The Massachusetts woman who used exercise bands to strangle the life out of her three young children has a fan club of sorts.
Thousands of Lindsay Clancy supporters believe the 36-year-old killer is herself a victim.
Hundreds turned out for a rally Thursday at Plymouth Superior Courthouse — most of them women and many in pink shirts — carrying signs with fangirl slogans such as “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace For Lindsay,” the Associated Press reported.
They have leaned into claims that the “overburdened” mother was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she committed the heinous crimes. She also slit her wrists and neck and jumped out of a second-story window in a suicide attempt that left her paralyzed from the waist down, according to court documents.
“… [Clancy] not receiving the help she needed while going through PPP just reflects how hard it is as a woman to receive proper healthcare. her having suicidal thoughts wasn’t enough to get the help she needed. she KNEW she was in a crazy state of mind but got no support whatsoever,” wrote a commenter on Reddit earlier this month as Clancy’s trial became the talk of the nation.
Meanwhile, a Wisconsin “influencer” has set up a GoFundMe account for Mike and Paula Musgrove, Clancy’s parents, who, according to the page’s creator, “have spent years traveling back and forth, staying in hotels, attending court proceedings and ultimately relocating from Connecticut to Massachusetts so they could remain close to Lindsay.” The page includes an illustration of Clancy (apparently) in a wheelchair, her head buried in her hands, elbows resting on her knees. She is encircled by a host of women holding hands.
The account had raised $1,045,000 as of late Monday evening.
What can explain this cult of personality that in some very disturbing quarters has turned a twisted mother who systematically slaughtered her children into some kind of hero — or at least a symbol of a deranged feminist movement? Untethered empathy.
That’s how Joe Rigney, pastor and fellow of theology at Moscow, Idaho-based New Saint Andrews College, describes it. Rigney is also the author of Leadership and The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits — A Christian Guide to Discernment, Emotional Manipulation, Boundaries and False Compassion.
“It’s when our compassion and our care for those who are hurting overrides consideration of what’s true, what’s good, what’s right and instead, with our emotions and our passions in the driver’s seat, steer us off the cliff,” Rigney told me Monday on the Vicki McKenna Show.
‘Fixated on Her’
Closing arguments are slated to begin this week in the emotionally charged murder trial. Prosecutors say Clancy premeditatedly murdered her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — at their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in December 2023. Clancy’s defense team argues that she committed the acts of filicide while in the throes of postpartum psychosis — a rare mental health crisis that causes a woman to lose touch with reality following childbirth.
She faces a mandatory life sentence. She will be spared her children’s fate, at least for now. Massachusetts does not have the death penalty. Her only hope is to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. If she is, Clancy will be committed to a state psychiatric facility where she will undergo routine mental health reviews.
The judge in the case this week denied a motion for a mistrial brought by the defense.
While her fan club paints Clancy as a victim, they void the names of the little ones she murdered.
“We don’t see any of them standing out there with a button with the three children’s faces on them. When you listen to interviews with all of the women who are standing out, they almost never mention the three child victims,” Bethany Mandel, a conservative columnist and mother of six, said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
That’s what is most striking to Rigney. He sees the “highly emotional allegiance” to Clancy as a kind of “tribal identity,” “birthed out of empathy for, in this case, the one who murdered her children rather than for her children” themselves.
As he writes in his book, empathy is a very good and natural human emotion that can turn dangerous when disconnected from reality. Sharing compassion for people, walking a mile in their shoes so to speak, is central to Christianity. But when empathy turns into excusing evil acts, it becomes evil.
“I think this is a perfect illustration of that phenomenon, as many women, it seems, feel intense empathy for Lindsay Clancy. As she sits in her wheelchair and on trial, they essentially end up kind of projecting themselves into her situation, I think in many cases, imagining what they would feel if they had done something horrific. And therefore their compassion wells up because all of their empathy is fixated on her,” Rigney said.
He calls it a kind of empathetic myopia, a tunnel vision, to the point where the feelers forget the actual victims of a heinous crime.
‘Devouring Empathy’
There’s a politics, too, wrapped up in this intense empathy. If empathy fuels tribalism (and it does), the tribe surrounding Clancy has a leftist bent seething over feminist catch phrases like “toxic masculinity”. As Olivia Murray opined this week in American Thinker, the Clancy trial “reveals how truly disturbed” American leftist women have become.
Rigney says the rallying around Clancy is the natural outcrop of an “Olympics of victimhood,” a never-ending contest to crown the greatest victim in society. Sinful empathy also is the child of a perverse death culture that dismisses the unborn as a “clump of cells.”
Rigney likes to say, the problem with the Middle East is that there is too much empathy. The players in the war-torn region feel endless compassion for their “in-group,” so much so that they can justify and rationalize great cruelty to others, the pastor said.
“And I think what you’re seeing [in the Clancy case] is a certain kind of female tribal identity,” he said, adding that the tribe has lost touch with what is “true and good” under the weight of a “devouring empathy.”
As the Clancy trial moves to a verdict, Rigney said the law, what is required of justice, cannot be denied. If it is, society will move into a more dangerous place. If the claimed postpartum psychosis becomes a justification, “then the incentive structure you’re setting up is very, very dark and very, very ugly.”
“All a woman has to do is claimthat ‘I was out of my mind,’ and the greatest evils can be rationalized and justified in the name of compassion.”
Joe Rigney is our guest on the latest episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.
