children feels horrendous and threatening. We care about Lindsay Clancy because she is our very worst nightmare. We pictured ourselves in her shoes before she even committed her terrible act. Postpartum psychosis is rare, and postpartum psychosis leading to the murder of one’s own children is rarer still. There are countless mentally ill mothers out there who do not kill their children. However, intrusive thoughts of harming one’s baby are common. More than half of new mothers experience them and they are not related to any greater incidence of actual harm. When my own sons were tiny, I lived in terror of “mad moments” in which I might throw them down the stairs or drop them out of a window. The feeling was akin to the thoughts you might have standing on a high ledge, terrified that you might suddenly decide to step off, even though that is the last thing you want to do. The comforting explanation for these thoughts is that they are linked to a desire not to harm but to protect your child. We run through a film reel of the most terrible things that could happen to our children: harm coming through our own hands being the most terrible of all. When we look at Lindsay Clancy, we see the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us. That is why we feel sorry for her. Of course, an intrusive thought is not the same as a “command hallucination” or hearing a voice telling you, as Clancy later put it, that “she had to kill her children and herself”. One of the most chilling elements of Clancy’s account of her actions is the sense of time pressure. She felt that she had to act in that moment or “neither she nor her children would be safe”. It is hard not to ask “what if that moment had never come?” She must, surely, think of this constantly. Clancy’s act is not excusable, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion. In the end, however, there are no slogans that can remedy this tragedy and there is no one else to blame. The mind can do terrible, twisted things out of love as well as hate. a.appcomments { background: #FFF; border: 1px solid #446c76 !important; font-family: benton-sans,sans-serif; font-weight: 600; font-style: normal; font-size: 12px; color: #446c76 !important; padding: 12px 50px; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1.5px; text-decoration: none; width: 100%; display: block; text-align: center !important; } view comments