Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel is calling out the crowd of women rallying for accused child-killer Lindsay Clancy outside a Massachusetts courthouse.
Mandel, who writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars, published a blistering essay this week as hundreds of supporters gathered at Plymouth Superior Court wearing pink and making heart hands at Clancy’s defense team. Clancy, 35, a former labor and delivery nurse, is on trial for the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan — and her defense argues postpartum psychosis absolves her of criminal responsibility.
“The women outside the courthouse, holding babies while cheering for Clancy, have no such excuse,” Mandel wrote. “Unless, that is, we want to talk about what social media has done to women’s ability to process tragedy, assign responsibility and distinguish between victim and perpetrator.”
Mandel directly addressed the spectacle of mothers bringing their own children to cheer for a woman who strangled hers. “Imagine the conversation at home as Mom puts on pink and heads off to spend the day with hundreds of other women cheering as members of Clancy’s defense team drive past,” she wrote. “‘Mom, who’s the woman you’re making heart hands at?’ ‘A woman who strangled her three children!'”
The essay zeroes in on what Mandel calls a disturbing inversion — that Clancy has “somehow become a more compelling victim than the children themselves.” She noted that Clancy’s supporters insist “the system failed her,” a phrase Mandel argues “conveniently transfers agency from an individual to an amorphous collection of individuals and institutions.” Yet by available accounts, Clancy had extensive support: multiple medical providers, involved grandparents, and a husband who took paternity leave and later worked from home. On the day of the killings, Clancy asked her then-husband Patrick to leave to pick up dinner and medication. While he was gone, she killed all three children.
Mandel also highlighted the online vilification of Patrick Clancy, who has since remarried. “The women standing outside the courthouse have inexplicably assigned Patrick as the villain of the story,” she wrote. She found particular irony in self-identified feminists embracing Lindsay Clancy, arguing that “women have spent generations demanding to be treated as full moral actors” yet “when she commits an atrocity, an army of women materializes to explain that ‘the system’ did it to her.”
The commentator emphasized the voicelessness of the actual victims. “Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot tell us what happened in their home that night,” Mandel wrote. “They cannot explain their fear or ask strangers to remember them. They cannot organize rallies, make TikToks or wear matching colors. Their mother has an entire movement doing that for her.”
Mandel’s critique arrives as the trial itself has featured dueling portrayals of Clancy’s mental state. Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham told jurors in opening statements that Clancy “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly” and that “this was not a woman in the throes of psychosis.” Patrick Clancy testified that his wife was “having one of her best days” on January 24, 2023, exchanging photos of the children making snowmen and doing crafts before he left the house. He returned to find her on the ground outside a window and discovered the children’s bodies in the basement.
In the viral moment that launched the case, Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands, then jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt that left her paralyzed from the waist down. She has claimed she heard voices telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself,” according to her lawyer. She received 30 prescriptions for 13 drugs from at least six providers between September 2022 and the killings, and spent about five days as an inpatient at McLean Hospital in late December 2022, though psychiatrists there testified they did not observe signs of psychosis. Nineteen days after her discharge, the children were dead.
Mandel closed by rejecting the framing that cultural compassion for Clancy represents progress. “A culture that extends compassion to a mentally ill woman while forgetting the three children she murdered has not become more empathetic; it has lost all sense of morality,” she wrote. “When mothers gather outside a courthouse with their own children in their arms to cheer for a mother who strangled hers, perhaps the most disturbing question isn’t what happened to Lindsay Clancy’s mind.”
Clancy’s trial is expected to continue for several weeks at Plymouth Superior Court.