Support for Lindsay Clancy, From Pink T-Shirts to Conservative Stars
New York Times · LC · trust 51/100
How to understand the wide range of sympathy for a mother on trial for murder.
Listen · 7:41 min Share full article Hundreds have shown up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., to show support for Lindsay Clancy. Credit... John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images By Ginia Bellafante
Hundreds have shown up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., to rally for Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse whose psychiatric care was so uncoordinated, the defense maintains, that doctors subjected her to “horrific overmedication,” leading to dangerous auditory hallucinations. “Any one of us who have dealt with mental health, anxiety, depression, postpartum — I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” Renee Kimball , the lead organizer of the rally, told a local news outlet. The gatherings were inspired by a call she posted on social media asking people to “stand in peace for Lindsay.”
Online a kind of consensus certainty quickly emerged around the notion of Clancy’s victimization. Any serious reckoning with the central brutality — that Clancy strangled her daughter Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callen, 8 months, with exercise bands in their basement — has been subordinated to the compassion for her underlying anguish. In some corners of TikTok and Instagram, where charitable feeling for Clancy is at a high pitch, unhinged conspiracy theories — born perhaps of the challenge in believing that a mother could do such a thing — suggest that maybe it was someone else behind the killings, even if Clancy has admitted to them.
On Etsy, there are at least 25 different kinds of pro-Clancy T-shirts available for sale. (“Team Lindsay!” reads one.)
The sympathy extended to Clancy recalls the allegiance offered to Luigi Mangione , who has admitted to killing Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, on his way to a meeting in Midtown Manhattan. Many found the source of Mangione’s professed rage — an insurance industry perceived to be enriching itself on a hilltop of denied claims — all too relatable. As it is with Clancy, supporters regarded the system as a greater danger than the violence itself.
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