On January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy waited for her husband, Patrick, to have left their family home in Massachusetts and proceeded to strangle their three children – Cora, Dawson, and Callan. At least that’s what the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Clancy triple murder trial states. Although the six-week-long trial ended in a hung jury, and Clancy is still awaiting a verdict, the Internet has already made up its mind about her guilt.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy, which shook the American nation and awakened Internet detectives worldwide, has been nothing if not divisive. Each and every single one of the obsessive followers of the case has their own view of what happened in the Clancy household that January day in 2023. Each and every one of them has also participated in a modern witch hunt for a single person to blame – be it Lindsay, her husband, or even her therapist. Yet, what sticks out about this case has less to do with the events that unfolded and more with the moral outrage it generated in the online spaces.
The Clancy family has since faced abhorrent backlash from self-proclaimed “True Crime junkies” who have been making the already tragic situation even more unbearable. With images of Clancy breaking down and sobbing in court being broadcast online for all to see, one cannot help but wonder where the line between requiring justice and having a shred of empathy lies. It could be argued that the concept of empathy is much too personal and specific to each individual to ever be generalised, but surely there ought to exist at least a preliminary basis on which it is applied by all. While it is nothing new that social media desensitises us to tragedy, there is an entirely different problem in being incapable of objectively considering the circumstances that led to said crime.
According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, empathy is inherently biased, and there is no point in attempting to convince ourselves we feel strongly and compassionately for all human beings. Bloom notes that our desire to help others is usually selectively aimed at those we relate to or that experience similar life circumstances. The issue, however, does not end here. It is not simply a lack of empathy that we are facing, but also a perverted obsession with punishment looming over online spaces. It is not enough that the woman is paralysed and has already lost her three children and husband – we want to see her suffer more, suffer endlessly to satisfy an itch for vengeance. In particular, we want to see the punishment of a woman, even more so than that of a murderer.
One would expect that as Clancy has been deemed a monster by many, being compared to Ted Bundy, there would also be the requisite evidence supporting her unequivocal guilt and conscious intent to commit murder, as is the case with Bundy, but this is not so. Returning to Bloom, most of this scrutiny has much to do with who Clancy is and who she is not. As many things are, this problem is almost exclusively reserved for women and driven by bloodthirsty redpillers hoping to see a woman suffer. Without sounding like an angry child-hater or applying a gradation to crime, the public outrage at Clancy’s murder of her children has little to do with the horror of such filicide. Why does the public not only refute the notion of Clancy having postpartum psychosis but also the entire concept of postpartum psychosis altogether, given that it is documented in the DSM-5 and recognised by the WHO and most national health agencies? And why are we hearing more and more about evil mothers who abuse and kill their children? Certainly not because it is happening more than before. If anything, it is fathers that commit statistically more child murders than mothers do, the difference being purely in men being more expected predators and thus not facing as much vitriol from the public. Whereas, motherly crime is being treated as the ultimate betrayal of womanhood and the rebuttal of everything feminine.
All that the tabloids want to talk about is seemingly the “psychotic feminists” going after Patrick Clancy in what they would call a desperate attempt at blaming a man. If this is true, how come it is he who removed himself from the trial as much as he possibly could? This issue is entirely separate from believing that Clancy’s husband is guilty of the crime or not. It is about noticing the pattern of how gender does matter in the Internet trial, and it is absurd to act like it does not. Why is it that the holdout juror, who refused to cooperate despite admitting that there in fact was reasonable doubt against the guilty verdict, is now being victimised and treated as an innocent target of online vipers? Why isn’t it questioned that it was his lack of compliance with the law that is now going to cause the Clancy family further pain? It is difficult not to make this case about the antagonisation of women when the proof is so blatant.
So, who, in the end, gets granted the elusive empathy? Not Lindsay Clancy. Not Patrick Clancy. Not even their poor children. In the age of the yearning for entertainment pervading all social spaces, not much concern is given to the people behind the tragedies. Who, really, has taken a moment to mourn the lives that were actually lost in this case? It is not those demonising Clancy, and it is not the prosecution stooping so low as to “honour” the little girl by wearing bows in their hair in a deliberate ploy to break Clancy further. There is justice, and then there is vengeance – and if your argument has no real merit to it, the only thing left is to play mind games.
With “Mental Health Matters” being plastered all over schools, campuses, and doctors’ offices, it is quite enraging to realise that this mantra no longer applies when getting to cover something on TikTok comes into play. Online vipers can be reduced to harmless commentary only for so long before there are real-life repercussions. Lindsay Clancy is not the public enemy nor the devil, and to believe that she causes nothing but harm to both the victims and to women in general. It is easy for your interest in this case to end at commenting on how “insane” or “heartbreaking” it is, but the difficulty arises when it is time to face the reality of how little empathy we extend to those we believe have wronged us.
