The Lindsay Clancy army, from mums in pink to right-wing podcasters

August 28, 2026 — 3:30pm

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New York: For the past month, in an obsessively watched trial testing the insanity plea, Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has argued that his client murdered her children in a state of postpartum psychosis brought on by the negligence and mistreatment of her medical overseers.

The position has found an overwhelming degree of public support – largely among women who have identified with Clancy despite the severity of her illness and the barbarous nature of her response.

Hundreds have shown up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to rally for Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse whose psychiatric care was so unco-ordinated, the defence 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 organiser 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 victimisation. 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........

© The Sydney Morning Herald