To some close followers of the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy — which ended in a mistrial on Friday — the case was as political as it was legal.
Right-wing commentators and MAGA mouthpieces argued those expressing sympathy for Clancy’s mental health struggles before she strangled her three young children in January 2023 proved the dangers of feminism and the left’s moral rot.
Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson said Clancy’s defenders prove “feminism is a death cult.” Podcaster Joe Rogan, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., anti-abortion advocate Kristan Hawkins and commentator Tomi Lahren accused Clancy’s supporters of being — as Rogan put it — “a lot of liberal women.” Commentators Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro and Jack Posobiec said the mistrial reflected an acceptance of filicide and, therefore, a failure of the social contract.
“It’s now going to be ok for people to murder their own children and blame it on ‘depression,’” Loomer wrote. “Our society is doomed.”
Others went further, arguing the repeatedly deadlocked jury, comprised of nine women and three men, proved that women should not be jurors — or even vote, as several right-wing social media accounts with large followings insisted. Some, including Donald Trump, Jr., praised the sole male juror who apparently blocked a not-guilty verdict.
Followers of the Make America Healthy Again movement, meanwhile, argued the case proved the dangers of antidepressants, a common — and oversimplified — argument of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.
And Clancy’s supporters — some of whom wore pink shirts and cheered the arrival of her prison van at the courthouse — said her vilification masked her apparent history as a loving mother and the systemic challenges mothers like her face in accessing mental health care.
But the case may be more complex than any of these factions would like to admit.
The insistence that Clancy was failed by the medical system ignores basic facts: She had health insurance, maternity leave and help with childcare, and she saw multiple mental health providers while she was struggling with severe depression. She appeared to blame medications — which she tended to take in limited doses before seeking new prescriptions — for playing a role in her mental demise, yet was willing to try a slew of drugs in her bid to get better.
Her supporters do not appear to fit neatly into any particular political ideology, and Clancy’s own political bent is unclear. But by all accounts, she was a deeply devoted mother to her children before she killed them.
The complicated tragedy seemed to put motherhood itself on trial, leading armchair jurors to filter their takes through the lenses of partisan politics and simple ideologies. In doing so, they offered convenient distractions from uncomfortable realities about motherhood and postpartum health that the trial brought to the forefront.
“It is terrifying and painful to reckon with postpartum mental illness,” Michelle Oberman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who has studied women who kill their kids, told MS NOW. “The culture war debate is just a small part of our long-overdue reckoning with this issue.”
The trial unfolded against the backdrop of the second Trump administration, which has cast motherhood as an unequivocal positive. President Donald Trump has called for a “baby boom” and the White House has sought ways to encourage people to have more children. Several members of the current administration — including Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, as well as former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt — have had babies during Trump’s second term in office and encouraged others to do the same. Online, tradwife influencers extol the virtues of women abstaining from paid work, submitting to their husbands and raising as many children as they can bear.
But as Miranda Brady, an associate professor at Carleton University and the author of a book called “Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst After Second Wave Feminism,” told MS NOW, these portrayals of motherhood “don’t seem to include mothers who are struggling with mental health.”
To the extent that federal officials have addressed mothers’ mental health challenges, it has been to urge them not to take antidepressants — even over the objections of OB-GYNs, who have pointed out the prevalence of perinatal mood disorders and the important role medications can play in treatment.
Mobilizing motherhood for political aims is not new — it has been a cornerstone of the anti-abortion movement for decades. But the fact that the Clancy trial occurred in such a polarized environment — one in which motherhood has become a political battleground — made the case ripe for absorption into the culture wars.
“This notion that we need to have more babies … is threatened a little bit when we see a woman burdened by what can happen during pregnancy or after having children,” said Sonia Suter, a law professor at The George Washington University whose work focuses on reproductive rights. (As Suter noted, postpartum psychosis — the rare psychiatric condition that Clancy says she was experiencing at the time she killed her kids — affects only one or two mothers in every 1,000 births. It is also highly treatable with prompt emergency intervention.)
Trump himself weighed in on the Clancy case on Friday, calling it “a horrible tragedy” and “a terrible situation.”
“Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing — can’t be worse,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price — it’s gonna be mental institution, or jail, or something.”
Clancy’s status as an upper middle-class white woman seemed to contribute to the politicization of the case — a fact Mace herself pointed out. The trials of Black mothers accused of similar crimes have not attracted anywhere near the level of public debate that Clancy’s did.
Latarsha Sanders, a Black mother who stood trial in 2022 before the same judge who presided over the Clancy case, was sentenced to two mandatory life terms without parole for the 2018 killings of her two sons. Her defense team argued she was experiencing psychosis at the time. Last month, the state Supreme Court overturned her conviction and ordered that she be granted a new trial after Judge William Sullivan ordered her medical and mental health records excluded from her first trial. Erin Merdy, a Black mother in New York City who admitted to drowning her three children in Coney Island following her struggles with postpartum depression in 2022, was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison earlier this year.
Neither Sanders nor Merdy had supporters gathering outside court or raising millions of dollars for their families, as they did for Clancy.
“For mothers who are not white,” said Brady, the author of “Mother Trouble,” “there is less leeway for feelings of empathy or even understanding what their circumstances might be like.”
The trials of other white mothers, though, have also become media spectacles and referendums on motherhood. The 2011 trial of Casey Anthony, who was ultimately acquitted of first degree murder of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, and the 2006 retrial of Andrea Yates, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning of her five children, both dominated headlines. But Clancy’s case played out in a distinct era — one in which anyone with an Internet connection can follow live-streamed court proceedings and share their every thought on social media.
While those commentators clung to their keyboards as the trial unfolded, Clancy and her family continued grieving the deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan.
After it was all over on Friday, a local news outlet captured video footage of Clancy — who is paralyzed from the waist down following her suicide attempt the night of the killings — being wheeled back into the state-run psychiatric facility where she has been held for the past few years.
An attorney for her ex-husband, Patrick, released a statement saying the children’s deaths are “something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure,” and that the prospect of another trial “is extraordinarily painful.”
The statement made no mention of politics.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
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