A reporter covering the Lindsay Clancy triple-murder trial lost her Vanity Fair credentials after she was caught grinning and winking at a courtroom camera.
Brittany Romano, who was seated in the gallery at Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts on Monday, flashed a smile and winked directly into a live CourtTV feed while colleagues around her remained stone-faced. The trial concerns whether Clancy, 36, should be convicted of murder or found not guilty by reason of insanity for strangling her three children to death.
Romano later claimed she knew Clancy personally, telling reporters she had “grown up” with the accused killer. She also offered an explanation for her on-camera expression, saying her father had told her she looked sad on live television.
Vanity Fair moved swiftly to distance itself from the reporter. “We were interested in the prospect of a personal essay by Brittany Romano about her experience growing up with Lindsay Clancy,” the magazine said in a statement Tuesday. “Yesterday, after clear conflicts with our editorial standards and processes, we informed Romano that we were not moving forward with her essay and informed the court that she is no longer credentialed by Vanity Fair.”
Romano was absent from court Tuesday, though her name remained posted outside the courtroom on a credential list identifying her as a reporter for both New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.
The reporter took to Instagram Stories Tuesday to address the wave of criticism. “All for smiling at a camera?! Love it! Tysm for boosting my analytics Xoxoxoxo,” Romano wrote in one post.
In another story, she described the response she had received online. “these trolls have been absolutely vile,” she shared, adding that commenters had told her to kill herself and attacked her personally.
In the viral moment that triggered the backlash, the CourtTV camera had panned across a row of journalists covering one of the most disturbing cases to reach a Massachusetts courtroom in years. The trial has drawn intense public attention, with the brutality of the allegations so affecting that at least one prospective juror fled in tears before proceedings even began. Clancy, a Duxbury mother, admits she strangled her three children but contends she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis and hearing voices at the time, and that she also attempted to kill herself.
Witness testimony in the trial was expected to conclude later Tuesday as the case winds down this week.